Great post on the NOVA site about recent advances in evolutionary biology. Things like this are why I keep hoping to find a way to teach computing to scientists: it’s the only way I have to thank them for all the wonders they’ve given the rest of us.
The only downside of last week’s DevDays in Toronto was the more-abysmal-than-usual gender ratio: it was at least 100:1, and may well have been worse. So, if you’re organizing a tech event of any kind, check out geekspeakr.com — it’s a new directory of women in tech who can speak on topics ranging from Android programming to… um… something techy that starts with ‘Z’. (Forgive me, I have a cold…)
The project teams in my consulting course will be demoing at the Toronto Innovations Showcase on Monday and Tuesday (Nov 2-3). If you can’t make it down to City Hall, please tune into the webcast. Lots of other projects are moving ahead—just a few days ago, the City of Toronto launched a Meeting Monitor to let people track items that are before city council. We’re looking forward to seeing what else is on show.
Software Carpentry
One of the ads for the Business of Software conference that played at DevDays Toronto on Friday featured a clip of Seth Godin asking, “How do you sell something to people when they don’t know they need it?” Twelve years on, that’s still the biggest hurdle Software Carpentry faces…
Undergraduate Cross-Country Open Source Projects
…plus a bunch of status updates. Several students have written lengthy and thoughtful comments on some of the posts above that are well worth reading.
We’re putting together a (very) short survey for people who have bought Practical Programming (our intro to CS using Python). What do you think would be the most useful questions to ask readers? The three I’ve thought of so far are:
Others?
I have posted the slides from my DevDays talk on Slideshare—hope you find them useful.
It’s still a lot harder than it should be to add pictures to web pages. I know, you think it’s easy, but let’s do a comparison:
| Modern desktop WYSIWYG editor | WordPress (and most other tools) |
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Not too bad so far, but what happens when someone wants to update the image?
| Modern desktop WYSIWYG editor | WordPress (and most other tools) |
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The former feels more wiki-like, and I suspect that if sketching in web pages was as easy as sketching in Word or OpenOffice, a lot more developers would draw pictures of what’s going on in their applications.
I can see two ways forward: create drawing tools that rely on the <canvas> element that are as easy to incorporate into web pages as the Javascript WYSIWYG HTML editor I’m using right now in WordPress, or hack around the problem. Right now, it looks like the latter is winning. For example, check out Jordi Cabot’s list of text-based UML tools: all of the entries translate text like
@startuml Alice -> Bob: Authentication Request Bob --> Alice: Authentication Response @enduml
into a picture like:
just as a wiki engine takes //ohmigod!// and turns it into ohmigod!. (Example taken from PlantUML.)
Now, part of me wants to weep at the prospect of ASCII art’s continued survival. On the other hand, it’s a pretty creative way to work around the continuing backwardness of web interfaces, and if people actually start using it to explain what their code is doing and how it works, we’ll all be better off.
U of T’s Computer Science department is putting video of this year’s distinguished lecture series on the web at http://web.cs.toronto.edu/news/lectures.htm — enjoy!
William Cook’s ECOOP 2009 banquet speech is online; I nodded a lot while reading it.
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