The Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto now has an RSS feed for upcoming events. If you want a less formal look at what the department’s doing, you can also subscribe to the Planet aggregator of departmental bloggers that Michalis Famelis runs.
I’ve been telling my family I want a new bike (since I’ve been riding the one I bought from Jeff Balogh regularly since May, and I’m still not dead), but maybe I want a Faradayed wallet:
To help prevent surreptitious readers from siphoning RFID data, a company named DIFRWear was doing brisk business at DefCon selling leather Faraday-shielded wallets and passport holders lined with material that prevents readers from sniffing RFID chips in proximity cards.
Via Nat Torkington.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that we’re running some capstone projects this fall with students from several universities across Canada. The list of projects has grown, and we now have 21 students signed up, with more in the pipeline, so I’ve created a separate blog to keep track of it all. I’ll be giving the students write access, and asking each team to post their thoughts and progress weekly; hope you’ll add it to your feeds.
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American Scientist has just published a short article summarizing I wrote summarizing the results from last year’s survey of how scientists actually use computers.
I’ve been invited to talk at Stack Overflow DevDays at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto on Friday, October 23. I’m flattered to have been asked; now, what do you think I should talk about?
Dear LazyWeb,
I have a spreadsheet laid out as follows:
| A | B | C | |
| 1 | User | First | Second |
| 2 | turing | red | up |
| 3 | hopper | blue | down |
| 4 | zuse | red | up |
| 5 | knuth | blue | up |
I’d like to generate another table counting choice pairs:
| 100 | 101 | 102 | |
| X | red | blue | |
| Y | up | 2 | 1 |
| Z | down | 0 | 1 |
There are going to be about eight values for ‘First’, and about a dozen for ‘Second’, so I don’t mind typing in the row/column headers for the second table. What I want is something like a double-barrelled COUNTIF(), but there doesn’t appear to be one. I’ve tried constructing an extra column joining the two choice values:
| A | B | C | D | |
| 1 | User | First | Second | _joined_ |
| 2 | turing | red | up | red:up |
| 3 | hopper | blue | down | blue:down |
| 4 | zuse | red | up | red:up |
| 5 | knuth | blue | up | blue:up |
and then doing COUNTIF(D2:D5,=CONCATENATE(something,’:',something)). However, I can’t put a CONCATENATE or any other function call in the second half of a COUNTIF (though you can compare to a cell value using something like “>=”&A5, and yes, the quotes are supposed to be where they are). I also can’t figure out what the something’s should be to look up the two items to concatenate.
So, how should I do this? And please don’t say “use a relational database” — I’ve got some constraints here.
Jason Cohen has a nice post about what “going viral” actually means. Long story short, it’s not the number of people who read your post/tweet/whatever; it’s the number of people who forward it that matters.
Yet more evidence that Mike Gunderloy must have cloned himself several years ago—how else to explain how much he gets done, and how quickly? His new Rails Freelancing Handbook is exactly what the title suggests: guidance from a successful freelancer for people who’d like to be one. Chapters include:
and an appendix titled “What If It Doesn’t Work Out?”. Mike’s reputation and integrity are second to none, and his user guide for FogBugz is the best technical documentation I’ve ever read. This new one’s going immediately to the top of my stack…
Slides from the Science 2.0 symposium held on July 29 as part of the Software Carpentry course are now available online. Video of the lectures will follow soon.
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