Archive for June, 2010
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Would you like to be rich, famous, and popular? Do you have mad computer vision skillz, and/or a Level 29 Jedi Ninja rating in embedded devices? You do? Excellent: drop what you're doing and figure out
how to laminate a bunch of CCD sensors onto the panels of a regulation soccer ...
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Sunday, June 27th, 2010
Great post from Joey deVilla about the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow each year from high tech companies to the ugliest warlords in the world. Don't you just wish people at the G8/G20 in Toronto (the suits and the scufflers) had been talking about this? And don't you ...
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Zuzel Vera Pacheco is studying how developers visualize SQL queries for her Master's thesis project. She ran her last subject a few days ago, and yesterday did the draw for the gift card she was using as an incentive. There's still a lot to be done---coding and analyzing all that ...
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
The Google Summer of Code student I'm working with, Chas Leichner, has a working prototype of a two-pane folding editor for IDLE (the Tkinter-based IDE that ships with Python). This will let him edit control annotations for code side-by-side with the code itself, so that we can start experimenting with ...
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
From "Proving and Improving Teaching Programming Languages":
SIGPLAN Education Board has produced a report “Why undergraduates should learn the principles of programming languages” which was presented at the ACM Education Council meeting. It makes four claims for why students should study programming languages:
Students learn widely-applicable design and implementation ...
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
From Marian Petre's recent paper "Mental imagery and software visualization in high-performance software development teams":
...even in debugging and comprehension, the experts relied more on their own systematic practices than on visualizations---and their use of available visualizations related to how directly the visualizations supported their practices. Tools which simply re-presented available ...
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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
The Jolt Awards for best software (and book) are back: this page on the Doctor Dobb's Journal site has the schedule and categories. It's a shame that neither of the collections I'm helping edit right now (one on evidence-based software engineering, the other on the architecture of open source applications) ...
Posted in AOSA, Announcements, EBSE | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
In 2009-2010, almost 90 students from over a dozen universities across the country earned a course credit by working in teams on a variety of open source projects. Thanks to our friends at Google, O'Reilly, and CACS, the program is going to run again this fall and winter --- see ...
Posted in Announcements, Teaching | 3 Comments »
Sunday, June 20th, 2010
I'm partway through Bill Karwin's new book SQL Antipatterns [1] and all I can say is, "Damn, this is good." Important material, crisp writing, well-chosen examples---it's exactly what a technical book should be, and I hope a lot of people read it.
[1] Fair disclosure: I've done two books with Pragmatic, ...
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
For those who aren't following along:
Testing invasion percolation (June 7)
Making invasion percolation faster (June 8 )
Reorganizing content (June 9)
Interview with Scimatic and a new version of the concept map (June 10)
Our introductory database lecture in 8 episodes (also June 10)
Thoughts on teaching simple design patterns (June 11)
Interviews with SHARCNET and ...
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