Planet DCS@UofT

He Would Have Appreciated the Irony

2012-02-13T00:13:06+00:00

Very high customer acquisition cost for MDD tools

2012-02-12T22:33:02+00:00

MDD tool vendors differ in many aspects but they have one thing in common. They all (well, all those I’ve interviewed or I’ve discussed with, which I do believe are a representative sample) agree that the cost of customer acquisition is really high. Roughly speaking, you must first attract their attention (e.g. sponsoring this site

Going west

2012-02-12T17:00:50+00:00

Air travel is really quite astounding. In the wee hours of the morning of Friday, I hopped on a plane bound for Vancouver and arrived at my destination before the start of the business day. Some people have jitters about flying but not I. Get on1 and, after zipping through the air in a flying ...

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Green Revolving Funds

2012-02-09T17:02:55+00:00

I was talking to the folks at our campus sustainability office recently, and they were extolling the virtues of Green Revolving Funds. The idea is ridiculously simple, but turns out to be an important weapon in making sure that the savings from energy efficiency don’t just disappear back into the black hole of University operational [...]

Another sign of the death of Science in America

2012-02-09T03:50:49+00:00

The 12th Annual Weblog (Bloggies) awards shortlists are out. This year, they have merged the old categories of “Best Science weblog” and “Best Computer or Technology Weblog” into a single category, “Best Science or Technology Weblog“. And the five candidates on the shortlist? Four technology blogs and one rabid anti-science blog. Not that this award ever [...]

pywebuml – create UML class diagrams from Java, C# and python files

2012-02-08T22:36:50+00:00

Pywebml is a new addition to our list of UML tools for python. Pywebml uses graphviz to create a UML class diagram representing your python (and also Java and C#) code. According to the author: “The difference to other UML tools that I have seen is that the data will be saved in a webpage

INRIA Postdoc position in MDE and Cloud Computing available

2012-02-05T01:58:39+00:00

Join AtlanMod as an INRIA postdoc for 16 months. You can read below the proposed description (though we are open to listen to your preferred topics if you want to propose your own and fits our research interests). To apply, please visit the INRIA recruitment page and select the position entitled “ATLANMOD – Modeling in

Ultrabook fad (follow up)

2012-02-04T17:00:28+00:00

A few months ago, I disagreed with comments made by Acer’s founder, Stan Shih. I suggested that netbooks and ultra books would merge (or face extinction). It looks like at least some people at Acer now share the same view publicly. Their estimate is for 18-24 months from now; my original prediction would have been ...

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On publishing the “obvious”

2012-02-03T23:30:23+00:00

As a requirement for the course “Advanced Propositional Reasoning” that I’m taking, today I did a presentation of a very very interesting paper titled Empirical study of the anatomy of modern SAT solvers. You can find my slides here.

Earlier in the day, I almost caught the end of Alicia‘s practice talk for her paper On the Perceived Interdependence and Information Sharing Inhibitions of Enterprise Software Engineers that will appear at CSCW 2012. Part of her most recent results is apparently some data that substantiates certain things which are supposedly “common knowledge”. (I won’t elaborate, wait for her paper in CSCW.)

It’s interesting how that closely parallels the situation of the findings of the SAT solvers paper. That paper also substantiates with empirical data some things assumed to be “common knowledge”. What I want to say is that basically, that’s a very good thing! Sure, if your empirical investigation finds something that refutes commonly held perceptions, that’s more exciting (and I guess more publishable). But confirming anecdotal knowledge with hard scientific investigation is just as important!

This points to the often talked about(*) “problem” with empirical research: it takes big amounts of energy to conduct and there is a good chance the results will be considered unimpressive. But empirical research is of paramount importance to Software Engineering! I won’t argue for that, I will just point to this page.

(*) See? Anecdotal knowledge!

Filed under: blogging, empirical se, presentation, self-reference, software engineering

Free and online Model Thinking course

2012-02-03T06:41:58+00:00

You can now register for this free and online course on Model Thinking. From the course web page: “Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don’t. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. … Models help us to better organize information. Models

Software Carpentry in Ninety-Five Seconds

2012-02-03T00:35:43+00:00

I posted a ninety-five second explanation of Software Carpentry on YouTube today. Feedback would be very welcome.

Bullshit, Appropriation, and Technology in Education

2012-02-02T02:22:27+00:00

A few weeks ago, a former student who’s now a friend asked me to teach him how to bullshit. At first I couldn’t decide whether I was flattered or offended, but then I decided I was more curious than anything. What did he mean by that? And why did he think I’d be a good teacher?

After a bit of back and forth, we agreed that he didn’t mean outright lying, or the indifference to truth that Frankfurter talks about in his book on the subject. What he wanted to learn was how to present things in a way that made the speaker’s preferred outcome seem like the only sensible or desirable choice—how to (in the words of one of my teachers) sacrifice truth for clarity, or (in the words of an ex-girlfriend) how to clarify things for people.

