Archive for December, 2009
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Jon has just coined the phrase "carbon theater" to describe activities that superficially appear to be aimed at reducing carbon load, but which in reality do little or nothing to address the actual problem.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Steven Dale thinks we should build gondolas instead of digging tunnels. I know it's unlikely to ever happen, but wouldn't it be wonderful?
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Mike Fletcher, Leigh Honeywell, and I will be practicing our PyCon 2010 talks at the Linux Caffe on Feb 16 --- see the PyGTA web site for details.
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Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a darning indictment of an "intelligence" agency that has an unparalleled half-century record of failure: "darning" rather than "damning" because the author's obvious anger makes the book sound one-sided.
The Year's Best Science Fiction (25th and 26th editions): gems of ...
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
The field is becoming increasingly crowded: the second edition of Al Sweigart's Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python is now available. It's aimed at kids and teens, but doesn't condescend --- I'm looking forward to going through it.
Posted in Practical Programming, Python, Teaching | No Comments »
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Adding to this meme, here are some PyCon 2010 talks I'm particularly looking forward to:
"Creating RESTful Web services with restish" by Grig Gheorghiu.
"Python Testing Patterns", by Aaron Maxwell.
"To relate or not to relate, that is the question", by Mark Ramm.
"Turtles All The Way Down: Demystifying Deferreds, Decorators, and Declarations", by ...
Posted in Python | No Comments »
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Best Colleges Online (about which I know nothing) has posted a list of 100 great science talks that you can watch for free on the web. By my count, only 7 have a computing component, and of those, only 2 are actually about computer science per se. As I've said ...
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Sunday, December 27th, 2009
The last two times I've taught a regular classroom course on software engineering, I've had students make up the lecture notes and assignments. Instead of creating PowerPoint slides and posting them on the web, I've lectured with chalk and a blackboard. In each lecture, a group of 3-4 students have ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
CodeRun Studio is a browser-based IDE that currently handles PHP and ASP.NET. Frankly, I don't get it: the only advantage I can see to doing development on a remote server via a browser is the ability to switch rapidly between platforms for testing purposes, but the same virtualization technology that ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
The Humanitarian Free Open Source Software initiative is holding its next symposium on March 10 in Milwaukee to coincide with SIGCSE 2010. If I can find a way to get there that doesn't violate my "no fly" pledge, I'd really like to attend; if you're going to be in the ...
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »