Another Week of Progress

Our students all seem to be making progress:

• Kosta Zabashta has posted a (rather quiet) screencast showing the current state of IRC integration. Your comments on the user interface would be very welcome.
• Eva Wong has been wrestling with security and domains in Flex. Input would be welcome—surely it can't be this hard? Meanwhile, Matthew Basset managed to burn 100% of his CPU on logging, but is making good progress regardless.
• Nick Jamil has posted a summary of what he's learned and done so far.
• Victoria Mui has discovered how useful writing documentation can be when you're trying to learn your way around legacy code.
• Eran Henig's Python plugin for Web-CAT is ready for testing. The security features aren't there yet, but round-trip submission and execution of exercises seems to work. He and the other Web-CAT students had a chance to talk on Friday with my former boss, Gene Amdur—apparently, they got to hear stories about me (some of which might have been true).
• Xuan Le took time off this week to learn her way around mips.c, one of the core elements of the os161 simulator.
• Daniel Servos has figured out how to make SciTE play nicely with Moodle's coding standards. More importantly, he has a demo version of a text UI for visualizing Moodle stats. (Log in as guest, then go to http://compsci.ca/~dan/moodle/grade/report/stats/index.php?id=2 to see the stats display.) He'd be grateful for feedback—see here for more info.
• Ming and Bing gave their second demo, then were hit with a hard drive crash. They're going to do some paper prototyping this week to see if their proposed interface works in the hands of other people.
• Joseph Yeung is getting ready to pull his hair out.
• Dmitri Vassilenko has taken Robert Frost's advice, and is back on the HTTP POST highway.
• Matthew Basset now crudely supports stuff.
• Jeff Balogh has posted a demo of his Dojo drag-and-drop form editor. Feedback welcome.
• And over at Undamped, Charlotte has learned the value of version control.

Everyone has been discovering that coding isn’t the real challenge—getting other people’s software built, installed, configured, and playing nicely is much harder. Everyone also had a good time at lunch on Thursday June 5th—I’m grateful to Professors Kyros Kutulakos and Hector Levesque for coming to represent the department, and to the following friends from industry for coming along to talk about life outside academia:

• Roy Pereira, Colin Smillie, and Pierre Lafayette from Refresh Partners
• Ben Newton from Rogers
• Drew Atkins and Jeremy Chan from the Jonah Group
• Rob Tyrie and Adam Edmonds from NexJ Systems
• John Salama from Kneebone
• Shawn Konopinsky from Infusion
• Shidan Gouran from Jazinga
• Sumit Oberai from Indigo

My apologies if you were there and I forgot to mention you—I was too busy fending off grad students who were trying to scavenge before our guests were done eating to take proper notes. We’ll be having another lunch on either June 30 or July 2; if you’d like to come along and meet some rising stars, please drop me a line.