The Third Bit

It’s Less Funny When It’s Your Life

A couple of days ago, Steve Yegge posted a sort-of funny piece to his blog about Wikileaks leaking the source code of 5000 open source Java projects by making all modifiers ‘public’ and all classes and members non-’final’. One mock-quote in it was:

If people could keep using the older, more convenient APIs I made for them, then why…would they use my newer, ridiculously complicated ones? It boggles the imagination.

In response, a friend of mine who works for a major bank said that he just had to explain to a new Java programmer why:

1. In Java, you have to use java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar and java.sql.Date
2. java.util.Date has a getYear() which needs you to add 1900 to the year (because that was reasonable to somebody)
3. Months are 0 based, but days of the month are not.
4. Calendar.get() uses YEAR, MONTH and DATE to get year month and day. Because you know, I always think of describing the date with dates. It’s recursive. Or circular. It’s something.
5. Even with all three dates, you’ll still end up getting nothing done, because you can’t compare dates. So go just download this open source library instead.
6. And finally, now you have opensource, so fill out this security deviation form for the bank.

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I Could Use Your Help With Javascript

Details on the Software Carpentry blog, but basically I need a simple folding display for code to do faded examples.

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XKCD on University Web Sites

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Interview with David Wallace

CivSource has posted an interview with David Wallace, the City of Toronto’s CIO, about open data. I’m really pleased to see things are still moving ahead — wish I could have stayed involved.

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An Idea Whose Time Is Long Overdue

When I blogged about App Inventor for Android a couple of days ago, I focused on the fact that it’s closed source. What I didn’t say, but should have, is that I think drag-and-drop programming tools are an idea whose time should have come at least twenty years ago. Tools like QuickFuse (for building voice response apps) respect the 80/20 rule in a way that even the simplest “real” programming languages don’t. Like SQL, they’re a good solution to a single, but important, sub-problem.

So why are tools like Scratch stuck in the playground? Why doesn’t my PVR come with a drag-and-drop programming system? Why doesn’t OpenOffice, so that people can automate simple repetitive tasks? Why haven’t any of the dozens of such systems that have been built to manage scientific workflows over the past 25 (!) years ever caught on? Will App Inventor do for drag-and-drop programming what the Mac did for windows and mice, or the World Cup did for the vuvuzela?

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Apparently We’re Less Creative

Apparently we’re becoming less creative. Well, Americans are, anyway, according to research reported in Newsweek (and repeated elsewhere):

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The good news, training can help:

The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect.

There’s even better news for science fiction geeks like yours truly:

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity.

I have this picture in my head of a stern parent saying, “Nope: no ice cream ’til you watch your Star Trek.”

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Closed Feels Weirder Every Day

By now, most readers of this blog will have heard about Google’s App Inventor for Android, a building-blocks programming system based on MIT’s OpenBlocks that’s intended to let gazillions of people who aren’t programmers build the apps they want themselves. What most people probably don’t know is that App Inventor is closed source: according to Google’s Sharon Perl, Google’s modifications to OpenBlocks “…are not currently available as open source.”

My reaction when I read this was, “Huh? That’s dumb.” App Inventor would be a great starting point for any number of student projects—it cries out to be hacked, ported, and extended.  (If it was a UCOSP project this fall, I bet it would be most students’ first choice.)  I’d be very interested in finding out why Google decided to lock it down…

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BP Buying Up Scientists

Via ClimateProgress:

Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, “…prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.”

I wonder if the scientists are taking their payment in pieces of silver?

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The Strengths of the Small

Jorge Aranda, who recently completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and who contributed a chapter to Making Software, recently wrote a position paper on the strengths of small software companies that’s based in large part on his thesis work. It’s quite good—please pester him to post the screencast he prepared as a backup for his remote presentation.

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City of Toronto Releases New Data Sets

Longtime readers will recall that I ran an open government/open data course at the University of Toronto last fall. I wasn’t able to stay as involved as I would have liked [1], but I’m heartened to see that the City of Toronto has released some more data sets — see toronto.ca/open’s catalog page for details. Happy hacking!

[1] I couldn’t find a professor willing to run the course again after my departure from U of T, and having spread myself too thin for too long, didn’t think I could keep it going and do a proper job on Software Carpentry as well. Middle age is when you stop asking what is possible, and start asking what possibilities remain…

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