I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while: CBC Radio is posting most of its shows as podcasts at http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/. Highlights for me include “The Best of Ideas“, “How to Think About Science“, and “Talking Books“. One recent entry is an interview with Dr. John Evans, formerly of the innovative medical program at McMaster, and the founding chair of MaRS. In a way, the web is turning radio into books: instead of being ephemeral, radio shows can now be permanent parts of the great conversation we call civilization.
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Brian Hayes’ latest column for American Scientist is now online, and he has posted supplementary material in his blog. The problem he’s looking at this month is how to count a potentially infinite number of values using finite space; I think there’s probably a good CS assignment in here 
.
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I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today—with luck, work will start in a couple of weeks, and I’m very excited to have a chance to work with the NRC’s Janice Singer on the survey. And since students (graduate and undergraduate alike) occasionally ask about how academic funding works, the text of the proposal is below the cut. It isn’t quite the same as programming, but in the end it might be more useful…
Read more…
Research, Software Carpentry
20 more rules for faster web sites (to supplement the original 14, which are in Steve Souders’ book High Performance Web Sites).
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Our students all seem to be making progress:
- Kosta Zabashta has posted a (rather quiet) screencast showing the current state of IRC integration. Your comments on the user interface would be very welcome.
- Eva Wong has been wrestling with security and domains in Flex. Input would be welcome — surely it can’t be this hard? Meanwhile, Matthew Basset managed to burn 100% of his CPU on logging, but is making good progress regardless.
- Nick Jamil has posted a summary of what he’s learned and done so far.
- Victoria Mui has discovered how useful writing documentation can be when you’re trying to learn your way around legacy code.
- Eran Henig’s Python plugin for Web-CAT is ready for testing. The security features aren’t there yet, but round-trip submission and execution of exercises seems to work. He and the other Web-CAT students had a chance to talk on Friday with my former boss, Gene Amdur — apparently, they got to hear stories about me (some of which might have been true).
- Xuan Le took time off this week to learn her way around mips.c, one of the core elements of the os161 simulator.
- Daniel Servos has figured out how to make SciTE play nicely with Moodle’s coding standards. More importantly, he has a demo version of a text UI for visualizing Moodle stats. (Log in as guest, then go to http://compsci.ca/~dan/moodle/grade/report/stats/index.php?id=2 to see the stats display.) He’d be grateful for feedback — see here for more info.
- Ming and Bing gave their second demo, then were hit with a hard drive crash. They’re going to do some paper prototyping this week to see if their proposed interface works in the hands of other people.
- Joseph Yeung is getting ready to pull his hair out.
- Dmitri Vassilenko has taken Robert Frost’s advice, and is back on the HTTP POST highway.
- Matthew Basset now crudely supports stuff.
- Jeff Balogh has posted a demo of his Dojo drag-and-drop form editor. Feedback welcome.
- And over at Undamped, Charlotte has learned the value of version control.
Everyone has been discovering that coding isn’t the real challenge—getting other people’s software built, installed, configured, and playing nicely is much harder. Everyone also had a good time at lunch on Thursday June 5th — I’m grateful to Professors Kyros Kutulakos and Hector Levesque for coming to represent the department, and to the following friends from industry for coming along to talk about life outside academia:
My apologies if you were there and I forgot to mention you — I was too busy fending off grad students who were trying to scavenge before our guests were done eating to take proper notes. We’ll be having another lunch on either June 30 or July 2; if you’d like to come along and meet some rising stars, please drop me a line.
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Dear Lazyweb,
I’m using Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 on Windows to read mail (which is IMAP’d on a Linux server). I’m also using Pine occasionally when I need to do something quickly over a slow connection (yes, those still exist). The problem is that if I create or delete folders in Pine, Thunderbird doesn’t know about it. I can use “Subscribe…” from the File menu, but then I have to open up sub-folders one by one to find new folders to tick them off, which is annoying. What’s even more annoying is going back and forth between a command-line view of my folders, and Thunderbird’s view, in order to delete folders that no longer actually exist from Thunderbird’s view of the world. I have browsed the help and googled the web to no avail. If you know how I can get Thunderbird to re-synch its view of what folders exist and don’t, I’d be grateful for a ping. (Please note: I’ve tried editing the .mailboxlist file in my home directory on the Linux host — no effect.)
Thank you in advance,
Greg
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The next Toronto DemoCamp will be on Tuesday, July 15 at the Supermarket. Tickets are available at Eventbrite, and you can volunteer to give a demo or Ignite presentation at Wufoo. If you have something new and cool to share with the community, or want to see what other people are up to, come on down and join us.
DemoCamp
Via Joey de Villa, a pointer to Wordle. Here’s the first chapter of my next children’s book:
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OK, so what am I doing if I’m not coding?
- Teaching: at least two full days per week during term, and about half a day a week right now (because as I found out last year, if you don’t do enough prep over the summer, your fall is hell).
- Reading: at least half a day a week, maybe more. This includes other people’s blogs and technical (journal) articles. The former are usually more informative than the latter.
- Giving talks: about two days a month once you include prep and travel time.
- Writing book reviews and opinion pieces: probably about the same.
- Writing a “CS-1 in Python” book: probably averaging half a day per week right now.
- Herding
cats kittens: a day a week—a day and a half if you include grad students.
- Writing grant proposals: variable, but I’d guess it has averaged at least two days a week since last May. Three small ones have come through, along with contributions from the Jonah Group and Idee (thanks, folks), but NSERC and a couple of other companies have turned down all the larger (i.e., more time-consuming) ones.
- Organizing stuff: a day and a half per week. This includes student lunches with people from industry, DemoCamp, special issues of journals, meetings to introduce local companies with researchers in the department, networking on behalf of my grad students, etc. I could cut a lot of this, but I honestly think this is where I add most value.
- Departmental responsibilities (such as preparing a proposal for a Professional Master’s in Computer Science): has been highly variable; probably averages half a day a week.
- Keeping up with email: I send roughly 2500 email messages a month, and read at least three times that number; I think this takes 2-3 hours per day, much of it outside office hours.
- Research: half a day per week, tops. I’m including everything from design discussions for DrProject to writing “real” academic papers in this category.
- Socializing with colleagues: half an hour to an hour a day. Coffee-room discussions are where most small issues around teaching and organizational matters seem to get hashed out.
As you can see, there’s not a lot of room in their to learn Dojo…
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Daniel Servos is just about ready to put a text-based version of his Moodle stats plugin up for public comment—screenshots are already available. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. I’ll be begging for feedback on other students’ projects as well just as soon as they have pixels on the screen.
Meanwhile, Nick and Jeff are making steady progress on DrProject‘s new ticketing system. If this schematic is any indication, we’re going to need a lot of maintenance documentation…
DrProject
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