Archive for September, 2007

A look around the University of Essex (from above)

Posted in Computing, Education, Research, Sabbatical on September 28th, 2007


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For those in a serious need of something to do, I hereby provide you with an ariel view of the University of Essex, complete with places like my office marked on it. Exciting, eh?

It was fairly fun to do, actually. I should do one where I lay out my entire morning and evening commutes. Then I could post various photos along the way and really send you to sleep!

Some have reported that this map doesn’t show up for you. Others seem to see it fine. If it fails for you feel free to leave a comment letting me know what browser and version you’re using, and I’ll try to figure out what’s up. Thanks!

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English creepy-crawlies

Posted in Family, Gardening, Sabbatical on September 26th, 2007

Monsters in the dark
As well as taking endless photographs of flowers over here, I’ve also had the opportunity to capture some wee beasties, mostly spiders and their unwilling companions. The fellow on the right, however, is actually a snail up close. It turns out that the house in Wivenhoe was host to quite the army of snails, which would come out at night and (literally) crawl all over the house. No idea what they were searching for, but it was pretty weird to come back at night after a session of internet in the office to find them all over the front window of the sitting room.

Not exactly the friendliest of smiles
The Wivenhoe house was also home (right at the end of our stay there) to this nifty spider. One evening I just noticed it hanging there near the ceiling in the kitchen, so I of course took a ton of pictures of it. (Conveniently, it just sat there posing through the entire session.) It disappeared a day or two later, but WeatherGirl found that it had moved (for inscrutably arachnid reasons) over to the front of the clothes washing machine.

Final struggle
Given that I have no real history of photographing spiders, I rather assumed I was done with the whole spidie thing for the moment, but ’twas not to be true. In one of my first walks around our apartment complex, I ran across another spider, with a large, complex web that quite obviously successful at trapping meals. There were several “finished” critters in evidence, and the unfortunate fellow to the right still struggling weakly (and I assume futilely) against its bonds. There was a light breeze, which made it harder to photograph up close than it had been in the kitchen. At one point I accidentally bumped the web, and the spider scurried from its throne in the center of the web up to the top, where it adopted a ball-like post and watched over its domain. Not sure whether it thought I was lunch or a Bad Guy, but it never did come down again while I was there.

In fairness, however, as cool as our monsters have been, they don’t hold a candle to the amazing sightings of Cory and Mrs. Q among their many adventures in these fair isles. They have some really excellent photos from their trip, and a visit is definitely recommended!

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Love (Squashed tomatoes and stew)

Posted in Art, Family, Photography, Sabbatical on September 25th, 2007

Love (Squashed tomatoes and stew)
A little late on this, but no surprise there, eh? Sunday was my lovely wife’s birthday, which we celebrated with a nice, quiet day together at home.

One definite (and excellent!) sign that we’re getting settled here is that she’s pulled together some art supplies and begun to litter the apartment with wonderful bits of drying color and pots of paper soaking in things like tea.

I took a bunch of photos of some of her recent work, but much of it didn’t turn out very well (not enough light). The ideas were good, though, so I may try again soon.

In the meantime, here’s a bit that I liked and a sentiment I can’t argue with.

Happy birthday to you!
Squashed tomatoes and stew,
Bread and butter in the gutter,
Happy birthday to you!

Love you dear :-)

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Two scotch eggs and a jar of Marmite

Posted in Family, Sabbatical, Travels on September 24th, 2007

One scotch egg (No jar of Marmite)
I don’t think I’d ever had a scotch egg before, so when Sub-Evil Boy saw them in the grocery store and asked about them, we got a few to try. All through the experience I kept thinking of the splendiferous Half Man Half Biscuit song "24 hour garage people", with the bit:

Two scotch eggs
    and a jar of Marmite
Two scotch eggs
    and a jar of Marmite
Two scotch eggs
    and a jar of Marmite
What sandwiches have you got?

I enjoyed the scotch egg in a "Oh, my arteries are really not happy about this" sort of way. He didn’t even get that far. I doubt we’ll try this again, but I’m glad to have added it to my culinary experiences. (For those who aren’t familiar with such things, a scotch egg is essentially a boiled egg in a casing of breaded sausage-y meat - pork in this case.)

The tomatoes came from a local green grocer and were absolutely gorgeous. Sweet, almost like a piece of good fruit. Having those with my sandwich at lunch as been a real treat :-).

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JOCP! We can recycle shiny round discs!

Posted in Computing, Environment on September 19th, 2007

'Tins' by Flawka

An e-mail from the fine folks at Brainwashed promoting an upcoming release included a link to CDRecyclingCenter.org. Apparently you can send these people you dead discs (and cases) free of charge (but you have to pay shipping) and they’ll process them for recycling. They separate out the metals, yielding a plastic that can be used in things like automobiles. (Of course I don’t really want to think about the outgassing, do I?)

