ATS Blog

The O'Reilly Radar has an entry this morning about FOSS4G 2006. That's the Free and Open Software for Geoinformatics 2006 conference, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

It looks like the conference is sharing lots of information, streams of some portions of the conference, from their web site.

It looks like interesting stuff!

I am a Web 2.0 skeptic. There's more enthusiasm than reality out there right now, and while I think it's important to have a picture of what's possible, I step back when I see proponents floating off with the hype.

That said, it's difficult to keep up with everything that's going on out there in the socially connected web. Web2.0List seems to be an efficient way to track what's going on. The site is a list of sites that embody one or more aspects of the Web 2.0 ideal.

One site they mention is mynoteIT, a place that students can use to automatically save and share their notes. Of course, all the usual suspects (Flikr, Skype, del.icio.us, Technorati) are there too. So it's a good index to watch. And it wouldn't be Web 2.0 if they didn't have their own social bits - comments for entries, ratings and a tag cloud.

All they need is an RSS feed!

I'm reading a book right now, Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. The book was recommended to me as a good explanation of the two primary approaches to software development: plan-driven methods and agile computing methods.

While I've got most of the book still ahead, I wanted to share the authors' definitions:

• Plan-driven methods are characterized by a systematic engineering approach to software that carefully adheres to specific processes in moving software through a series of representations from requirements to finished code. There is a concern for completeness of documentation at every step of the way so that thorough verification of each representation may be accomplished after the fact. The original tendency was to view the development cycle as a waterfall from the concept through to the end product. More recently, incremental and evolutionary processes have been adopted, but still with strong documentation and traceability mandates across requirements, design, and code.
• In general, agile methods are very lightweight processes that employ short iterative cycles; actively involve users to establish, prioritize, and verify requirements; and rely on tacit knowledge within a team as opposed to documentation. A truly agile method must include all of the following attributes: iterative (several cycles), incremental (not deliver the entire product at once), self-organizing (teams determine the best way to handle work), and emergence (processes, principles, work structures are recognized during the project rather than predetermined). Anything less is a "lightened defined process," although such processes can exhibit considerable agility.

So which practice do you think we use?

Actually, it's not much of a surprise that we embrace the agile approach; what's nice is how much we seem to have adopted agile techniques without formally studying agile methods. The book goes on to list several agile computing concepts. Does this one sound like anyone we know:

Pair programming: A style of programming in which two programmers work side by side at one computer, continually collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code, or test.

All in all the book is fairly interesting. I'm hoping to find further confirmation of our practices and perhaps a few new tricks we might employ.

I came across this list of Writing and Publishing Portals in the latest issue of Teaching & Learning. The magazine is primarily focused on primary education, but I find at least one article interesting in each issue.

The latest issue of the Richmond Alumni Magazine features a cover story entitled "Professor Tough Love", a collection of profiles of some of our faculty who have reputations for being tough. It's an interesting read. I particularly enjoyed the profile of Teryl Givens, having taken a class with him many years ago.

The article is a timely one, as PETE is sponsoring a lunch on October 5 on the subject of "What Makes a Course Rigorous?". Joanne Ciulla, featured in the article, will be one of the presenters at the session.

Richmond Alumni Magazine concludes the article by saying "We designed this list to be illustrative, not comprehensive. Tell us about your top choice for tough-love professor. Send letters to krhodes@richmond.edu or mail them to Karl Rhodes, University Communications, Maryland Hall, University of Richmond, VA 23173. We’ll include some of your tough-love stories here in the online magazine." So if you've got any suggestions for tough-love professors, be sure to send them in!