I’m still not sure why he thought I’d be able to teach this, but his request sent me wandering down memory lane. Back in 1989, when I was doing some work for a sociologist in Edinburgh, I occasionally sat in on his group’s seminars. At one, an American researcher talked about her studies of the impact of networked computers on workplace dynamics. (Remember, this was before the Internet: most PCs were still only connected to a printer, not to each other, and even on Unix systems, NFS needed a lot of love and care.) She claimed that networking was democratizing the workplace by allowing people to share information more freely.

She made a plausible case, but then one of the grad students challenged her with a thought experiment. Suppose we’d invented networked computers first, and that mainframes had only come later. Wouldn’t she be arguing that they were a democratizing force—that giving everyone access to the totality of the group’s computing resources was more empowering than allowing everyone a small, fixed fraction of those resources? In fact (he went on, warming to his theme), wouldn’t she be reading meaning into the term “time sharing” in the same way that she had actually emphasized “networking”?

This was where I first heard the term “appropriation” applied to explanations. Today, I see it happening a lot in and around education. Almost everyone claims that new technology will fundamentally disrupt the way we teach. As Audrey Watters pointed out in a recent podcast, though, the big education companies have an incentive to make sure that “disruption” isn’t, and the budgets and connections to neuter any change that might threaten their business models. Simlarly, as much as we might want kids to grow up to be better citizens, teaching them to program won’t automatically make this happen, any more than teaching them addition will automatically make them better at balancing budgets.

In his 2008 essay, “The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the United States“, David Labaree showed how people have increasingly turned to schools to solve social problems, even though schools have repeatedly proven that they are ineffective at doing so. I think it’s equally true that reformers all too often ask technology to solve educational problems, even though it has shown time and time again that it can’t. (I speak as someone who lived through the VCR-in-the-classroom revolution, the PC-in-the-classroom revolution, and the first-generation-Internet revolution. Meet the new class, same as the old class…) Yes, new technologies might enable change, but they will not make that change happen. Only we can do that.

On Algorithmic Thinking

2012-02-01T20:55:17+00:00

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
– Inigo Montoya

I recently sat in on an online discussion with Cathy Davidson, whose work focuses on technology, collaboration, cognition, and learning. She recently wrote a blog post titled “Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms“, in which she says:

…our world changed in April 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser was released to the general public. We need new forms of education. We need to reform our learning institutions, concepts, and modes of assessment for our age… I have a basic literacy to add to the last century’s 3 R’s of “reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic.” Let’s add a 4th R: “algoRithm.”

I’m all in favor of that. But I’m not sure that Davidson and I mean the same thing when we say “algorithm”—in fact, I’m pretty sure we don’t. Based on the slide that appears on this page, and on comments she made in that online discussion, her definition includes:

procedural thinking
webcraft/webmaking
forking
participation
diversity
future partisans for the open web

I’d definitely include the first; I’d say it was a prerequisite for the second, and plays into the third, but the rest feel like aspirational goals for society rather than anything algorithmic. Yes, the interweb is a powerful tool for implementing those goals (or their opposites), but “diversity” and “algorithm” have no more to do with each other than “justice” and “double-entry bookkeeping”.

What I mean by “algorithmic thinking” is, I think, closer to what Michelle Levesque is describing in this blog post (available here as a handy visual aid, complete with drop shadows). It’s what Jeannette Wing meant in her 2006 article that introduced the term “computational thinking”. Everyone immediately started using it to mean whatever they already wanted to push—office suite skills, parallel computing, how to search and filter—but Wing herself later defined it as:

Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can effectively be carried out by an information-processing agent.

She went on to say:

Computational thinking enables you to bend computation to your needs…to:

understand which aspects of a problem are amenable to computation,

evaluate the match between computational tools and techniques and a problem,

understand the limitations and power of computational tools and techniques,

apply or adapt a computational tool or technique to a new use,

recognize an opportunity to use computation in a new way, and

apply computational strategies such divide and conquer in any domain.

That’s a much narrower definition, but I think it’s also more useful. CollaboRation or paRticipation would make a great “zero’th R”, but they’re very opposite of “algorithmic”. They are, fundamentally, about the exercise of judgment in situations where right answers can’t be calculated by following a formula—in short, about the things that still distinguish us from machines.

Old Soup in New Bowls

2012-02-01T16:42:08+00:00

In a recent podcast, the always-interesting Audrey Watters talks about the tension between innovators who want to use technology to disrupt existing models of education built around top-down sales to school districts, rather than direct delivery to learners, and the big “educational” companies’ desire to subsume those technologies into their existing (very profitable) business models. Start in around 20:25 — there’s a lot to think about…

Creating DSLs, a word of caution

2012-01-31T09:09:17+00:00

As all (relatively) new techniques, we are still in the process of learning when and how creating a DSLs is the best solution for a given software development scenario. Otherwise, we may end up following again the technology hype cycle (as already happened with UML; we are still paying the consequences) and fall trap of

I Hope Someone Has Already Built This

2012-01-31T05:10:24+00:00

Over the next few months, I want to experiment with at least four new learning formats for Software Carpentry. The baseline is what we have now: each topic is covered in 6-10 lessons, each of which has its own page. Most of those pages have a voice-over-slideshow video lasting 5 to 10 minutes and the slides themselves as PNG images in parallel with a transcript of the voiceover; the exceptions are the lessons on spreadsheets, databases, and debugging, which are actual screencasts of the appropriate tools in action. Only a handful of topics have exercises, and the only way to give feedback is to comment on the page.

