If I’m supposed to meet you today, but don’t show up, I apologize: Google Calendar is “temporarily unavailable”. There was no warning that I saw; disturbing that someone a continent away can disrupt my life in the same way that losing my day timer did twenty years ago. When I upgrade this WordPress installation in May, I’m going to look seriously at moving my life planning there—at least then there’s a tech support team I can contact.
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I do almost all of my work now in a command-line shell, including reading email and composing text of all kinds. And I mean it when I say “a” shell—I almost never have two open at once. The reason? It encourages me to use only one tool at a time, which I find makes me more productive by reducing context switching overheads. I don’t yet have the willpower to (re-)open Firefox each time I need something on the web, then close it when I’m done, but that’s the next step. Who’d have thunk that going back to 1984 would be the right answer in 2010?
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My side of the conversation this morning went like this. (I would have recorded it “for quality assurance purposes”, but where would I send the recording?)
- I’d like to have a technician come in to move a cable connection.
- Yes, I understand there will be a charge.
- A monthly charge? Why will there be a monthly charge?
- No, I don’t want to add a connection, I want to move an existing one.
- No, I want to disable the one that’s there, and put in a new one.
- What do you mean, you can’t disable one?
- Yes, I want to TURN OFF the one that’s there, and—
- No, I don’t want to cancel my service.
- Yes, I want to—may I finish please?
- Thank you. I want to move the existing connection in the living room to a different place in the living room.
- Right, so the number of connections stays the same.
- Right, but we’re adding one, so if we turn one off and add one, the monthly charge should stay the same, shouldn’t it?
- Yes, adding one, but we’re turning one off, so —
- No, we’re not canceling the service. We are just moving an outlet from one place in the room to another place in the same room.
- No, we’re not moving house, we’re moving the cable outlet.
- So we can put the TV in a different place.
- Yes, in the same room.
- Yes, I understand there will be a charge for the service. But it will be a one-time service charge, right?
- No, I — ma’am, I didn’t ask what our current service charges are, I just want to confirm that there’s just a one-time service charge for moving the cable outlet.
- OK, if you can just send the technician, I’ll explain it to them.
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Google Summer of Code 2010 is on for 2010! They will begin accepting applications from would-be mentoring organizations on March 8th, with applications closing on March 12th. Students can apply between March 29th and April 9th.
Announcements
Mike Conley (one of my grad students) is converging on a thesis topic: pre-commit continuous integration. If you have thoughts, he’d enjoy hearing them.
Research
I’m a big fan of David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, not least because it’s a command performance by a master of back-of-the-envelope calculations. This post by Kent Beck on NoSQL databases is a smaller example of that art, but still fun. Amid quotes like, “[Amazon] EC2 is basically a really complicated way of charging for electricity,” and, “At internet scale, programmers are (sometimes) cheap compared to the cost of electricity,” there’s some nice number crunching to explain why non-relational databases are suddenly fashionable. Thinking like this really does deserve to be called software “engineering”.
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Amid all the excitement about moving education online, we shouldn’t forget that so far, doing so seems to hurt those who need help the most. As Mark Guzdial says in his recent blog post:
Universities already widen the gap between rich and poor, by flunking out or not admitting the poor. On-line courses tend to flunk out even more students, and mostly at the lower-knowledge and poor levels… I think it’s possible for on-line education to be even better than existing University education, in terms of improving learning and engaging a broader range of students… [but] the work has to happen first. If [universities] disappear in favor of [online education], before we make [online education] better, [it] will lead to worse education for society, especially for weaker students.
Teaching
I’m speaking at Guelph University on Monday, February 8, and at McMaster University on Wednesday, February 10. Both talks will be based on my DevDays/CUSEC talk about evidence-based software engineering. I look forward to meeting lots of you! (I’m also speaking on Saturday February 20 at PyCon in Atlanta; looking forward to meeting lots of people there, too.)
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Lots of people were chatting last week about Sikuli, the “programming with screenshots” project from MIT. Even if I didn’t agree with Adam Goucher’s comments (with I do), I’d still criticize it as a half-measure: a real extensible programming system would allow one programmer to nest this capability in a generic programming language.
Extensible Programming
The University of Waterloo‘s VeloCity program is launching a new program for this spring term (May-July 2010) that will give three great teams of postsecondary students from across Canada with promising tech startup ideas a chance to get their startup off the ground by the end of July. Selected students will receive:
- funding: $3K per student, $9K per team max
- free office space in the Accelerator Centre in our R&T Park
- free living space at VeloCity (max 3 free rooms per team)
Students would own 100% of their IP. Communitech (the local tech association) is developing weekly workshops and seminars, and will be helping to match the teams up through their network of mentors. The application deadline is February 14; for more details, see http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/bootcamp.
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