Phergie refactoring idea
I’m taking a course this semester on software architecture — the high level design principles that go into building high-quality, maintainable software. The class is generally pretty decent, but the best part of it is the project. Over the course of the semester, teams have to learn and describe the architecture of an open source [...]
A Semi-Coherent Review of PyCon Canada 2012
Two weeks ago I was foolish enough to take a few days to escape from university life long enough to go to PyCon Canada, a nice little conference in Toronto that can only be described with words that end with exclamation marks: fantastic!, awesome!, etc. I’m no veteran of tech conferences — this was, I [...]
Getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter to work with the BeagleBone
(For the benefit of fellow “embedded systems” students…) If you’re having trouble getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter working with the BeagleBone, I found this Raspberry Pi forum post really useful. You have to change the commands slightly for the Beagle. To download the driver and install it, run the following on your Beagle: ubuntu@arm [...]
The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2
The second volume of The Architecture of Open Source Applications was just released thanks to the hard work of Amy Brown and Greg Wilson. I had the privilege of helping copyedit a few chapters of the book. Here’s the blurb: Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings [...]
Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women
The sheer humility, honesty, and deliberate action these two people took to fight a problem they saw in the world is inspiring. They listened to people, really listened to people, and didn’t shy away from the faults in their approach. This is the most practical guide for how to get fresh blood into programming that [...]
Time tracking by screenshot
As an experiment, I’ve set up my laptop to record screenshots every minute. My hope is that I can write a program that will automatically figure out how much time I am spending on various tasks by teaching the program what certain tasks looks like. I think my first approach will be to classify based [...]
The Maeslant Kering: BOS development
I came across this paper (found via Lambda the Ultimate) on the development of BOS, the control system for The Maeslant Kering, which is “the movable dam which has to protect Rotterdam from floodings while, at (almost) the same time, not restricting ship traffic to the port of Rotterdam”. The development team used formal methods [...]
Thoughts on the Quorum paper
Recently on the “It Will Never Work In Theory” blog Greg Wilson blogged about a paper by Andreas Stefik, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, and Kim Slattery on “An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages” (pdf). The paper compares Perl, a popular programming language, to two [...]
Spam Filter in Haskell
Check out this spam filter I wrote in Haskell while watching the Stanford AI lectures! The same technique (Naive Bayes Classification) is used in most effective spam filters, albeit with more parameters. This version simply calculates the probability of a word being either spam or ham (the technical term for non-spam), based on how frequently [...]
pressureNet now has 500 installs
Two weeks ago I posted about my friend Jacob’s project, pressureNet, which lets Xoom users pool together their barometer data. Well, Jacob informs me that they’re past 500 installs now. By the looks of their screenshots, they’ve at least got users in North America, Central America, South America, and Europe. I wonder if this is [...]