Here’s what I want instead:

Superficially, it isn’t much different from what we have The “Slideshow” area shows the current diagram, code snippet, or whatever. The “Continuous Controls” (the usual forward, pause, and rewind) control the synchronized slideshow and audio track, while the “Stepping Controls” allow users to move forward and back a slide at a time, and the “Pointmarks” show where slide transitions take place. Finally, the “Transcript” is, as its name suggests, a transcript of the audio that accompanies the current slide.

The big difference doesn’t show up in this diagram. In this version, the slides are not PNG images, an MP4 video, or any other paint-by-pixel format. Instead, they are SVGs stored right in the body of the web page, so that their content is visible to search engines, and can be copied and pasted in sensible ways. This means that if the current “slide” is showing some code, the user can pause the show, select that text, and paste it into her own editor. She can do similar things with the diagrams, i.e., select a cloud, shift-select the caption, and paste them both into her favorite image tool, rather than having to select a rectangular block of anti-aliased pixels that happen to look like lines and letters to a human eye.

I haven’t built this yet, but I think it should be fairly straightforward: each “slide” is a div with a unique ID containing an image and a block of text. The audio is linked from the page; a data-* attribute in each slide div has its start time, and a bit of Javascript shows the right slide at the right time. Marking start times will be a bit tedious—I think it’ll have to be done by hand, at least for now—but it should be easy to allow people to add and view comments and questions in place, instead of tacking them all onto the bottom of the page. And displaying an all-in-one view of the slides with appropriate bits of transcript for printing (or for people who just want to browse) will be easy.

This is just a start, of course. I haven’t said anything about (self-)assessment, which is crucial to real learning, or about accessibility (although I think that having all the code and captions in the page as first-class text will help a lot). I also haven’t thought yet about whether I can build this in just one week, which is about as much time as I have, because there’s one question I should ask first:

Has someone built this already?

If so, I’d be very grateful for a pointer.

Visit our course blog

2012-01-30T03:35:00+00:00

This term, I’m running my first year seminar course, “Climate Change: Software Science and Society” again. The outline has changed a little since last year, but the overall goals of the course are the same: to take a small, cross-disciplinary group of first year undergrads through some of the key ideas in climate modeling. As last [...]

Girls in a Tech World

2012-01-29T19:48:40+00:00

A Browser-Based Programming Tool That’s Better Than Many Desktop Tools

2012-01-29T11:56:54+00:00

I don’t know who Philip Guo is, but I think he’s amazing—at least, the software he creates is. Like several other tools, his Online Python Tutor lets you write and run code in the browser; unlike others, though, his allows users to step forward and backward through program execution, and displays simple, but effective, box-and-arrow visualizations of the program’s state as it evolves:

14 years after the publication of Stasko et al’s massive survey of software visualization, most IDEs still don’t do the latter. There are some good reasons (scalability and extensibility) and some bad ones (programmers can be surprisingly suspicious of anything new when it comes to their tools). My question is, will programming-for-everyone tools like Scratch allow people to create their own visualizations of their programs? I.e., will their be introspective hooks so that I can not only say, “Animate this picture,” but also, “And display the stack, my variables, and my definitions in the following way as you do so”? I wouldn’t expect the average eight-year-old to build new program visualizations, but (a) I’m frequently surprised by what non-average eight-year-olds can accomplish, and (b) who knows what those eight-year-olds might do when they’re sixteen or thirty-two if they’ve learned that tools are hackable too?

Goodbye WordPress

2012-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on converting this blog from WordPress to a static site generated by some custom Python scripts. Yesterday, I finally made the switch.

Everything looks pretty much the same as it did before, but things should feel a bit faster. Most importantly, it’s a lot more pleasant to write posts in the new system, so hopefully I’ll get back to blogging a bit more regularly.

If you see anything that’s broken, send me an email or let me know on Twitter.

Work As Though You Lived in the Early Days of a Better Nation

2012-01-27T22:59:47+00:00

Cam Macdonell teaches computer science at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton. Last September, he had to deliver a software engineering class for the first time. Instead of giving his students the kind of throwaway project such classes are usually built around, he put them to work on Ushahidi, a humanitarian open source project. As his end-of-course blog post shows, they can be proud both of what they did, and how well they did it. Like David Humphrey‘s course at Seneca College, or the UCOSP program that gives students from across Canada a chance to work together for course credit, this ought to be part of every undergraduate’s education.

Recovering from hard drive woes — Part III

2012-01-27T17:00:56+00:00

I woke my computer up from sleep and tried to run ssh. Surprise alligators! I encountered the odd error message “You don’t exist! go away!” It turns out that my dying hard drive had trashed some very important system files containing my computer login and password information. Trying to start up Terminal, I got the ...

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Well, That Was Weird

2012-01-26T23:29:12+00:00

It’s amazing what you can learn when you don’t have cable TV:

peaceful.com says “coming soon”.
joyful.com is a one-man software shop. At least he’s Irish.
disappointed.com tells you to get over it.
angry.com and sad.com are both for sale.
happy.com redirects to Walgreen’s pharmacy.

