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Toronto, Ontario Helping scientists build better software since 1997 Areas of Expertise:
Greg blogs at: Minutes from 2012-12-19 All-Hands Meeting December 19 2012 Our second all-hands meeting was held on Wednesday, December 19, from 12:00-13:10 Eastern time. Actions Dhavide Aruliah Co-author bullet-points and cheat sheet for Unix shell Co-author bullet-points and cheat sheet for basic Python Amy Brown Proof-read Code of Conduct Add Code of Conduct to boot camp "how-to" Create graphic for… read moreYou've Shown Me the C, Now Where's the Python? December 16 2012 The W3C's Provenance Working Group recently published a new draft of their proposed standard for tracking provenance on the web. It's pretty dense stuff: even the primer, which uses the word [...] read moreLorena Barba's Reproducibility PI Manifesto December 15 2012 Prof. Lorena Barba, of Boston University, presented an excellent manifesto at the ICERM meeting on reproducible research: I will teach my graduate students about reproducibility. All our [...] read moreThree Non-trivial Use Cases for Git December 15 2012 Today's guest post comes from Nicolas Limare. Here are three problems I encountered while introducing fellow grad students and post-docs to Git. These are situations where Git seems to not provide [...] read moreWould You Like Your Programming Language to Have a Million Users? December 14 2012 Would you like your new programming language to have a million users in a couple of years? You would? Cool—here’s how to do it. Instead of asking yourself, “How will people write loops?” or, “Is this statically or dynamically typed?”, ask yourself, “What can I do in the language to… read moreTwo R Workshops at UBC in 2013 December 13 2012 We're pleased to announce two workshops in 2013 at the University of British Columbia: Beginners R Date: January 11, 1 Day Venue: MSL 101 Format: 4×1.5 hour blocks R Basics, workspace, [...] read moreTwo R Workshops at UBC in 2013 December 13 2012 We’re pleased to announce two workshops in 2013 at the University of British Columbia: Beginners R Date: January 11, 1 Day Venue: MSL 101 Format: 4×1.5 hour blocks R Basics, workspace, working directory, projects in RStudio Importing, exporting and cleaning data. Data manipulation, aggregation and indexing. Working with a statistical… read moreDecember 13 2012 From Mike: This week saw the first boot camp to be held at The University of Edinburgh. The boot camp was organised by the The Software Sustainability Institute and EPCC as part of the PRACE Advanced Training Centre. We had 36 researchers from geosciences, astronomy, biology, statistics, chemistry and mathematics and… read moreDecember 12 2012 This week saw the first boot camp to be held at The University of Edinburgh. The boot camp was organised by the The Software Sustainability Institute and EPCC as part of the PRACE Advanced Training [...] read moreDecember 12 2012 Via email: We are proud to announce that we’ve received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that will support IPython development for the next two years. Thanks to this $1.15M grant, Brian Granger and Fernando Perez will be working roughly 3/4 of their time on IPython, Min Ragan-Kelley will… read moreSome of the Things We've Learned About Teaching Git December 11 2012 We've tried teaching Git six or seven times now; here's what some of the instructors have learned. Instructor #1 I spent too much time explaining the "stage." It's an important concept [...] read moreSome of the Things We’ve Learned About Teaching Git December 11 2012 We’ve tried teaching Git six or seven times now; here’s what some of the instructors have learned. Instructor #1 I spent too much time explaining the “stage.” It’s an important concept that sets git apart from other VCSes, but for beginning students it’s probably too advanced. I wish I had… read moreDecember 09 2012 Votes are in and tallied: here's what you'd like us to work on in [...] read moreDecember 09 2012 Votes are in and tallied: here’s what you’d like us to work on in 2013. read moreDecember 08 2012 We’re going to start using GitHub to manage our content, and as a corollary of that, we’re going to use its issue tracker to manage the things we’re working on. I’ve already put a handful of medium-to-large items in it; suggestions would be welcome, particularly if accompanied by, “…and I’ll… read moreDecember 08 2012 For the past few years, Jon Udell has been working on a project called ElmCity. Its ostensible aim is to do for calendars what the RSS ecosystem has done for news: allow everyone to be an author, but also make