Hundreds of Christian congregations will be holding services tomorrow to mark Darwin’s birthday. The aim is to stand up to authoritarian interpretations of scripture, and to demonstrate that faith and science can coexist.
Adam Goucher summarizes a list from Michael Bolton explaining how to design applications for testability. Worth bookmarking.
Via Bruce Schneier‘s blog, this paper ought to be required reading for everyone with legislative authority.
Joanna Berzowska will be speaking at Ryerson University on February 23. Her work on electronic textiles and “smart garments” is just plain cool — if you can make it, you should.
CUTC, CUSEC, and now this — an undergrad conference on biomedical computing, to be held in mid-March in London, Ontario. The first one, which ran last year at Queen’s, was by all accounts a success; hope to see lots of U of T students turn out.
I’d like to set up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage the department’s contact list, help with event planning, and so on. Key requirements are ease of use (most people will only touch it occasionally, so the interface has to be intuitive on a once-a-month basis), and ease of installation and management. Systems that look plausible include:
Anyone have any experience or recommendations to share?
The first link that comes up when you google for “Microsoft Press” takes you to this page. Using a stopwatch, see how long it takes you to find the email address you should send review copy requests to. Then guess how long it will take for your message to be answered. Oh, wait, that’s a trick question: after two months, it still hasn’t been. Then go back and look for any relevant contact information; after a few frustrating minutes, you’ll find a 1-800 number for John Wiley & Sons. Call them. See if the publicist you’re connected to has ever heard of Microsoft Press. (That’s another trick question.)
Now, for bonus points: is there a conspiracy to ignore MS Press books? Based on evidence to date, the only correct answer is, “Yes—and it’s being run by Microsoft.”
*sigh*
Big splash today about Yahoo Pipes, complete with launch puff from Tim O’Reilly. On the one hand, past generations of WYSIWYG flowgraph programming tools have run into “can’t quite reach it” problems pretty quickly. On the other, this is just… plain… cool. Wonder how long it’ll be before someone connects it with Windows PowerShell?
I discovered two things today. The first was that most grad students don’t know about the ACM Distinguished Dissertation awards, which have been handed out every year since 1978 for the best Ph.D. theses in Computer Science. I think everyone who’s about to write a thesis ought to read at least one of these; they’re great models to follow, and you might even learn something.
The second thing I learned is that my professional organization doesn’t know from information architecture. I can forgive the awards’ site’s use of table-based layout—after all, I’m using it in this posting 
. But would it really have been that hard to format the pages for the individual winners consistently, so that the little script I used to grab authors and titles didn’t have to be rewritten four times to handle all the egregiously-different cases? I also suspect that the pages were all built by hand, rather than being constructed from a database—the use of a URL in place of a thesis title in one case certainly suggests that.
Anyway, here they are: the best theses in Computer Science since 1978. Enjoy…
All right, it’s exhortation rather than information, but it’s still very cool.
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