Thinking Through a 21st Century Replacement for PowerPoint

2012-01-26T20:05:12+00:00

Over on the Software Carpentry site, I’ve posted another set of musings on what a 21st Century learning content creation tool (i.e., a PowerPoint killer) would look like. Comments welcome…

fink08

2012-01-26T08:17:33+00:00

Given the kerfuffle over Elsevier (see Michael Nielsen’s summary of affairs), I thought it would be instructive to list the Elsevier titles which cover my field of software engineering and information systems, in case people wanted to decide for themselves whether to support this corporation with free labour.

I had some doubts about publishing this list and making my views known, since being on the editorial board for journals like these helps one’s CV. But then, at some point you have to decide whether the larger issues of open access and relevance are important to you. In any event, these venues are, I’m convinced, making it very difficult for academics like me to have meaningful impact on the practice of software engineering. If it will cost a reader 35$ to read my article, I might as well not bother. Which seems to be what the low impact factors are telling us, anyway. (I’m not sure why I linked to them …)

Journal of Systems and Software – IF 1.277 – Editor Hans Van Vliet
Science of Computer Programming – IF 1.282
Information and Software Technology – IF 1.507 – Editor Claes Wohlin
International Journal of Human Computer Studies – IF 1.600
Advances in Engineering Software – IF 1.004
Applied Computing and Informatics – no impact factor, run by the King Saud University (see Crooked Timber for more on Saudi universities).
Data & Knowledge Engineering – IF 1.717
Information and Management – IF 2.627
Information Systems – IF 1.595
International Journal of Human Computer Studies – IF 1.600

Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(II): Don’t sell to developers

2012-01-26T07:21:25+00:00

(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog) This is the second in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up giving up for free due to the lack of clients. In the previous post, I recommended to

What are the main challenged in enterprise security?

2012-01-24T23:18:00+00:00

Talking to a senior partner at one of the big four professional services firms, I was pointed out that a weblog that is not getting updated, is better to be let go.
There was actually a good advice in there, and made me think of a series of daily short notes that I was taking during preparation for job hunting in the area of enterprise security and risk:

In the last two months of studying and preparations, I looked at very diverse changes happening in the security area. If I was asked in a job interview "what are going to be main challenges in enterprise security"? I would say business models and enterprises are changing fast, the main change drivers are mobility, cloud computing, and social networking. I will get back to those, but before that, I need to mention organizations are not the only group changing. Attackers are getting seriously sophisticated (examples: Anonymous hacking group, LilzSec, etc.) They are organized, goal-oriented, and not only opportunistic, but actually have exact plans and targets.

Those big changes I listed above are business enablers, can help security, or can open the doors of organizations to critical risks. The use of portable devices and mobiles, outside the traditional enterprise network perimeter is now a norm. Mobile applications have not yet face huge security breaches, while what I have understood is already mobile devices are less secure (no physical security, no secure data storage, to malware protection, poor keyboard and thus shorter passwords showing up again, lack of multi-user on each device, and easier phishing on mobile browsing). Web 2.0 applications and social networking is now part of many firms' daily routines. Many enterprises have not actually thought about the security implications and threats of their employees chit chatting on Facebook and updating work-related statuses. Cloud computing is exciting, promising, and is going to help firms bounce services and computations on someone else's machines, but have organizations thoroughly analyzed who is going to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of data and computations they bounce off on the cloud?

Seems a DMZ and nicely configured firewalls are not enough anymore. What I understood, out there in the wild, Data Loss Prevention products, Security Event and Information Management tools and Identity Management Solutions are the hot hot areas of investment, beyond what is already being spent on traditional network security. I think to the must-to-have list, we need to add: training and awareness, policy development, enforcement, management, and compliance, and well as routine vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and risk assessment.

21st Century Textbooks

2012-01-24T14:49:26+00:00

Apple’s announcement, blah blah blah—I think Audrey Watters’ “Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-revolution” sums it up best. So what should a “textbook” for a webified world look like? David Andrade’s description of what he does in his physics course, and Frank Noschese’s “Vision for a Physics iBook” are much better answers.

A Better Solution to the Final Problem

2012-01-23T18:54:08+00:00

I enjoyed the first three episodes of BBC’s Sherlock. I was disappointed by how episode 4 (the first of the newest trilogy) resolved episode 3′s hangover, but immediately forgave the writers as A Scandal in Belgravia unfolded. But then came episode 5, The Hounds of Baskerville, which was frankly awful.

So it all came down to episode 6, The Reichenbach Fall. Good opening, great development, tension steadily ratcheting up, and then bam, the final three minutes ruined it all. Completely. It was completely implausible, inconsistent with what we’d seen of the characters up to that point—frankly, it almost had me expecting Moriarty to reveal that he was Sherlock’s long-lost twin brother.

My ending is below the fold. Enjoy.

[Scene: Moriarty and Sherlock are on the roof. Sherlock's standing on the edge; Moriarty is explaining it all to him, and then Sherlock grins and turns around and Moriarty says, "What? What did I miss?" And instead of that utter crap about "you have to kill yourself or your friends will die", the dialog goes something like this:

Moriarty: What? What did I miss?