it easy to aggregate, filter, and share information from a… read moreDecember 06 2012 Jorge Aranda and I submitted a short opinion piece to Communications of the ACM in February 2012 that discussed some of the reasons people in industry and academia don’t talk to each other as much as they should. Ten months later, it has ironically turned into an illustration of one… read moreDecember 05 2012 Software Carpentry wouldn't exist without support from the Sloan Foundation, Mozilla, and a lot of other sponsors, but that support won't last forever. Over the next two years, we need to find a [...] read moreDecember 05 2012 I'm giving a short talk next week at an ICERM workshop on Reproducibility in Computational and Experimental Mathematics, which has prompted me to look back at a talk I gave six years ago at [...] read moreDecember 05 2012 Our instructors are all volunteers—boot camp hosts cover their travel and accommodation costs, but they're not paid for their time. So why do they do it? Make the world a better place. As [...] read moreWho Can Run a Software Carpentry Workshop? December 05 2012 A couple of people have mailed us in the past week to ask if they can use our materials and run a workshop on their own. The short answer is "yes"; the longer answer is "yes please" :-) All of our [...] read moreDecember 05 2012 Software Carpentry wouldn’t exist without support from the Sloan Foundation, Mozilla, and a lot of other sponsors, but that support won’t last forever. Over the next two years, we need to find a way to make this project self-sustaining; to achieve that, we’re currently doing the following: Use a “host… read moreDecember 05 2012 We’d like to invite our friends to a week-long hackathon at Mozilla’s office in Toronto in June to: create new teaching material give each other feedback on teaching (we’ll run a workshop during the week) build new tools (like extensions for the IPython Notebook) get to know each other We… read moreWho Can Run a Software Carpentry Workshop? December 05 2012 A couple of people have mailed us in the past week to ask if they can use our materials and run a workshop on their own. The short answer is “yes”; the longer answer is “yes please” :-) All of our lessons are covered by the Creative Commons – Attribution… read moreDecember 05 2012 Our existing workshops/material are aimed at people who know enough to write a hundred-line script, but don’t yet use version control or do any systematic testing. Many scientists either haven’t gotten this far, or are well past it, and we’d like to start helping them. We think that means we… read moreDecember 05 2012 Our instructors are all volunteers—boot camp hosts cover their travel and accommodation costs, but they’re not paid for their time. So why do they do it? Make the world a better place. As I say in a lot of my talks, the two things we need to get through the… read moreDecember 05 2012 I’m giving a short talk next week at an ICERM workshop on Reproducibility in Computational and Experimental Mathematics, which has prompted me to look back at a talk I gave six years ago at SciPy’06. The slides from that talk are included below; I’m now trying to decide whether I’m… read moreDecember 04 2012 The list of talks for PyCon 2013 has been posted, and we're very pleased to see three by members of our team: Titus Brown: Awesome Big Data Algorithms Matt Davis: Teaching with the IPython [...] read moreDecember 04 2012 The list of talks for PyCon 2013 has been posted, and we’re very pleased to see three by members of our team: Titus Brown: Awesome Big Data Algorithms Matt Davis: Teaching with the IPython Notebook Jessica McKellar: How the Internet Works There will also be the first-ever Python Education Summit… read moreEuropean Grid Infrastructure is Organizing a Software Carpentry Workshop December 01 2012 The European Grid Infrastructure project is putting together a Software Carpentry workshop for Manchester in April—early details are in their post, and we’ll post more details ourselves as they evolve. read moreGood News About Software Carpentry (and More) November 30 2012 We’re pleased to announce that Mozilla and Software Carpentry will be continuing and expanding our work to empower scientists with computer science and webmaking skills. We have been working with the Sloan Foundation to teach scientists the concepts, tools and techniques they need to use computers and the web to… read moreAlpha-Testing Ideas for the IPython Notebook November 27 2012 Before I post any of these ideas on the IPython Notebook wiki, I’d be grateful for feedback from our learners and instructors. Most of these (maybe all of them?) would