The Third Bit

On Spec magazine has bought my short story “Still”—it should appear some time in 2009.

Writing

I’m no longer DDJ’s tame book reviewer, but reading is an addiction that’s very hard to break.  Here’s my queue for January and February:

• Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
• The Online Learning Idea Book
• Patterns for Fault-Tolerant Software
• Practical API Design
• e-Learning and the Science of Instruction
• Workflows for e-Science

Books

Python 3.0 (final) has been released — yay, and congratulations to everyone who helped build it.  It includes a lot of welcome changes [1], and I’m looking forward to switching—but not yet.  Our “intro to CS in Python” textbook (now in beta at Pragmatic) and our port of DrProject to Django are both going to stick to 2.*, at least until mid-2009.  It’s no reflection on Py3K—we’re just juggling enough other balls that adding more technical novelty to the mix would greatly increase the risk that everything would come crashing down. It’s the same argument I’ve had with students who want to switch from Subversion to Git/Arch/Bazaar/Mercurial/whatever: sometimes, it’s better to concentrate on the task at hand and let other people find the potholes for you.

Congratulations once again to the whole Py3K team!

[1] Very glad they added literals for sets, like {1, 2, “three”}; still disappointed that people still have to write the empty set as set() (because {} means “empty dictionary”).  Maybe in 4.0…

Python

I currently have 276,155 email messages archived in 2082 folders, which are divided among 97 directories.  The oldest dates from July 2004 (when I last switched mail servers) — everything before that is on CD.  And you?

Uncategorized

And while we’re wrapping up the term: when we started rebuilding DrProject on top of Django in September, Blake Winton volunteered to help out.  Since then, he has done detailed line-by-line code reviews on over half of our 950 commits, been a voice of reason during online design discussions, and shown the whole team (myself included) how a mature, even-tempered, and good-humored developer gets things done.  We wouldn’t be anywhere near as far along as we are without him, so thanks, Blake—we really appreciate it.

DrProject

Today, the students in my CSC491 project course gave their end-of-term demos. Each team had 10 minutes to present their work to a mixed audience of students, faculty, and visitors from industry.  It went very well—their talks were clear, their demos ran smoothly, and they handled questions well.  For the record, we heard from:

• Mike Conley and Geofrey Flores, who are rebuilding OLM on top of Ruby on Rails;
• Fan Dong, who benchmarked the usability of three scientific workflow packages (Taverna, LONI, and Kepler);
• Justin Foong, Vladimir Markin, and Teren Teh, who integrated Mozilla’s Ubiquity natural language interface into Thunderbird;
• AJ Guillon, who is building a mixed task- and data-parallel library for GPU programming;
• Lenny Han and Can Zhang, who extended the Eclipse feature diagram plugin to create a WYSIWYG graphical refactoring tool;
• Mohammad Jalali and Darren Jung, who extend the FlareFlow visual database query builder (and did some usability testing to see if their extensions actually made life easier);
• Eddie Kang and Ben Kim, who created two graph layout plugins for a bioinformatics tool called Navigator;
• Denis Pankratov and Jennifer Ruttan, who have been banging their heads against a wall of undocumented and/or flaky CDMA phone software;
• Miles Thibault, who put together a business plan for a screen writing site; and
• Kosta Zabashta, who built the mail and search components for our rewrite of DrProject on Django.

I’m really proud to have worked with them—they deserved all the applause they got.

Teaching

My dad (a former English teacher) sent me a scan of an advertising flyer from Scholastic Canada that includes my latest children’s book, A Bottle of Light. As I’ve said before, it’s only available in school reading programs, not bookstores, but it’s still pretty cool.

Writing

As reported earlier, the Computing Community Consortium asked people to submit “game-changing advances” from computer research. Results are now up on their site, and include:

• The Internet and the World Wide Web
• Search technology
• Cluster computing
• The transformation of science via computation
• Secure communication
• Mobile computing
• Expert systems
• Everyday robotics
• Digital media
• Mapping & navigation
• Recommendation systems

Still nothing from software engineering, though…

Research