I had to cut out of DemoCamp 17 early on Monday night to catch a train, but:
Nice summary on High Scalability of a post by Mike Peters about making web sites run faster—much, much faster.
Nature would like “to hear from physicists what kind of tools would help in managing the ever-growing tide of information from, and the exciting possibilities of, the internet.” (I presume scientists in lesser disciplines will be asked to chip in at a later date 
. It will be interesting to see how much (if anything) has changed since Jon Udell wrote “Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration” eight years ago.
And now it’s official: the Google Summer of Code 2008 web page is up at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/. If you’re not familiar with the program, Google provides $5000 grants for full-time university students to work on open source projects, which are mentored by people affiliated with literally dozens of different open source organizations. The FAQ should answer most questions; as in past years, I’ll be proposing some projects, and looking for students to mentor. They will begin accepting applications from mentoring organizations on Monday, March 3, and student applications on Monday, March 24th.
Uncategorized
VeloCity calls itself a “mobile + media incubator”, but the reality is more interesting: it’s a residence building at the University of Waterloo that is being set aside for students with an entrepreneurial bent and an interest in new media and mobile computing. It will undoubtedly be mocked as a frat house for would-be Baby Bills, but I think it’s a great idea, and I’m keen to see how it plays out. (via StartupNorth)
A colleague is trying to expand the subset of SVG that haxe supports. A sticking point is how to approximate SVG’s elliptical arcs with a sequence of quadratic Bezier curves. If you have a flair for numerical methods and would like to offer some help, please get in touch: the pertinent part of the SVG spec is at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/paths.html#PathDataEllipticalArcCommands
The schedule is up for DemoCamp 17, which is being held at the Toronto Board of Trade on Monday, Feb 25. Good lineup, fun crowd—look forward to seeing you there.
I’m introducing Python to scientists at the National Research Council today. It’s sometimes easy to forget how much fun the language is…
According to this press release, O’Reilly is partnering with Wolfram Research to create a Web 2.0 version of Mathematica that will “be browser accessible and, utilizing AJAX technologies, will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity”. I’ll be very interested to see how they handle equations (MathML isn’t well supported) and grahpics (IE7 doesn’t do SVG, so what, Flash? Silverlight?).
Recent Comments