be done as extensions, rather than as patches to IPyNB itself. Please let us know what you think; I’ll revise… read moreTitus Brown on the Scripps Institute Boot Camp November 25 2012 Hot on the heels of Cait Pickens’ posts about our workshop at the Scripps Institute comes this post-mortem from Titus Brown. Again, there’s lots of good analysis, and many useful recommendations—particularly concerning installation and setup headaches (which continue to be our second-biggest problem). read moreCait Pickens on the Scripps Institute Boot Camp November 24 2012 Cait Pickens (a grad student from Michigan State University) has written a great series of posts about the boot camp she helped teach at the Scripps Institute a couple of weeks ago: Preparation Day 1, Part 1 Day 1, Part 2 Day 2, Part 1 Day 2, Part 2 Day… read moreWho Wants To Build a Faded Example Tool for the IPython Notebook? November 19 2012 While I’m asking people to write code for me, here’s a small addition to the IPython Notebook that someone should be able to knock off in an hour. The starting points are cognitive load theory and the idea of faded examples: long story short, one good way to teach is… read moreThe Tool (I Think) We Need To Do Peer Instruction Online November 19 2012 Clay Shirky’s recent essays “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy” has attracted a fair bit of attention. I’ve written about some of the things it doesn’t discuss on my personal blog, but here, I’d like to use it as a jumping off point for a description of a tool I’d like… read moreIf Udacity is Napster, Who Will Be iTunes? November 19 2012 My Who Decides? post has produced some rather heated email. In answer, no, I am not defending the existing university system: I quit my faculty position at the University of Toronto in part because it doesn’t serve students well, and doesn’t have a future beyond elite networking-building [1]. But the… read moreNovember 17 2012 We’re planning to launch an update to this web site in the next few days, and as part of that, we’re revisiting some of our content. For example, we’d like to shorten and update our recommended reading list—the current short list is below, and we’d welcome suggestions for additions. However,… read moreWho Wants To Write a Little Code? November 16 2012 We have always steered away from building libraries to use in teaching—we want to show people the “real” stuff, and we can’t afford to maintain things. The IPython Notebook has us rethinking that: now that we can display images inline, it would be wonderful if we could leverage Mark Guzdial… read moreNovember 07 2012 One of the last things I did before leaving the University of Toronto was start UCOSP, which gives students in CS a chance to work in cross-country teams on open source capstone projects. I learned recently from Karen Reid and Michelle Craig that it has grown considerably: 20 different Canadian… read moreNovember 05 2012 Sal Khan and Michael Noer recently recorded an 11-minute webisode on the history of education from 1680 to 2050. It angered Audrey Watters, and I think my take on why says a lot about where I stand on education, online or otherwise. Michael Noer works for Forbes, whose byline is,… read moreNovember 02 2012 Twice this week I’ve heard the claim that ignorance is strength—that not knowing what’s been done before in an area is actually an advantage, because then you’re not hamstrung by preconceptions. When challenged, the people making the claim offer hypotheticals: “Would Louis Armstrong have invented jazz if he’d studied classical… read moreOctober 31 2012 (The yellow raincoast isn’t really part of the costume—blame Hurricane Sandy for that.) read moreAn Apology to the OSC (was: Calling All [Male] Junior Aerospace Engineers) October 24 2012 We received an email from the Ontario Science Centre this morning about their upcoming sleepover camps. It said: SPACE ODYSSEY: Families, Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and all other groups Calling all junior aerospace engineers and mission specialists! Come to a fun-filled night of space exploration. Blast off for an out-of-this-world overnight experience!… read moreOffline Rendering of WordPress Blog Posts? October 16 2012 I’d like to take a few tens of thousand WordPress blog posts and turn each into a standalone HTML page. I have the text that WordPress stores in its database, but there’s a problem: WordPress doesn’t (usually) store <p>…</p> paragraph tags. Instead, it (usually) interprets a blank line as a… read moreAlso find Greg on:  Recent Twitter posts: Buy Now and Save
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