The Third Bit

Am I a bad person for thinking that there would be a market for infant clothing made out of Swiffer cloth?

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I’ve come late to the social networking party — I mean, I have a social network, I just hadn’t webified it until recently.  But the more I think about future directions for DrProject (assuming funding materializes some day), the more I realize that software project management portals are really just specialized social networking sites.  The network might be imposed if you’re in a company, and you’re more likely to share bug reports than movie preferences, but at their core, both exist to connect people with shared interests to one another in a slightly-less-than-realtime way.

Which makes Google’s announcement of its OpenSocial API interesting. This is for the also-rans (as the announcement says, Facebook and MySpace are big enough that they can define their own APIs), but anything that makes it easier for people to combine DrProject with other tools has got to be a good thing.  Now, if only more web-based blog readers would support OpenId…

DrProject

I’ve been meeting four new grad students (Samira, Jeremy, Carolyn, and Jon) on Monday mornings this term.  Initially, the point was to pick apart some research papers: what good ideas do they contain, what are the strengths and flaws in their presentation, etc.  For next week, though, I’ve set them a different goal: each of them is to come up with one thesis idea for each of the others.  The point is partly to get them thinking about research topics—under the new rules, they’re supposed to finish in a total of 17 months, which will fly by pretty fast—but what I really want is for them to get used to bouncing ideas off one another.  Our educational system discourages this: when students in my classes talk in detail about their work to anyone except their officially-assigned partners, we call it plagiarism, and take off marks.  It’s a hard habit to break; I’ll be interested to see whether the academic equivalent of picking an outfit for someone else will do it.

And of course, given David Crow’s comments about last night’s DemoCamp, I’m wondering whether this can be generalized and scaled up in some way (assuming, of course, that it works…)

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I got my first email message from my daughter this morning. It said:

zZ
gcvcv nc 4rfcd 5tcde x345vZCXv cCd
fzaxAsZ
sw 55cde 4rx3cde rfx4
s37 jn 3dexc fgg
Zdxssd

love
maddie
That more than makes up for the A/V glitches at last night’s DemoCamp…

Later: pictures, courtesy of Andrew Louis.

DemoCamp

It’s a small world: Andy Oram, my co-editor on Beautiful Code, just interviewed Brent Gorda, co-author of the first version of the Software Carpentry course, about the cluster challenge that’s running at Supercomputing’07. Don’t be fooled by the purple-on-black titles: this is a very cool idea. Students teams get fixed time (and fixed electrical power) to put together a cluster and run some benchmarks. Doing this earned you a PhD twenty years ago; ten years ago, it would have been a line item in a department’s budget. It’s now a contest for students, and I look forward to finding a cluster in the bottom of a cereal box before I die…

Later: Brent has started blogging about the Cluster Challenge at O’Reilly’s ONLamp site. I’m looking forward to hearing how the teams do.

Beautiful Code, Software Carpentry

I spent today at the Free Software & Open Source Symposium at York University Seneca College’s York U campus (sorry, David). It was a lot more fun than the academic workshops I’ve been at recently. The speakers and audience are genuinely engaged in what they’re talking about, and what they’re talking about is stuff: software, development processes, ways to make the world a better place… I attended Mike LeVan’s talk on creating a Linux administration course for university students (which isn’t just tech training: by the time you know how to admin a Linux box, you know a fair bit about how networks and operating systems actually work) and Benjamin Smedberg’s discussion of code review at the Mozilla Foundation (pretty standard as far as reasons and practices go, but it was cool to hear first-hand about the implementation). I meant to go to others, but I got sidetracked by discussions with Trent Mick from ActiveState, Michael and Jennifer from Waterloo, Mic Berman from Mozilla, and a bunch of other people as well. Bob Young (Red Hat and Lulu) is talking about the evils of software patents right now. As I said at the start, it’s a lot more fun…

Later: kudos to David Humphrey and co. for a well run show — I have a stack of cards and notes to follow up on, and am looking forward to seeing many of the attendees at future DemoCamps.

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DesignCamp Waterloo will be held on Thursday, November 8.  I won’t be able to make it, but I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who attends.

DemoCamp

Could a development portal like SourceForge, Trac, or DrProject be built as a Facebook application?  OK, that’s poorly-phrased: clearly, one could be.  Would it make sense to do so?  Privacy would be one big concern (esp. for non-open source projects), and I’d worry about it disappearing without warning due to a court order or an acquisition (but that’s a concern for SourceForge, Google Code, and every other hosted service too). On the other hand, a Remember The Milk-style shared to-do list would be straightforward… And a bunch of stuff like account provisioning would be taken care of for you…  Hm…

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I’ve been saying for a while now that Javascript—sorry, ECMAScript—has a good shot at being the hottest general-purpose scripting language in the world five years from now.  After looking through the 4th Edition Language Overview, I’d like to temper that bold assertion.  The language is now as complicated as Ruby or Python, maybe even more so, and I think that’s going to be a significant barrier to wider adoption.  On the other hand, Yukihiro Matsumoto might have been right when he said (in Beautiful Code) that:

Simplicity is one of the most misunderstood concepts in programming.  People who design languages frequently want to keep those languages simple and clean.  While the sentiment is noble, doing this can make programs written in that language more complex.

We’ll all find out soon enough…

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Google Code Search now supports packagemap files.  We should do this for DrProject, OLM, and other projects.  There aren’t enough hours in the day

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