The Third Bit

OK, I’m a little sceptical, but the rest of this post about Sci Foo 2007 was fun…

Uncategorized

Interesting paper by Mauro Cherubini et al. looking at when and why software developers draw pictures. My takeaway is that for most “thinking” purposes, today’s computer drawing tools impose overhead without adding value; it’s only for “archival” purposes that it’s worth cleaning up. I was very interested in their finding that this is true even for developers with tablets…

And of course, Jorge got there first…

Research

A lot happened while I was on holiday:

• RegDeveloper in the UK liked it.
• Jon Bentley gave a talk about Quicksort at Google (video online). He refers to BC as “a reasonably cool book”, which I think it is a good description.
• We discovered that a PDF of the book is already available (illegally) through file-sharing sites. Stealing money from big rock bands might not bother you; I hope that taking it away from people who are trying to help prisoners of conscience does.

Beautiful Code

Tomorrow is our summer students’ last day (and two are already gone). It’s been a great few months: everyone was productive, and I think they all had fun, too. The post-mortem is tomorrow, followed by a barbecue (and possibly a few games of Speed Scrabble).

Thanks, everyone — it’s been a pleasure working with you. (And thanks to Pat Smith for the photo…)

DrProject

One of the goals of CSC494/495 (one of my goals, anyway) is to give students a chance to build software that people will actually use. It’s therefore been very rewarding to watch the genome browser project grow over the last couple of years.  The latest development is a paper in PLoS One:

D. Winter, B. Vinegar, H. Nahal, R. Ammar, G. V. Wilson, and N. J. Provart: “An ‘Electronic Fluorescent Pictograph’ Browser for Exploring and Analyzing Large-Scale Biological Data Sets”. PLoS ONE 2(8): e718, 2007.

Three of those names are 49Xers — yay for our side

Uncategorized

Rudolf Olah has a nice short piece on packaging and distributing Python apps.  Thanks to David Wolever for the pointer.

Uncategorized

Joey DeVilla has a good report on the Facebook Developers’ Camp recently held in Toronto; David Crow adds links to developer resources. I’ve started wondering whether next-generation software project portals will “just” be extensions to tools people use anyway; oh, to have more hours in the day…

Uncategorized

I know this is supposed to be a technical blog, but having just re-read three of Pratchett’s Discworld books, I feel compelled to share.  He’s always funny, and there’s always a sting in the tail.  My personal favorites are:

• Mort
• Wyrd Sisters
• Guards! Guards!
• Small Gods
• The Last Hero
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
• Night Watch
• Feet of Clay

and, of course, Where’s My Cow?, which is Madeleine favorite book too.  (Well, it’s the one shes happiest to chew on…)  Recommended.

Books

The Beautiful Code interview has been Slashdotted — thankfully, the link points to O’Reilly’s server, not this one.

Beautiful Code

Botanicalls is a system that lets plants phone human beings when they need help.  The plants, that is, not the humans — if plants could tell when people needed help, I’d be really scared.  Haven’t these people seen Day of the Triffids??

Uncategorized