I gave a short talk on non-academic publishing to grad students in the Computer Science department a week ago, and one of them asked me about self-publishing. In the past, companies that did this were called “vanity presses”, because in most cases what they printed was material that no other publishing company thought people would buy. Has the web changed that? Well, here’s the current top 20 from Lulu, which is probably the best-known Internet vanity press. About the only thing I can conclude from it is that we are a very odd species…
- What Janet & John Did Next (based on a BBC radio program)
- How to Become an Alpha Male (“The lazy man’s way to easy success with 20 or more women a month”)
- Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook
- The Havanese (it’s a type of dog)
- The Didymus Contingency (scientist invents time travel, goes back to watch the Crucifixion)
- Day by Day Armageddon (the undead rise—again)
- Finding the “CAN” in Cancer
- The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
- Programming C# with Visual Studio .NET 2005
- The Ultimate Tattoo Guide
- S CURVES: The Art of Shane Glines (“illustrations and sketches by artist Shane Glines…Filled with studies, character designs, and hundreds of sexy women.”)
- Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
- Sam, World’s Ugliest Dog (three time undefeated world champion, apparently)
- Luciferian Witchcraft
- Enjoying Web Development with Tapestry (I’m sorry, but…”enjoying”?)
- Installing, Upgrading and Maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite Applications/a>
- Learn C on the Macintosh
- Developing Web Services with Apache Axis
- USPAP in Plain English (real estate)
- Muscadine Medicine (the healing power of grapes)
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I’m giving a talk tomorrow at the University of Toronto titled “Gibson’s Law and Software Engineering”. PowerPoint and PDF are both now online, for those of you who can’t make it. (Is this what they call “ego-blogging”? 
)
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I’m (still) in love with GalCon, a five-minute real-time strategy game that’s surprisingly addictive. Its author, Phil Hassey, would like to provide a plugin API so that users can write bots (in Python). He has posted a strawman proposal, and would appreciate feedback — he’d prefer if comments about it were made on the pygame mailing list, because other Python game programmers are interested in the answers too.
And hey — try the game…
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According to www.scipy.org, The SciPy 2007 Conference will be on August 16-17 this year; tutorials and sprints will run on the 14th, 15th, and 18th. I won’t be able to attend (new baby), but I’d like to organize a half-day or one-day session to update and extend the Software Carpentry notes. Lots of modules need writing, both on Python-specific stuff and on general software engineering skills for scientists and engineers. I’d particularly like to see:
- A lecture or two on NumPy (used to have one, it fell behind Travis Oliphant’s coding, and it’s probably now the biggest gap in the lectures)
- A whole lecture on the subprocess module, job control, and remote execution
- A second lecture on security
- Some screencasts on Python IDEs (Wing 101, IDLE, Eclipse, and Komodo)
- A lecture on connecting to C and Fortran
- A lecture on design patterns
- A lecture on professional ethics and responsibilities
- And stuff on requirements, traceability, data lineage, and, oh, what else do you want?
If you’re interested, please let me know…
Software Carpentry
Lots of people are linking to this post by Federico Mena-Quintero — it’s a very useful set of guidelines, and I hope lots of people will give it a try.
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Via Titus Brown, a link to the Insight Journal, an open access online publication covering medical image processing. They have a very interesting process requirement: your source code must compile & be verifiable by an automatic system. I’ve been expecting something like this for a long time; glad to see it happening.
Later: and, via Gary Bader, Source Code for Biology and Medicine. Anyone know of a journal or journals like this for physics, chemistry, geology, and other non-life-science areas? Or (wistfully) computer science?
Software Carpentry
Well, the feline has apparently been debagged: in his keynote at SIGCSE 2007 on Friday, Grady Booch mentioned the book that Andy Oram and I are putting together for O’Reilly. It’s called Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, and contains essays by more than thirty great software developers on, well, beautiful code. It isn’t on O’Reilly‘s public site yet, but it’s already listed on Amazon. The contents are:
- Greg Wilson: Foreword
- Brian Kernighan: Beautiful Brevity: Rob Pike’s Regular Expression Matcher
- Karl Fogel: Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology
- Jon Bentley: The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote
- Tim Bray: Finding Things
- Elliotte Rusty Harold: Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Validators
- Michael Feathers: Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility
- Alberto Savoia: Beautiful Tests
- Charles Petzold: On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing
- Douglas Crockford: Top Down Operator Precedence
- Henry Warren: The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count
- Ashish Gulhati: Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom
- Lincoln Stein: Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl
- Jim Kent: The Design of the Gene Sorter
- Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek: How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination
- Adam Kolawa: Beautiful Numerics
- Greg Kroah-Hartman: The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together
- Diomidis Spinellis: Another Level of Indirection
- Andrew Kuchling: Python’s Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People
- Travis Oliphant: Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy
- Ronald Mak: A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA’s Mars Rover Mission
- Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat: ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability
- Bryan Cantrill: A Spoonful of Sewage
- Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: Distributed Programming with MapReduce
- Simon Peyton Jones: Beautiful Concurrency
- Kent Dybvig: Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case expander
- William Otte and Doug Schmidt: Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software
- Andrew Patzer: Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way
- Andreas Zeller: Beautiful Debugging
- Yukihiro Matsumoto: Code That’s Like an Essay
- Arun Mehta: Designing Interfaces Under Extreme Constraints: the Stephen Hawking editor
- TV Raman: Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop
- Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald: Code in Motion
- Brian Hayes: Writing Programs for “The Book”
- Andy Oram: Afterword
I’m proud to have worked on it, and even prouder of the fact that royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International. My only regret is that Frank Willison isn’t here to enjoy it with us. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I hope he would have.
Later: for those who have left comments / sent email asking, “Why isn’t XYZ included?”, the answer is probably one of:
- we weren’t able to reach them,
- we asked, but they declined, or
- we didn’t ask this time around, but if you can talk them into contributing to Volume 2, please do so.
Announcements, Beautiful Code, Books
The Speech Accent Archive is a very cool idea: audio recordings of a single short passage being read by people from all over the world. Nice test for speech recognition software, but, um, I wanna know who wrote the text they’re using…
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A Japanese TV show did a spot on LinkedIn, and it included an interview with our very own Sean Dawson. W00t!
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I just discovered Café Scientifique — if I didn’t have a ton o’ baby stuff to buy this weekend, I’d head down to the Rivoli on Saturday to check it out.
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