Archive for July, 2010

It’s Less Funny When It’s Your Life

Friday, July 30th, 2010

A couple of days ago, Steve Yegge posted a sort-of funny piece to his blog about Wikileaks leaking the source code of 5000 open source Java projects by making all modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'. One mock-quote in it was: If people could keep using the older, ...

I Could Use Your Help With Javascript

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Details on the Software Carpentry blog, but basically I need a simple folding display for code to do faded examples.

XKCD on University Web Sites

Friday, July 30th, 2010



Interview with David Wallace

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

CivSource has posted an interview with David Wallace, the City of Toronto's CIO, about open data. I'm really pleased to see things are still moving ahead --- wish I could have stayed involved.

An Idea Whose Time Is Long Overdue

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

When I blogged about App Inventor for Android a couple of days ago, I focused on the fact that it's closed source. What I didn't say, but should have, is that I think drag-and-drop programming tools are an idea whose time should have come at least twenty years ago. Tools ...

Apparently We’re Less Creative

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Apparently we're becoming less creative. Well, Americans are, anyway, according to research reported in Newsweek (and repeated elsewhere): Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily ...

Closed Feels Weirder Every Day

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

By now, most readers of this blog will have heard about Google's App Inventor for Android, a building-blocks programming system based on MIT's OpenBlocks that's intended to let gazillions of people who aren't programmers build the apps they want themselves. What most people probably don't know is that App Inventor ...

BP Buying Up Scientists

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Via ClimateProgress: Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is ...

The Strengths of the Small

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Jorge Aranda, who recently completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and who contributed a chapter to Making Software, recently wrote a position paper on the strengths of small software companies that's based in large part on his thesis work. It's quite good---please pester him to ...

City of Toronto Releases New Data Sets

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Longtime readers will recall that I ran an open government/open data course at the University of Toronto last fall. I wasn't able to stay as involved as I would have liked [1], but I'm heartened to see that the City of Toronto has released some more data sets --- see ...