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Dreaming in Code

Finished a great book on software engineering:

• Dreaming in Code

It tells the story of Chandler, a personal information manager (PIM), started by Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame, as well as giving a very nice history of software engineering, its luminaries and its methodologies.

Web Programming

Decided to explore what it would take to invoke all of my C++ and Java programs from a Web page. That is, I want to create forms that would constitute the input to my programs and have other forms on the page be updated with their outputs. In particular I don't want to have to translate my programs to PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

Web Design

Listened to a great podcast from E.O. Wilson at this year's TED Conference about his new project: the Encyclopedia of Life. I was so taken by the beautiful design that I decided to borrow it! Unfortunately, the site is designed in HTML Transitional and I really wanted to play with HTML Strict. Serendipitously, I had earlier encountered the CSS Zen Garden, which is strict, and that allowed me to merge the two designs into my own renovated site.

Economist Blogs

Read an interesting article, The invisible hand on the keyboard, in this week's Economist. It describes the benefits of blogging in the context of academics in the field of economics, but it's clear that it would apply to other academic fields as well. In particular blogging is evolving into being one of the better ways with which academics can keep up-to-date in their field.

Gates & Jobs

There's a great quote in Ozzie the wizard, from this week's Economist.

The co-founder, chairman and "chief software architect" of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, would deny it on his life, but the one person Bill Gates admires most for his geeky prowess - and might have chosen to succeed him as software architect - is almost certainly Steve Jobs.

Sudoku

Read another good article, The Science behind Sudoku, in this month's Scientific American. After describing the game and giving some insights into counting the total number of solved puzzles, it goes on to say that in the end even humans have to resort to backtracking to solve the harder puzzles.

World of Warcraft

Read a great article, Worlds without end, in this week's Economist. It's about the economies of MMORPGs and it refers to a new book on the subject, Synthetic Worlds. I got intrigued enough to go to MMORPG and found that one of the highest-rated games runs on the Mac! The game of course is World of Warcraft, so I bought it for myself for Christmas!

Programming Interviews

Read an interesting article, Analyze That: Puzzles and Analysis of Algorithms, in this year's SIGCSE proceedings. It advocates the use of puzzles for teaching algorithms and data structures, something that I've been doing for a couple of years (again, see my blog entry of 22 Aug 2003, Programming Challenges). And led me to two wonderful books about the current vogue of using similar puzzles in the context of programming-job interviews: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? : Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers and Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job.

Australian Voting

Read an interesting article, 6 Ways to Reboot the System, in this month's Wired by Clive Thompson. The second way suggests eliminating the electoral college, moving to a popular vote, and using an Australian voting algorithm (which curiously leads back to my blog entry of 22 Aug 2003, Programming Challenges). Programming Challenges describes Australian Voting in puzzler 1.6.8 on page 25, and the footnote on the succeeding page led me to another wonderful new book, For All Practical Purposes, with an interesting discussion of the mathematics of social choice. That book also has a nice accompanying website, For All Practical Purposes.

Blogging Revisited

Got an e-mail from a good friend, Dilip D'Souza, announcing his new blog Death Ends Fun. That made me realize that there was no longer a reason for having a poor-man's blog when Google was again facilitating an exciting new technology. Their enterprise is called Blogger and setting up a new and free blog couldn't be easier. You're reading one now!

The Moore Method

Although I've been here on and off for more than twenty years, it wasn't until today that I heard about R.L. Moore and the Moore Method. Alan Cline told me about it at a CS lunch. He had a math class from Paul Halmos, who had been a student of Moore's, and it had changed his life.

Programming Challenges

Don't remember how, but I recently discovered the wonderful book Programming Challenges by Steven Skiena and Miguel Revilla, which describes 100 interesting programming problems. Skiena is from Stony Brook and Revilla is from Valladolid. On the accompanying Web site, Programming Challenges, after easily and freely registering, you can submit your solution to any of the 100 problems and almost instantly get feedback as to whether you've solved the problem.

Four languages are accepted: Pascal, C, C++, and Java. The problem statement is in the form of the ACM Programming Contest problems, and your program is required to use standard in and standard out.

Alternatively, the companion Web site Valladolid Programming Contest has hundreds of problems. And again after an easy and free registration you submit your solution via e-mail or Web form to a server that again responds within minutes with the four aforementioned languages being accepted.

Pair Programming

Got a set of papers from John Werth about Pair Programming. I've always made programming with a partner optional in my classes, but this is a more defined methodology with proven results as detailed in the following paper: All I Really Needed to Know about Pair Programming I Learned in Kindergarten.

Millennium Problems

Got an e-mail from Richard Brice to the department today describing the Millennium Problems, sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute. There are 7 problems and the solution of each is a worth a cool million! The e-mail referred to the Who's Counting article Unsolved Math Mysteries in ABC News by John Paulos, which in turn led to the book The Millennium Problems by Keith Devlin.

In 1900 David Hilbert posed 23 unsolved problems. 22 of them have since been solved and the remaining one, the Riemann Hypothesis (which curiously leads back to my blog entry of 20 Apr 2003, Primes), is carried over into the 7 above. A book about the original 23 was written by Benjamin Yandell in 2001, The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers.

Blogging

Read an interesting article in today's New York Times, As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation, by Geoffrey Nunberg. It starts by describing Google of course, and then observes that Google reflects "an extended Internet community, with the power to shape opinion and events." As evidence he quotes James F. Moore, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, from his blog of 31 Mar, "the Internet has become a 'shared collective mind' that is coming to figure as a 'second superpower.'" Nunberg asserts that Google has allowed Moore to hijack the expression "second superpower".

In particular, in reading Moore's blog I noticed that Harvard Law has setup a Web server specifically for blogs for all of its students and faculty, and which itself is a blog!

I looked in vain for such a server here at UT, but did find a physics professor, Jacques Distler and a computer science graduate student, Jefferson Provost, doing individual ones.

I also discovered that most bloggers use a "weblogging content management system" like Movable Type and Blosxom, but in the end, I chose to forgo any specialized software and just create the simple one you're currently reading.

Primes

Decided to implement an arbitrary-precision integer class in C++ for both my CS315 and CS378 classes. Looking for something to try it out on led me to a great Web site on primes. The current largest known prime happens to be a Marsenne prime (a number of the form 2ⁿ-1) with n = 13,466,917 (which also must be prime) and 4,053,946 digits, which was discovered in 2001. There are only 39 known Marsenne primes.

There's a SETI-like effort, GIMPS to find the next one, and the EFF is offering a $100,000 reward for finding one with 10 million digits.

Nifty Assignments

Read an interesting article, Nifty assignments, in this year's SIGCSE proceedings. And that led me to Stanford University's namesake website Nifty Assignments which maintains interesting programming assignments for CS0, CS1, & CS2 courses.