Sherlock [plucks a camera off the wall, identical to the one he found in his apartment earlier]: I don’t know what you missed, but the police won’t have missed anything. Or the the people watching online—we decided to do a live feed. [throws camera away]

Moriarty [furious]: Your friends are dead! Dead, do you hear? My people are going to—

Sherlock [laughs]: Your people? Did you really think that if you hired a bunch of international assassins, none of them would turn out to be working for my brother? Jim, Jim, Jim—the ones who aren’t Mycroft’s people are dead themselves.

[cut to: an old lady from Sherlock's Homeless Network shuffling along the street past one of the assassins, then whirling around and stabbing him with a knitting needle.]

[cut to: Mrs. Hudson introducing her "nephew" to the large bald assassin who was doing renos for her. As the LBA turns around, the nephew picks up a hammer from the toolbox and hefts it.]

[cut back to: incredulous, furious face of Jim Moriarty]

Sherlock: Oh, poor Jim. Poor, poor Jim. All this time, you thought you were playing a game with me. Well let me tell you something. Mycroft and I solved the final problem years ago. We figured out how to cure boredom. [leans forward] All this time, you’ve been our game.

Moriarty: I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you!

[Sherlock, laughing, turns to go. Moriarty howls with rage, rushes forward, grabs him. The two hurtle over the edge of the building. Freeze frame. Fade out.]

Welcome to Gravenhurst

2012-01-23T13:49:54+00:00

OK, so on the one hand we have online education growing by leaps and zounds, until anyone who really wants to do a quality university degree can do so from the comfort and security of their parents’ basement. On the other hand, we have the quite natural desire of 18-year-olds to get out of said basement and hang out with each other. What can we do to help them?

Welcome to Gravenhurst, a small town in the heart of cottage country two hours north of Toronto. (I could equally well say “welcome to Bracebridge” or to Parry Sound or to any of a dozen other places, but I’ll stick to Gravenhurst for now.) Every summer, Gravenhurst is filled with vacationing urbanites who either own, rent, or visit the lakeside cottages around it. They buy stuff at its stores, they drink in its pubs, they keep its summer theater alive—and then they go home, usually around Labor Day.

Would it be possible to create a centralized campus for decentralized learning in a place like Gravenhurst? I.e., could someone build a few dorms and labs and a gym to give students the social zing of living in a college town, and just skip all that stuff about professors and lectures and what-not? Students would take courses online from any provider (or mix of providers) they wanted, and get their degree from the course provider (which could be a big-name school like Stanford, Oxford, or whatever). When it came time to dissect a frog or write an exam, though, they’d pay a small fee to their campus provider for facilities, supervision, or invigilation [1].

I think it makes sense from the town’s point of view: students would be arriving just as tourists left, and leaving as tourists arrived, so it would even out the town merchants’ cash flow. It might not appeal to students who crave the bright lights of the big city, but I think there are plenty of others who’d leap at the chance to be a five minute walk from boating, canoeing, hiking, and the rest of the great outdoors. (And of course you could set up a physical campus for virtual courses in a big city, too, it would just cost more, and you’d have a harder time getting the host city to think you were really important.)

So: is anyone already doing this? If so, I’d welcome pointers…

[1] I actually think that invigilation—i.e., exam supervision—is the key to this whole plan. Once online learning really matters, we’re going to see cheat-for-hire services appear (“Give me $50 and your login ID, I’ll write the calculus exam for you.”). Learning providers who want to maintain the value of their degrees or badges will need ways to prevent fraud, so there’ll be a need for people like notary publics (notaries public?) to provide such assurances.

Code Generation 2012 – Programme available

2012-01-23T13:01:02+00:00

You can now check the very interesting talks awaiting for you at this year’s edition of the Code Generation conference, the “leading event on the practical applications of Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD). … This reputation has been built up by attracting industry-recognised experts to share their experiences at the conference.” If you enjoyed this post

First 50 terms in the MDE Glossary

2012-01-22T16:04:39+00:00

The first milestone of our MDE Glossary has been achieved this week. Slow but steady, the first 50 terms are now in. Many more are still missing but we’ll go there. By the way, the order in which I add terms in the Glossary is completely random. The first 50 are neither the most important

We Have Nothing To Give Them

2012-01-21T19:00:36+00:00

Sylvia Jane Cotton (née Wilson), November 7, 1964 – January 21, 2012

I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
— Virginia Woolf

By Any Means Necessary

2012-01-20T03:33:38+00:00

I was passionate about politics when I was in my twenties, mostly because I was desperate for something to be passionate about. (I had friends who felt as strongly about Hibs and jazz as I did about apartheid and nuclear weapons, for much the same reason.) And while I’d never actually been in any “direct action”, and would have been absolutely useless in a riot, I often quoted Malcolm X’s phrase, “By any means necessary.” I even used the whole thing as a mail signature for a while:

We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

I didn’t really mean it, though. There were things I simply wouldn’t do, and right at the top of that list was “compromise”. Like most angry young men, I’d rather fail than find common ground, because after all, the point wasn’t actually to change the world—the point was to be trying to, to be preaching at the indifferent, and above all, to be angry.

