Jeremy Handcock has posted a nice summary of his recent reading in information seeking. It’s a fascinating topic, and some of these papers are really intriguing.
Interesting interview with Donald Knuth (highlights here):
With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term “extreme programming” sounds like exactly the wrong way to go…with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me…
and:
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop…
It was a beautiful day yesterday in Toronto—warm and sunny, just perfect for strolling around the neighborhood and looking for a new home. And for stopping in at the baby goods store a couple of blocks from our current house to pick up a new pair of shoes for Maddie (pink, in case you were wondering—not outrageously so, but definitely pink).
As I was standing at the counter waiting to pay, I noticed a flyer advertising upcoming workshops: one on natural childbirth, another on infant sign language, and one titled “Immunization and Your Baby”. The blurb said (as near as I can recall), “Does your baby really need vaccination or immunization? The scientific evidence isn’t clear, and many parents are increasingly concerned about the health risks,” and it was (the only one marked as) “sold out”. The organizer was billed as an “RNCP”; a bit of googling tells me that means “registered nutritional consulting practitioner“, which is not a recognized medical designation in Ontario (although they’re lobbying to be included with the homeopaths and kinesiologists). Based on that, and the general tenor of our times, what do you think the workshop will be like? Will attendees be given an overview of human immunology and walked through the results of recent peer-reviewed studies of immunization? Or will the “shots cause autism” meme be given another outing, and will another dozen or so infants be left unprotected in a city which gets approximately half a million visitors from at-risk regions in developing countries every year?
The irony is that many of the same people who dismiss what science tells us about immunization are scornful—often loudly and passionately—of people who disregard the evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Liberal or conservative, green or steel-gray, even the best-educated people in our society seem to think that basing opinions on data is optional. It reminds me of what John Galbraith said when asked what had surprised him most in the Twentieth Century: “I would never have believed that ‘stupid’ could become fashionable.”
Nice post from Adam Goucher about schools of thought (and practice) in software development and testing. It’s worth following the links, esp. to Pettichord’s presentation.
One of the ways I can tell that DrProject is getting better is that its database schema is getting cleaner. I’ve posted earlier versions from December 2006 (which was 1.0 something or other), Version 1.2 from early 2007, and the first Elixir-based version from July 2007. Today’s is much tidier, and I even know what most of the fields are for:
We have to add two or three new tables this summer, but I hope we’ll be able to keep things at least this clean.
Mark Doernhoefer writes a regular column for SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes called “Surfing the Web for Software Engineering Notes“. I hadn’t realized that all his links are online (though without his commentary, which is the real value add). Useful…
You’re never done designing a useful system, because if it is actually useful, people are always coming up with new requirements for it. For example, I’ve been using DrProject to manage my software engineering course this term: the class notes are all in the wiki (so that students can fix ‘em up), I communicate with students through the DrP-managed mailing list, and so on. But now I want to archive that material in the portal used by the departmental lecturers, so that future instructors can find it after the current portal is shut down. Moving the SVN repository over is trivial, and dumping and restoring the relevant portions of the database needs just a few lines of SQL…
…and might well result in disaster, since keys that are unique in one database might well not be unique in another. The “All” project in one portal is definitely not the same as the “All” project in another; I could replace uses of “All” as a key in appropriate places, but what about the user ID “nick”? The odds are good that it’s the same person in both portals (since they’re both hosted by our department, and we use unique Unix IDs wherever possible), but it’s not guaranteed.
There are subtler problems too. Suppose there are no conflict in the user IDs I need to import to make ticket ownership and wiki page authorship references resolve. I go ahead and add the users, import the data, and now the database believes that “nick” created some tickets and sent some email messages before his account existed.
How important is this? Not very—there’s no real cost to leaving the old portal up. How irritating is it? Quite—I like to keep things tidy, and having all the old courses in one place just seems like the right thing to do. (We also had some people from California approach us earlier this week about converting their existing Trac instance to DrProject, during which a similar problem would arise.) Never done…
I used to write for New Scientist occasionally; now I just enjoy reading it, and no more so than when they run articles like this one, in which 17 leading scientists are asked to name a books that changed their lives, and readers are invited to submit theirs. Neat.
This year’s Mesh Conference is coming up fast: May 21-22, here in Toronto. To add to the fun, there’s meshU, “a one-day event of 12 focused workshops in three streams (design, development, management) given by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game”. And the best news yet is that a batch of student-priced tickets have been released. Get ‘em while they’re hot…
Google announced this year’s Summer of Code projects today. I’m very pleased that six students from the University of Toronto were among the recipients:
Four students from other schools (Jeff Balogh, Luke Paireepinart, Daniel Servos, and Artem Yunusov) will be doing projects we’re involved in, and of course there are our non-GSoC students:
Oh, and we mustn’t forget the graduate students:
Me? I’m getting married (twice), helping Jennifer, Paul, and Jason finish off a CS1-in-Python textbook, and trying to find some funding. It promises to be a busy sixteen weeks…
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