I had no idea that we could recycle CDs, DVDs, etc. Pretty cool, eh? Now I’ll have to see if I can get UMM to start collecting discs for recycling, ’cause I bet we throw a lot away…

Thanks to Flawka for the photo.

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A different kind of computing curriculum? - Thoughts on an interview with Smalltalk Dave

Posted in Computing, Education, Science, Web development on September 17th, 2007

Teamwork
I finally got around to listening to this interview with Smalltalk Dave Thomas (as opposed to Ruby’s Dave Thomas) from the Agile Toolkit Podcast. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this puppy, and curriculum design would be a totally different animal if more academics were listening to people like Thomas.

He’s clearly a big fan of functional languages and tools

It’s really too bad we didn’t actually keep that course that taught those students functional programming and make them see Haskell or Scheme.

and also argues that JavaScript (a) is huge (in small part because Google just uses it so much, and so well) and (b) is essentially Scheme with a different (nastier, in his opinion) syntax. We teach a little JavaScript in an introductory non-majors course, but I think we almost entirely don’t touch it after that. Hmmm… Maybe we need to look into that.

Also, and not surprisingly given his Smalltalk history, he’s big into duck typing (like Smalltalk and Ruby) and not a big fan of heavyweight static typing. I twitch a little when I hear this stuff because static typing has always been a big deal in my universe, especially in teaching. An interesting take on this, though, is that

Test first really does the same thing as a typechecker, and in fact it does a little more.

My graduate experience at UT was very much a formalist experience, with lots of emphasis on formal methods and static types. Clearly there’s an alternative model here where serious test driven development provides the safety and correctness. You obviously need the discipline to make this work, but you arguably need discipline to do any sort of interesting software development well. Taking that as your premise, however, would lead to a very different curriculum model than most traditional arrangements.

What would a curriculum look like if you took agile methods and test driven development as your key premises from the very beginning. If all the early assignments were all unit tests that need to be passed? (The students would be writing their own tests for later assignments.) If everything was done in pairs/teams? If you emphasized dynamic tools and languages, using heavy tests to keep the quality high?

I’ll leave everyone with this very cool (for someone who teaches this stuff) line:

There is going to be an acute shortage of talented software people.

We all (and I mean everyone in our society) have come to seriously depend on software, so we all need talented people to be doing that work. This means we need to be encouraging bright young people to consider software development and computer science as an important and exciting option. We need to provide curricula that challenge, excite, and prepare them. I think we’re doing a good job at Morris, but could do better. Unfortunately, I think there are still way too schools that are stuck somewhere in the mid-80’s (”Hey, objects are actually pretty cool!”).

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Gosh, but I love trains

Posted in Photography, Sabbatical, Travels on September 15th, 2007

Coming into the station #1

I really do love riding on trains. I also really like city buses, especially double deckers - I’m a sucker for sitting in the front up top and gawking at the world. For longer trips, though, trains just rule. The space, comfort, and ability to get up and move around some are all just splendiforous. All of which makes it super sad that trains are all but dead in the States, and all the more fun to get to ride them when we’re over in Europe. I’ve had three happy train rides since we got here: The return from Ipswich after dropping off the rental car, and to and from London from my day at the British Museum with Cory and Mary. (The photo above is from the Colchester Railway Station while I was waiting for my train to London.)

The sad thing is that the rail prices have reached a point here, where for three of us it’s often cheaper to rent a car than to take the train. Big sigh. Still, I’m sure we’ll take the train whenever we go to London, ’cause no one in their right mind would want to drive there if they could help it.

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Departed this life

Posted in Photography, Sabbatical, Travels on September 14th, 2007

Departed this life

There are several churches (both new and old) in the town centre of Colchester, and at least two of them have been deconsecrated and put to other uses. One, rather amusingly, houses a natural history museum; I haven’t visited it yet, but intend to. The other is now the Colchester Arts Centre; we haven’t attended an event there yet, but they let us wander around inside one day and take some photos.

The photo above is from the church (which I think is still a church) opposite the library.

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A very long distance dedication

Posted in Computing, Family, Music, Radio, Sabbatical on September 13th, 2007

Modulatio(n)

I just heard Sage Francis’s excellent “Got up this morning”. This is not, in and of itself, terribly surprising, since I really love the song, and Sub-Evil Boy gave me the album (Human the death dance) for my birthday a few months ago. The cool part here was that I was listening to KUMM from 25% of the way around the world (pretty cool for a station with less broadcast wattage than my computer is using), and I requested it via the wonders of IM.

Wow. That was fun.

Oh - I guess I need to do the dedication part. So I’ll send that one out to Sub-Evil, both for giving me the CD and for being a cool song writing and performance partner.

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Different hairstyles (Under one roof)

Posted in Family, Photography, Sabbatical, Travels on September 12th, 2007

Different hairstyles (Under one roof)

We regularly pass these doorways on our walks into the town centre. I really like the painting on the brickwork over the openings.

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