Archive for January, 2009
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
On September 19, 1982, CMU's Scott E. Fahlman posted a message on the department's online bulletin-board system proposing that we use :-) as a symbol for "I'm just kidding" and :-( as a symbol for "This is serious". In celebration of this pivotal event in the history of human communication ...
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I'm a long-time reader of New Scientist (I even wrote a few articles for them back in the 1980s and early 1990s), but having browed BBC's new Knowledge Magazine, I'm seriously tempted to stray... But it makes me wonder yet again: where are the Carl Sagans and David Suzukis of ...
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Text is still king---or at least "evil overlord". Over on his Fastware blog, Scott Meyers (of Effective C++ fame) has been explaining why he's writing his next book in LaTeX: it'll handle cross-referencing, can generate every output format he cares about (PDF, HTML, etc.), and plays nicely with version control. ...
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Along with students doing course-sized consulting projects, I have a metric passle of graduate students who are starting to converge on thesis topics:
Aran Donohue may look at the cognitive processes involved in reading code (we're still negotiating).
Alecia Fowler wants to make map data accessible.
Alicia Grubb is going to figure out ...
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
For Canadians who are as frustrated as I am by how hard it is to find out when TV shows restart this winter:
Battlestar Galactica premieres tomorrow (Friday, Jan 16).
Chuck returns Thursday, Feb 5 (moves to 10:00 pm).
Stargate:Atlantis starts on March 29th.
Eureka will start as soon as the Sci Fi Channel ...
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
...but the music for BubbleSpinner (a truly addictive little game) reminds me of some of the soundtrack for Homeworld (the best game ever, which even two lousy sequels couldn't spoil). I played HW for the last time three years ago today; I still miss it.
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
I blogged a couple of weeks ago about this term's consulting projects. Here are a few more details:
Hanieh Bastani is working with AutoDesk to create animation software with realistic flesh and bone models.
Botond Ballo, David Cooper, Eran Henig, Bill Konrad, Derek Kwok, Phyllis Lee, and Kosta Zabashta are porting ...
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design is now available from O'Reilly (and also from Amazon, of course). Diomidis and Georgios have done a great job pulling it together---congratulations!
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
I'm running two courses this term, and in both, I'm asking students to make up their own grading schemes.
The first course (CSC494 for undergrads, CSC2125 for grad students) is the consulting course I've run for the past few years. Its aim is to teach students how to work as consultants ...
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
If so, would you let me buy you lunch in exchange for a chance to pick your brain?
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