Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
Tomorrow is Museum Day. What is Museum Day? Started by the Smithsonian Institution, it is a day when a number of museums across the country offer free admission to visitors who present the Museum Day Card available on the page I just linked to. For those in Western PA, the Carnegie is participating, so this is a great opportunity to check it out if you haven’t been before.
New Knitty! New Knitty! Curl up with a cup of coffee and plan your projects for the next couple of months! (That’s what I’m doing!) Ivy is a gorgeous wrap sweater with amazing cable details at the waist and cuffs. On the sock front, Red Herring have a nice herringbone pattern and is the pattern from this collection I’m most likely to actually make. Little slip of a thing is a great-looking felted bag that – very cool – only uses one strand of yarn throughout but supposedly still has fairly robust structure. Intolerable cruelty is also drawing my attention, … Continue reading New Knitty!
David Brin laments the lack of simple built-in programming environments on personal comptuters [via Slashdot]. I too remember learning to program on my Apple IIe – if you turned on the computer without a programmed disk in the drive, you fell into BASIC, and I copied many listigs out of magaziines or books and played around with their functionality. Brin is entirely right – this type of built-in, no-fuss programming environment got a lot of us started. Now, there are still command-line options. My programming students download Java off the Sun website and compile and run from the DOS prompt, … Continue reading Not BASIC Enough
The latest Craigslist kerfluffle described here at Slashdot reminds me of the case from about a year and a half ago of someone posting their chat sessions with a plagiarist soliciting them for an essay. In both cases, you have people assuming that their one-on-one conversations will be kept private and sharing information with a complete stranger that they would not want made public. Clearly, this is not a nice thing to do. I think it is also unethical – unlike the plagiarism case where the recipient of the advances was able to check that such behavior was prohibited at … Continue reading On the internet,, everybody knows you’re a dog.
The latest post at India, Ink about using templates in document formatting software made me feel a little guilty, but reminded me why I actually miss LaTeX a little bit. I really don’t understand styles and templates in MSWord, which I used to format my most recent couple of papers, and while it is nice to throw together a handout without having to wrestle with LaTeX, I missed its clarity of structure when dealing with sub-sub-sections and captioning figures and including citations (BibTeX, I miss you so….) The point at that we ought to learn to use our tools is … Continue reading Design of Text Documents
My most recently completed knitting project is this beaded mohair shawl, my first attempt at knitting with beads. I followed the “Patagonian Night Sky Shawl” pattern from Knit and Crochet with Beads by Lily Chen, though I included more repeats than the book called for since I wanted a slightly larger shawl. the yarn was a remaindered machine knitting cone that I got cheap a few years ago and had been looking for a purpose for; the beads are iridescent black glass beads – see the detail photo below. It turns out that knitting with beads is fairly easy, though … Continue reading
It’s almost become a cliche to say that we have so much information now that our biggest challenge is finding the relevant pieces, not making sense of them. And this is a fairly representative article cheerleading for the new technologies that will help with data search, focusing on data mining and the construction of a federated solution that can normalize across very different data sources with different base formats. But this is also a representative article in the misleading way that it blithely says what technologies will allow us to do, with no discussion of where we are now on … Continue reading Data Boom