Next term, I’m going to be teaching CSC302 (the second of our two-course sequence in software engineering). The mandate for the course is to introduce students to the tools and methods they need to deal with large applications; as part of it, I’m thinking of having each group of students go spelunking in a different pre-existing code base. I’d therefore like to find 15-20 applications that are:
- Relatively well written in C, Java, or Python (the three languages I can be sure the students know).
- Open source (for obvious reasons).
- About 50,000 lines long (yes, I know that lines of code is a weak measure of complexity, but it’s easy to calculate).
- Build and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
- Under active development (so that students have someone to turn to when they have questions).
I’d prefer complete applications to libraries, toolkits, or frameworks. Vim is a good example of what I’m after; I’d welcome pointers to others.
Teaching
My Government 2.0 class didn’t meet this Monday, partly because I was on jury duty, and partly to give students a chance to catch up after last week’s two-day showcase at City Hall. Two things I’ve been watching to fill the void are:
- City of Toronto Meeting Monitor — scrolling lists of proposals, amendments, referrals, and what not. I’d love to see something like this for the University of Toronto…
- datato.org (which got a mention at O’Reilly from Nat Torkington). Neat to see that so many people want the same things my students did; kind of sad that some of that data (like household energy consumption) isn’t going to be available for a long time.
Government 2.0
Email is down—strange how hard I find it to get started in the morning without my regular fix. While I’m waiting for someone to turn the firehose back on, here are four recent links:
- The Best Hand Painting Art Ever. Gosh, we’re a creative species, aren’t we?
- Ripley: Automatically Securing Web 2.0 Applications Through Replicated Execution. A new project at Microsoft Research that tries to prevent evildoers from subverting rich internet applications by duplicating execution server-side. Neat idea.
- The CIX Top 20. Lots of interesting companies here; lots of good ideas.
- The Go Programming Language. I’m underwhelmed: it’s as if the last 20 years of programming language research hadn’t happened. Now, Google backing Haskell… That would be interesting.
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We’re going to run some cross-country undergrad capstone projects again starting in January—the newly-updated UCOSP FAQ has some details, and I’ll post a note on that blog when we finalize the project list. Please help us get word out to profs and students who might want to take part.
Teaching
Jon Pipitone, a grad student here at the University of Toronto, has posted a question on his blog: what would it take to convince you (a software engineer) that a piece of complex climate modeling software was working correctly? It’s a hard question — he’d welcome your suggestions.
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I set up a Google Group to communicate with the contributors to the book on evidence-based software engineering that I’m pulling together for O’Reilly, but have run into some registration snags. I invited everyone into the group using their regular email addresses, but Google isn’t letting some of them confirm (which means they don’t get email sent to the group). They can confirm when I invite them via a GMail address, but they don’t read that regularly, and anyway, this stuff is just supposed to work, right? Has anyone run into this before? If so, what’s the cure?
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one… I’m at the court house waiting to find out if I’ll be selected for jury duty. The only WiFi network available is OneZone, but:
- The signup pages are all HTTP, not HTTPS (which means my credit card information and home address just flew threw the ether unencrypted), and
- Once I sign up (yeah, I did it anyway, I’m that desperate for bandwidth) the system echoes back my user ID and password on another unsecure page in plaintext.
Who are these people? And why are they still employed? *sigh*
Later: it may be insecure, but at least it’s slow…
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I will be giving a repeat of my DevDays talk on evidence-based software engineering at Queen’s University on Thursday, November 19. Details are in the flyer; if any regular readers are in the audience, please say hello.
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David Crow’s announcement has the details. It is becoming more focused on social media than hard-core geekery, but it should still be fun.
DemoCamp
Useful page comparing the green options and claims of various web hosting services. My host, Site5, isn’t even listed; renewal is coming up, and I may switch.
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