The title says it all: Liz Blankenship (who redesigned part of DrProject last summer) is looking for a job in Seattle.  Please contact her directly if you have any leads.

I’m at CalTech listening to physicists talk about the software side of the new Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge. One of their major headaches is the difficulty of deploying their code: a typical application has dozens of complicated modules, each with dozens or hundreds of dependencies. Their solution is to host a web service rather than try to deploy on end users’ machines, which has got me thinking: are web services and virtualization competing solutions for non-data-intensive applications? (Non-data-intensive because if your app needs to grind a few terabytes to produce an answer, you’re not shipping copies of it around.) Does anyone know of any studies/comparisons of the tradeoffs between “here’s the over-the-web API” and “here the VM”?

An update on a previous post: here’s where the last two weeks’ worth of working time went. I’m including time spent sorting out the house during working hours, but not the two hours a day I spend getting to and from work (much of which I spend reading technical material).

Note: a colleague asked me on Friday about the “days left” counter on this site. I teach my students that the real purpose of a schedule is to tell you how far behind you are, i.e., when to start cutting corners, and how many. The counter on this blog is meant to serve the same purpose: I only have 458 days left to make a success of my sojourn in academia, and I don’t want to lose sight of that deadline.

I found Jakub Linowski’s Wireframes blog last week, and have been catching up—lots of good ideas here for UI design, and more importantly, for thinking about UI design.

We’re number N-1! We’re number N-1!

Students are working on 24 separate projects in my consulting course this term. 21 are running smoothly, which means I’m spending most of my time on the other three. On the bright side, I finally found my Hogfather DVD.