Sometimes, simple shell scripts can save a lot of time. Recently, I noticed myself waiting for various unit tests to complete by surfing the web: a surefire way to be distracted for more than the time it takes for the tests to complete (or fail). Enter the following script, which I call notify:
#!/bin/sh “$@” status=$? xmessage [...]
When switching to a new version control system, it is important to be able to bring along all the past history of a project. There are several tools capable of converting a CVS repository to Mercurial; I have considered cvs20hg, tailor and Mercurial’s own convert-repo. While these all do the conversion, careful testing of the results is necessary. [...]
Over the past few years, distributed version control systems have flourished; there are now so many that is hard to choose between them. Each choice offers an evolution beyond CVS including, among other things, whole-tree views with atomic commits, complete and transparent offline operation, and excellent branching support. Always on the look out for better tools, I have played with [...]
Today, Robert O’Callahan stopped by MIT as part of his US Tour. He works for Novell is one of the “super reviewers” at the Mozilla Foundation. If you use FireFox (like 63% of my visitors this week), you probably run code he’s touched. He also wrote TTSSH, an SSH client that I linked to from my homepage for [...]
In his interview with Jim Gray, Werner Vogels talks about how Amazon.com structures and builds its internal systems. While many others have noted his comments on web technologies and development methods, I am more interested in a few points he raised at the end about building and testing distributed systems and what those of us in academic systems research can [...]
There are some articles making the rounds today on reddit about math education.
Seattle allows great diversity in its math curricula. This is not without risk:
In Seattle, schools have a lot of autonomy in how they teach math. The district has adopted textbooks and provides guidelines and timelines for teachers to follow, but doesn’t require [...]
Steve Yegge’s article, “math for programmers,” has been making the rounds. His thesis is that mathematical breadth in pre-college education would be more valuable than the attempt to provide mathematical depth in few apparently arbitrary areas (like geometry). He argues that specific math skills taught in grade school (like long division) are not necessarily of tremendous use to the [...]
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