The Third Bit

Family

We got back from BC yesterday — good trip, though the weather was uncooperative. If you’re visiting Victoria, we recommend Helm’s Inn wholeheartedly — it’s a five-minute walk from the heart of downtown, but quiet, clean, spacious, and affordable (even in the middle of the summer rush).  I would also recommend Pacific Editions if you like Northwest Coast native art; the proprietor managed to track down an obscure print from the early 1980s for me in less than 10 minutes.

But of course, what you really go to Vancouver Island for is the scenery…

Uncategorized

O’Reilly has announced this year’s Open Source awards:

• Beautiful Code contributor Karl Fogel, for Best Community Builder
• Pamela Jones, for Best FUD Fighter
• Aaron Leventhal, for Best Accessibility Architect
• Dave Recordon for Best Strategist (a nod to his work on OpenId)
• Paul Vixie (author of BIND) for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution

Congratulations to all!

Announcements

A while back, I posted a handmade picture of DrProject‘s database schema. Thanks to DB Visualizer, we now have pictures of the 1.2 database schema, and the new-and-improved schema that works with SQLAlchemy and Elixir. Alex and DW are starting work on a migration tool to translate from the latter to the former; those of you who have done this before will want to wish them good luck . According to Alex:

What’s really cool about this diagram is that it shows a topological
ordering of the graph of foreign keys, so if we migrate the rightmost
tables first, we shouldn’t run into any foreign key constraint
violation problems!

DrProject

Links that accumulated while I was on the road:

• The Art of Computational Science: lengthy (several hundred pages) PDF book on numerical simulation in astrophysics with examples in Ruby. This would be a great counterpoint to Software Carpentry if it was (re-)written in Python…
• The Flexible Configuration Management system: built by the British Met Office, it combines Subversion, Trac, and a custom extract-and-build tool to give scientists and environment for managing complex climate modeling codes. It’d put most commercial shops to shame…
• The Chemistry of Game Design: I’m not convinced that user interfaces (particularly games) can ever move past “alchemy” to “chemistry”, but Danc makes a good case.
• An emotional map of San Francisco: this is just plain cool — and a little spooky.
• 6th Sense Analytics: gathers data about what developers are actually doing. In any other context, it would be called a surveillance system — there’s no way I could get ethics board approval to do this to my students, so why is it legal for companies to do it to their employees?
• Improvements to JUnit. Yes, that means even more features…
• A Google Tech Talk on YouTube’s scalability issues. We should be teaching this stuff…
• Yet more talk about universities abandoning desktop office suites and moving to their web-based cousins — this time, it’s UC Berkeley. Good links to evaluations…
• Google releases a singleton detector. Why? Because singletons make code harder to test.
• Jon Udell interviews Henryk Nielsen on the RESTful architecture of Microsoft’s Robotics Studio.
• XKCD is frighteningly prescient once again.

Uncategorized

The NSA (yes, that NSA) now has a web site for kids. It doesn’t get really spooky ’til you start reading the biographies of the cartoon characters…

Uncategorized

http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/ — look forward to seeing you all there.

Beautiful Code

Dr. Jane Goodall will be speaking in Toronto on Saturday, September 15, at Convocation Hall.  Few people have done as much for conservation science as she has; I expect it will be a great talk.

Announcements

Today’s Amazon stats: Beautiful Code is #244 in books, #4 in computing, and #1 in both programming and software.

Beautiful Code

From XKCD, via Adam Goucher.

Uncategorized