But here I am, almost 49, and I’ve come to realize that compromise isn’t just the only way to make progress—it’s the right way too. Science and democracy both depend on the most difficult of virtues: humility. Both only work if people regularly say, “I might be wrong,” and actually believe it, rather than just saying it to clear their throats before adding, “But…” I think I know how best to teach certain things, but I might be wrong, and people who believe others ways are better might be right. I think I know what basic ideas people need to grasp in order to make the web their own, but I might be wrong about that too. Sticking to my guns might give me a crusading adrenaline rush, but if I really want to change the world, I need to accept that people I disagree with—people I think are part of the problem—are (mostly) sincere and intelligent, that their opinions are based on experiences I haven’t had, and that they almost certainly have insights and ideas that would complement or improve on mine.

This is why I find myself off in a corner in many of the discussions about teaching programming to the masses. Like many of the people who are trying to do this outside traditional classroom settings, I believe that:

knowing how the web works is as important today as knowing how contracts or electoral democracy work;
our educational system, and the models of learning it assumes, are all badly broken; and
if properly used, the web can help us fix or replace them.

However, I think these things are independent of one another. More specifically, I think that we can and should try to work with—not just co-opt, but work with and learn from—teachers who are inside today’s system, even though we think that system is part of the problem. They have the hands-on experience that most of us don’t; if we’re willing to listen, they can tell us which of our seemingly-plausible ideas are going to fail when transferred to the 85% of learners who aren’t ultra-curious hard-working self-starters.

This is why I’ve asked participants in the P2PU course on teaching webcraft and programming to free-range learners to think through the IES report on organizing instruction and study to improve student learning. This is why I think that we should be going to every relevant conference we can find, rather than setting up our own events. Yes, it’s fun and invigorating to hang out with fellow revolutionaries, but remember Frank’s Law:

If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you’re really in solidarity with all your friends, and you’re enjoying it, you’re probably not advancing the cause very much, because you’re spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.

And this is why I’m trying to hear what people like Larry Cuban, Scott Gray, Mark Guzdial, and Audrey Watters are saying, and to go and meet them on their home ground (physically as well as virtually). Humility doesn’t come naturally to me—just ask my parents or my former students—but if we really want to change the world, it’s as necessary as courage.

Telemachus, I am your father

2012-01-19T17:00:19+00:00

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — a retelling of the Trojan War from the point of view of Queen Penelope — is currently playing at the Buddies In Bad Times theatre. This run has been well cast and choreographed and I’m tempted to go watch it for a second time here. Of course, the whole point ...

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CloudMDE 2012 – 1st Int. Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering on and for the Cloud

2012-01-19T09:40:52+00:00

The goal of this CloudMDE workshop I’m co-organizing (together with Richard Paige, Marco Brambilla, Marsha Chechik and Parastoo Mohagheghi) is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in MDE or cloud computing, who are interested in identifying, developing or building on existing synergies. We aim to identify opportunities for using MDE to support the development

New OCL version available: OCL 2.3.1

2012-01-18T21:51:22+00:00

Two years after the previous version (OCL 2.2), the OMG has now released the new OCL version: OCL 2.3.1. What’s new in this version? Well, not much, only a bunch of minor issues/typos that needed to be fixed. In fact, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. A standard that basically

Our First Challenges

2012-01-17T16:16:03+00:00

The P2PU course I’m leading on teaching programming to free-range learners [1] officially kicked off this week. The first two challenges are up. First, compare the way you teach (or the way you’ve been taught) to the research-based best practices in this IES report. Second, describe who you’re trying to help. It’s already clear that participants are coming at these questions from many different angles—I’m looking forward to learning more.

[1] “Free-range” meaning “anything other than a conventional classroom format”. I like the term because it allows us to call people sitting in lecture halls listening to someone talk at the front of the room as “battery-farmed learners”.

Interaction Flow Modeling Language RFP is now out

2012-01-17T12:14:37+00:00

OMG has now issued the official request for proposal (RFP) for IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language), a domain-specific modeling language for expressing the content, user interaction and control behaviour of the front-end of applications. You can learn more about the standardization process of IFML here and read my view on the language in this previous

fink08

2012-01-16T19:37:11+00:00

Here is the text of an email I sent to the President of the ACM, Alain Chesnais (achesnais@acm.org) and the director of the ACM’s lobby effort, Cameron Wilson (cameron.wilson@acm.org). For more context, there is a good article in the Guardian.

I am writing to express my concern that the ACM is tacitly supporting the Research Works Act. I have read the blog post [1] of M. Chesnais, the ACM president, and to me it reads much like he is an ostrich putting its head in the sand. This act (and others like SOPA) will have major negative implications for research in the computer science disciplines.

That the ACM is international, or that the President is not American, is immaterial. Elsevier is likewise ‘international’, and that has not stopped it from making major financial efforts to influence this legislation. The reality is that US policy and the US market is so important that it has international significance.

