Software, research, and leadership
Something to do with all the mandarins from our tree – a Hoegaarden-inspired mandarin-and-coriander wheat beer. Cooper’s wheat beer kit, light dry malt, peels from 6 mandarins, and 2.5 tblsp coriander seed. (All a guess – let’s see how it turns out.) O.G. is 1.040.
Marek Kowalkiewicz from the SAP Research in Brisbane just last week won the international “Demo Jam” competition in the SAP TechEd event in LA, for the “Innoboard” software. Innoboard is an augmented reality technology, which lets distributed teams interactively share whiteboards that mix projected images and physical sticky post-it notes. All using the low-cost iphone …
Robin Milner gave a presentation “Is Informatics a Science?” at a conference at ENS, 10 December 2007, where he discussed the challenge of better understanding relationships between models in computer science – how they “explain” (specify, refine, implement, abstract, realise) each other. I don’t believe he captured these thoughts in a journal or conference paper, …
Stuff has started mysteriously disappearing from my desktop. I had installed Fences, so thought that was the culprit, and uninstalled it. But the problem keeps happening, and it turns out that Windows 7 is causing my pain. Windows runs a weekly maintenance task that deletes all your shortcuts if it thinks you have more than …
What is software architecture? There have been many definitions. Here’s mine. First let’s consider some of the earlier definitions. SEI has a huge collection of definitions on its website, including “classic” definitions, bibliographic definitions (stops in 1996?), “modern” definitions, and definitions submitted from the community. Perry and Wolf (1992) have perhaps the most classic definition, …
After a busy year, I’ve finally had a holiday. Mostly at home, but we also went to the spectacular Jenolan Caves for a couple of days. Before I head back to work again, I’ve time to start another beer. It’s been more than six months since my last batch (which worked out OK, but has …
Just over four weeks ago, I started brewing a Coopers Wheat Beer kit, with Safbrew WB-06 Wheat Brewing Yeast, and a kilo of dried wheat malt, all from the Asquith homebew shop a little way up the road. Two weeks in the primary, racked for two more weeks for bottling. It’s been a little chilly …
Just heard in a QESP webinar on Software Innovation in Australia from Julian Day of the Australia Consensus Awards: In business, invention is the conversion of cash into ideas, but innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. Nice. I see this is also on wikipedia. I wonder what’s the original source for this quote?
I need to create some simple project schedules at work. I used to have MS Project installed, but when I upgraded to Windows 7, my new SOE didn’t have MS Project. So, I googled for open source project management tools. I remember doing this years ago, and didn’t find anything compelling. Now, there’s lots of …
Researchers “stand on the shoulders of giants“, which in practice means reading a lot of academic papers and reports. Lots. You not only want to read them, but also cite them in papers you write, search them, and organise them by whatever topics you’re investigating. How do you do that? When I was a PhD …