Google has announced the winners of this year’s Summer of Code awards. They’re spread across more than a hundred pages on Google’s site, so I’ve coalesced them here. My apologies to people whose names my script may have slightly mangled (character encodings once again). Next time around, it’d be great if Google could list the schools the winners are at; I’d be very curious to see the distribution.
Uncategorized
It has been another eventful week—and it’s still only Thursday. We’re very pleased to announce the lineup for this summer’s team:
Thanks to a generous donation from Nitido, Alex Krizhevsky and David Wolever will be working full-time on DrProject. They will be joined by Jeff Balogh (from the University of Central Florida) and David Cooper, both of whom have won Google Summer of Code awards. Jeff and David will focus on making the ticketing system expand on demand, while Alex and David will—well, check out the current tickets, and tell us what you’d like to see most.
Xiaoyang Guan also picked up an SoC; he’ll be extending Mylar, a plugin for Eclipse, so that users can edit wiki pages in the IDE. This, combined with Mylar‘s existing support for editing and filing tickets, will let Eclipse users work with DrProject seamlessly.
Martin Williams and Tony Yiu will be working on OLM, an online marking tool that uses AJAX and other nifty technologies to support over-the-web grading of programming assignments. Florian Shkurti will work beside on an OLM-compatible plugin for Eclipse, so that students can view markers’ comments right in the IDE. Martin and Tony are being supported by the University of Toronto, the Jonah Group, and Idee; Florian is another Google Summer of Code award winner.
Pardis Beikzadeh, who is also being supported by the university, will work on UTest, a reverse test oracle that allows students to run unit tests against instructors’ sample solutions to exercises, without actually seeing those solutions. This project is still in its early stages, but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.
It promises to be quite a summer…
DrProject
The DrProject site got its first ticket spam today. I knew this would happen eventually if we allowed “anonymous” to post; guess we have to start investing in anti-spam technology.
DrProject
David Warde-Farley pointed me at Mogware’s FileHamster, a “version tracking application focused on meeting the needs of content creators.” No rocket science (not even clear from the screencast how conflicts are handled), but a nice, simple interface.
Uncategorized
eWeek has posted a list of the most influential people in IT. Their top 50 are here and here — all are white, and all but two are male. Doesn’t look like the industry I see here in Toronto; certainly doesn’t look like my classes.
Equity
Titus Brown will be teaching “Intermediate and Advanced Software Carpentry with Python” at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory this spring, and is open to teaching it elsewhere after that. Meanwhile, Chris Lasher has put together some more debugging material for the course. As mentioned previously, they’re planning to run a writing spree at SciPy’07; hope to see lots of people there.
Software Carpentry
Here’s a thought experiment (inspired in part by Michael Ernst’s groupthink exercise at MIT): Read more…
Research
In between feedings, burpings, and other miscellaneous tasks, I found this, which summarizes interesting recent findings in computer games research. See also Jane McGonigal’s AAAS presentation, “Experimental Gameplay: Toward a Massively Popular Scientific Practice”.
Research
End-of-the-month report time (while the baby is sleeping). Here’s what traffic has looked like on the Software Carpentry site since it opened:
And here’s this month on the Third Bit blog:
In order, the spikes are:
Google Analytics (the source of the information on this blog) also provides geographic information; I know it’s not 100% accurate, since it’s not showing visitors from continental Africa or Mexico, but it’s still pretty cool:
The coolest thing? Sadie and I have had congratulations on Madeleine’s birth from every continent except Antarctica 
.
Family, Uncategorized
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