I would like the ACM and its affiliates to publicly disavow the Association of American Publishers by cancelling membership. I would also like a public statement to the effect that the provisions of the RWA are anti-science and anti-progress – in short, contravene (at least) Article 2 of the Constitution, which states the ACM’s purpose is to foster the “open interchange of information”.

This issue is so important that neutrality is not acceptable.

Neil Ernst
Member

[1] http://blog.acm.org/president/?p=67

So, Greg, What Are You Up To These Days?

2012-01-14T02:15:15+00:00

I’m glad you asked:

Today was my last day at Side Effects; thanks to a grant from the Sloan Foundation, I start work on Software Carpentry again on Monday.
I’m running an open course on how to teach programming to free-range learners over at P2PU, which also starts on Monday.
Volume 2 of The Architecture of Open Source Applications is coming along nicely—Amy Brown is doing her usual great job of organizing, editing, and managing reviews, and we hope to have it on the shelves (and the web, and your tablet) in April.
Ellen Hsiang and I collected some great feedback on And Then… just before Christmas, and we’re going to try to find time to make some revisions in the next couple of months. I haven’t written any fiction since last February, but Sadie has threatened to get me a desk in a shared workspace two mornings a week as a birthday present to shame me into putting my head down and actually finishing one of the novels I’ve got on the go.

It’s going to be a busy few months…

Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends (follow-up)

2012-01-12T17:00:42+00:00

This is a quick follow-up to my previous post Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends.

It turns out Path is social networking service that limits users to 150 friends.

Ode to Joy on a Punching Bag

2012-01-12T14:59:25+00:00

The Internet of Things is already here: it’s just strangely distributed. (I’d probably exercise more if I had one of these, and yeah, a gym full of them would be cacophonous, but imagine getting your whole aerobics class to punch four-part harmony?)

Language Workbench Challenge 2012

2012-01-12T12:47:22+00:00

The list of participants in this year’s edition of the Language Workbench Challenge is now available. The web page also has the results of the inaugural edition last year, with a very interesting matrix comparing the different language workbenches that participated. For sure, LWC is the best place to get an overview of current language

Sloan Foundation Grant for Software Carpentry

2012-01-12T11:18:21+00:00

I’m very pleased to announce that the Sloan Foundation has generously agreed to fund six months of work by Software Carpentry and the Mozilla Foundation. You can read more on the Software Carpentry blog; it’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it.

How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system?

2012-01-11T18:01:24+00:00

I’ve been meaning to do this calculation for ages, and finally had an excuse today, as I need it for the first year course I’m teaching on climate change. The question is: how much energy are we currently adding to the earth system due to all those greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere? In the [...]

Cache-as-cache-can

2012-01-11T17:00:00+00:00

Thailand was tragically flooded last year. The number of surprise alligators in the region also likely increased. As home to much of the world’s production capacity for hard drives, the shutdown of facilities caused the cost per gigabyte stored on magnetic hard drives to balloon to prices not seen since the middle of the last ...

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SimpleOCL tool

2012-01-09T20:04:07+00:00

SimpleOCL is a new addition to our OCL tool list. SimpleOCL is a proof-of-concept implementation of the OCL standard, built on top of theEclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)and EMFText. It started as an embeddable OCL implementation for inclusion in transformation languages for the EMF Transformation Virtual Machine (EMFTVM). EMFTVM allows integrated execution of heterogeneous model transformation languages. EMFTVM is

I Have a Cunning Plan (or, Making Money by Doing Good)

2012-01-07T00:15:18+00:00

If you’ve ever posted an ad for a programmer, you’ll know just how much haystack you have to sift through to find a few needles. At least half of the people who send in resumes cannot write a simple FizzBuzz program, and filtering the ones who can is always a headache (and a big drain on a company’s technical resources, since most HR staff don’t know enough about programming to do it themselves).

Enter Stack Overflow, the premier technical Q&A site on the interweb. Lots of people spend lots of time being helpful there, and smart companies have taken notice: I know of at least two that ask applicants for their SO scores as part of the resume-screening process. My question is, could companies outsource technical interviews to SO? More specifically:

A company wants to hire someone who can do some technical task program in Django, administer a large database, whatever.
They submit their request to SO, along with the candidate’s contact info.
SO matches the request with someone who has a score over 1000 and has ticked the box saying “will interview people”.
The candidate and the interviewer rendezvous on a private portion of the SO site at an agreed time. The candidate shares her desktop with the interviewer, and they can chat voice and text.
The technical interview takes place. Everything is recorded for C’s HR department to review later.
The company pays a standard fee; SO keeps a commission, and passes the rest on to the interviewer.

Crucially, the candidate and interviewer don’t know each other’s identities: they both log in to SO to get connected, and since everything is recorded, HR will know if they gave each other a way to connect via another channel. That makes it hard (not impossible, but hard) for the two parties to conspire with each other, and that, plus a sufficiently large pool of interviewers, keeps the system trustworthy.

I’ve been interviewed this way (though I knew the identity of my interviewer), and it worked pretty well. It solves a real problem that a lot of companies face, and it gives people an incentive to keep being useful on SO (which I think is a good thing). Do you think it’s workable? Or is there a variant that would work even better?

