Other projects have made similar changes in the past. Interestingly, I have never seen a numbering scheme change to less frequent major version number changes.

In all the cases where I have seen this step taken in the past, it always left the impression that some marketing-oriented people in the respective project community are confusing cause and effect: it’s not by incrementing the major version number that you get substantial/fundamental development progress. It’s, of course, the other way around: after much development progress you find that the software has been entirely rewritten and that’s when you feel you have to change the major version number to reflect this. In my opinion this is one of the (and by far not the only) things that Linux kernel development gets right: version 2.0 is from 1996, 2.6 current, and there was lots of development progress…

If you are used to a text editor that you have been using for over 20 years(!) and you do pretty much everything that remotely resembles text in that editor: from keeping your appointments and agenda, preparing slides, writing email, writing source code, you name it, then those web-based interfaces are a slowdown by a factor of…, well I don’t know, but enough to turn me off.

So here comes org2blog which I am just trying out. It uses org-mode which is an awesome tool for structured text. Maybe with that in place I can bring myself to post more often.

Most recently, I am amused by the much-hyped “computational thinking”. One definition found on Google’s Exploring Computational Thinking is “Computational thinking (CT) involves a set of problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers use to write programs that underlay the computer applications you use such as search, email, and maps. Below is a list of specific techniques along with real world examples from our every day lives.” then that page lists decomposition, pattern generalization and abstraction, and algorithm design as skills or techniques.

But wait a minute: what a software engineer does, the above list of skills and techniques… This is programming!!!

And yes, I agree, students should learn programming in school and it will be easier for them if they can practice their programming skills across diverse subjects.

Computational thinking… “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet“

One less article for me to write…

I’d like to see a package for this in pkgsrc. If I find some time I might look into it myself.

- Every student sets up a blog somewhere

- the URL of the blog is communicated to the professor

- the professor adds the blog URL to the course blog

- from then on the course blog regularly checks whether there are new posts to the student’s blog

- when new blog posts are found, they are syndicated to the course blog

- students should blog frequently, but specifically how often, when, and at what length is left to the students

What to do? Make them prove!

So now I’m looking through online resources that will meet the following criteria:

1. introductory enough for non-Math, non-CS people, who have had very little exposure to proving
2. advanced, thorough, and challenging enough for graduate students from science/engineering disciplines
3. convey the elegance of rigorous proof, and
4. let them have fun proving

Thus far, I was most amused by the list of unacceptable proof techniques I found here.

I found some material on proof techniques, but what I found is either too basic, too concise, or too technical…

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Here are the slides.

I saw this today in a presentation at Blogfesores 2009

With the license considered “radioactive” by some, this shouldn’t even be called “open source”…