Thanks to Brent and James I can now call Radio from the Mac OS X CLI!

There is at least one minor bug but nothing that counts as a showstopper.

I...must....resist....the...temptation...to....play ;-)

via hbwt - Forwarding Address: OSX

Migrators to Apple's new operating systems talk about their experiences. Some of them come from Classic MacOS, some from Windows, and some from other Unixen.

High-tech teaching could be 'suicidal,' scholar says: 02/02

University educators largely extol the wonders of teaching through technology. But skeptics question whether something is lost when professors and lecturers rely too heavily on electronic media, or when interaction with students takes place remotely -- in cyberspace rather than the real space of the classroom.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, is one such skeptic. "I think this enthusiastic and sometimes naive and sometimes blind pushing toward the more technology the better, the more websites the better teacher and so forth, is very dangerous -- [that it] is, indeed, suicidal," Gumbrecht said, speaking at the Jan. 31 installment of the Center for Teaching and Learning's "Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" series.

I agree with some of the points made by Professor Gumbrecht. Personally, I would hate to see face to face interaction with students disappear. I enjoy the 'sage on the stage' aspect of lecturing too much to see it replaced entirely by 'virtualisation' of teaching. That being said, I have no doubt that appropriate use of technology can be very beneficial to the learning process.

It's hardly surprising that critics of so-called 'high-tech teaching' cited in the article suggest that it's an inappropriate methid of teaching for arts and humanities subjects. Hmm!

I have just been _strongly_ encouraged to bring this to the attention of student members of the BCS - go figure!:

The British Computer Society | Young Professionals Group (YPG) web page has a link to the ITDF competition (menu left hand side).

The deadline is Friday 1 March!

Ftrain is weird and wonderfully wacky. Interesting concept behind its Reader Services. The reason I stumbled across it (again) was Seth's link to the Ftrain: Robot Exclusion Protocol!

What impeccable timing! Iain picks up on something I said in a lecture last week about students undertaking OSS projects and lo and behold there's a Slashdot | Open Source as Programming Exp. for College Students? thread this week.

texatut asks: "With the computer industry in a slump, many college CS students nearing graduation are looking at pretty meek prospects. While 'formally' educated, few actually have concrete experience dealing with development of software. Many would like to have something concrete to put down on their resume or application to graduate school. However, starting their own project is a hard and time-consuming task. Obviously, the Open Source community is a perfect place for us to get our hands dirty. My question is, are there any resources that can help people with varying levels of experience connect with development teams in a way that would benefit both the project and the students?"

The responses make interesting reading.

Thanks for the link Iain.

I don't know who wrote this but you need to check out this really cool clock!

Erann Gat - How I lost my faith (very long)

...I can't really go into many specifics about what happened at Google because of confidentiality, but the upshot was this: I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found *myself* suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python.

A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog

THERE'S BEEN A RECENT retread of the weblogging phenomenon following a few articles at PC Mag, Time, and The Morning News. After posting my own short list of things that ought to be banned from weblogs, I realized that a list of things to be encouraged would be more useful. Some people are new to weblogging. Others want to raise the bar. In the end, everybody wants better sites, and some of these suggestions might help...

via hbwt - iBook: the revised edition - timesdispatch.com. A sad tale of a small minority spoiling it for the vast majority. I think the reporter was right to suggest that the culprits should be the ones to be punished rather than put draconian restrictions on all the iBooks.

O'Reilly Network: Learning the Mac OS X Terminal, Part 2 [Jan. 22, 2002]

In Part 1of this series, you learned how to reschedule default system cron jobs by modifying the system crontab. Here in Part 2, I'll show you how to configure cron to email you a report each time it runs one of these jobs.

O'Reilly Network: Learning the Mac OS X Terminal, Part 3 [Feb. 26, 2002]

Now that you have the regular maintenance cron jobs running at more reasonable times and emailing you their reports, you would probably like to know what those jobs do, and what the reports tell you.

gnuplot 3.7.1c for the Macintosh

...is available here. This 1.7 Meg download includes the gnuplot application, help files, demo files, AppleScripts, and other extras. This application has been "Carbonized," and requires CarbonLib 1.1 or higher from Apple. It has been tested on MacOS 9.04, 9.1, and MacOS X.

Owen Briggs' Box Lessons examples of CSS layouts.

A combo of Eric's OSX, Radio and Upstreaming tip along with Bill's SSHPassKey should see me all set for Radio-initiated secure syncing of websites along the lines that Nicholas has been experimenting with.

Thanks guys!

Thanks to Nicholas Riley for providing the incentive to come up to speed on rsync:

Here's how I set up rsync to work automatically from Radio. The problem was in getting SSH authorization to a process executed with sys.unixShellCommand. Radio just executes commands, it doesn't provide any way of connecting standard input. Standard output is returned as the result of the command, and standard error goes to the console log (open Console.app to see it).

It's now just a small step to get my Radio-controlled static sites weaned off the mirroing FTP set-up I currently use.

I had lunch with several colleagues today and the subject of the BCS Programming Competition cropped up. Generally speaking there is a negative reaction to the competition since in its current form it rewards a hurried 'hack-led' approach to program development rather than a considered 'design-led' approach. This hacking approach is, of coures, the complete antithesis of what many in an academic department of compuetr science are attempting to instil in the students. To a great extent that's why the competition is promoted less than enthusiastically by some staff.

I am pretty agnostic about the whole event. I can see both sides of the argument but err on the side that it's to be treated as a bit of harmless fun and, a bit like the Brits Awards, not to be taken too seriously. OTOH, the BCS is the Society that represents professional software developers and so there is a conflict there in that they seem to be promoting poor engineering practice in their competition.

In actual fact the competition shares some of the characteristics of Extreme Programming (XP) [see Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction., for example] and as such could be promoted in that way.

This struck home on Saturday during the Scottish heat. The judges don't inspect/judge the actual code produced when assessing the success/failure of a submission. It's purely down to how well the program(s) transform input to output and the judges use 'secret' data input to assess the degree of conformity with the problem specification. I.e. the output has to be an exact match with that provided to the judges otherwise the attempt is deemed to be a failure. Naturally, this limits the type of problem that can be set. Given the restrictions in the types of problem I believe that a relatively inexperienced programming team could be coached in the techniques that would maximise their chances of winning the competition. I suspect, too, that these techniques are at odds with good programming practice. Perhaps I will be able to test my assertion if the Strathclyde team enter next year and the Unexpected Exception proves the rule ;-)

As I said earlier, the best way to treat this competition is as a bit of fun. That being said, the contestants do seem to to compete as seriously and as hard as they can and there's no doubt that there's kudos attached to winning a regional heat and progressing to the national final.

Open-Source Web Servers: Performance on a Carrier-Class...