New Trans-disciplinary Lecture Series on Climate Change

2012-01-05T03:08:26+00:00

We’re running a new weekly lecture series this term to explore different disciplinary perspectives on climate change, entitled “Collaborative Challenges for the Climate Change Research Community“, sponsored by the department of Computer Science and the Centre for Environment. Our aim is to use this as an exploration of the range of research related to climate [...]

ERCIM news on Evolving Software – Featuring MoDisco and many others

2012-01-04T00:25:06+00:00

The latest issue of ERCIM news has as special theme “Evolving Software”. As the editors say, “software evolution will always remain inevitable due to a wide variety of factors … To accommodate these change requests, the software product needs to be changed and improved on a regular basis. In parallel to this, the software process

My research on owls

2012-01-03T17:00:25+00:00

Without further ado or fanfare, I present my research to date on the subject of owls (order strigiformes of the class aves) in the form of a concise visual guide. This research was supported through the generosity of NSORC (Network of Spurious Owl-Related Content).

Jono's guide to owls

Rethinking Software Carpentry

2011-12-30T22:51:10+00:00

I’ve spent some time in the last two weeks thinking about what I’ve learned from Software Carpentry, and how to move it forward. I think a lot of the ideas apply to online learning in general; I hope you find them useful.

To Be Assimilated in French…

2011-12-26T19:45:13+00:00

The Students’ Marks Will Fall

2011-12-26T17:00:56+00:00

Last week, while picking up an exam written at an alternate time by one of my students, my brain went into music mode, as it often does. It ended up rewriting a good two verses of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All before I realized what had happened. I finished it up and, while I ...

Continue reading The Students’ Marks Will Fall

Well, I Think the Gray Makes Me Look Distinguished

2011-12-21T15:11:06+00:00

List of Executable UML tools

2011-12-21T00:58:40+00:00

It looks like Executable UML is getting increasingly popular (again) maybe because the new Executable UML standards (fuml and Alf) we have now available. Executable UML aims at defining UML models with a behavioral specification precise enough to be effectively executed. In its purest state, Executable UML eliminates the need of programming the software system.

Understanding non-linear systems: Hurricane Damage

2011-12-20T21:46:09+00:00

One of the things that strikes me about discussions of climate change, especially from those who dismiss it as relatively harmless, is a widespread lack of understanding on how non-linear systems behave. Indeed, this seems to be one of the key characteristics that separate those who are alarmed at the prospect of a warming climate [...]

Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software

2011-12-20T05:15:45+00:00

Here’s the call for papers for a workshop we’re organizing at ICSE next May: The First International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software (GREENS’2012) (In conjunction with the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012), Zurich, Switzerland, June 2-9, 2012 Important Dates: 17th February 2012 – paper submission 19th March 2012 – notification of acceptance 29th March 2012 – camera-ready 3rd June 2011 [...]

Planet DCS@UofT

He Would Have Appreciated the Irony

Very high customer acquisition cost for MDD tools

Going west

Green Revolving Funds

Another sign of the death of Science in America

pywebuml – create UML class diagrams from Java, C# and python files

INRIA Postdoc position in MDE and Cloud Computing available

Ultrabook fad (follow up)

On publishing the “obvious”

Free and online Model Thinking course

Software Carpentry in Ninety-Five Seconds

Bullshit, Appropriation, and Technology in Education

On Algorithmic Thinking

Old Soup in New Bowls

Creating DSLs, a word of caution

I Hope Someone Has Already Built This

Visit our course blog

Girls in a Tech World

A Browser-Based Programming Tool That’s Better Than Many Desktop Tools

Goodbye WordPress

Work As Though You Lived in the Early Days of a Better Nation

Recovering from hard drive woes — Part III

Well, That Was Weird

Thinking Through a 21st Century Replacement for PowerPoint

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Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(II): Don’t sell to developers

What are the main challenged in enterprise security?

21st Century Textbooks

A Better Solution to the Final Problem

Welcome to Gravenhurst

Code Generation 2012 – Programme available

First 50 terms in the MDE Glossary

We Have Nothing To Give Them

By Any Means Necessary

Telemachus, I am your father

CloudMDE 2012 – 1st Int. Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering on and for the Cloud

New OCL version available: OCL 2.3.1

Our First Challenges

Interaction Flow Modeling Language RFP is now out

fink08

So, Greg, What Are You Up To These Days?

Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends (follow-up)

Ode to Joy on a Punching Bag

Language Workbench Challenge 2012

Sloan Foundation Grant for Software Carpentry

How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system?

Cache-as-cache-can

SimpleOCL tool

I Have a Cunning Plan (or, Making Money by Doing Good)

New Trans-disciplinary Lecture Series on Climate Change

ERCIM news on Evolving Software – Featuring MoDisco and many others

My research on owls

Rethinking Software Carpentry

Top 10 modeling posts of the year

To Be Assimilated in French…

The Students’ Marks Will Fall

Well, *I* Think the Gray Makes Me Look Distinguished

List of Executable UML tools

Understanding non-linear systems: Hurricane Damage

Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software

Well, I Think the Gray Makes Me Look Distinguished