TIm Bray observes that several previously stable technologies are currently in a state of flux, with many of them on the cusp of potentially changing the way that applications will be engineered in the future.
It’s a great survey of what’s hot right now, but I don’t think that this is a particularly [...]
xkcd on Python. (It’s a pity the title is hidden unless you mouse-over the graphic.)
We interrupt our regular programming to speak geek.
Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about programming languages at work and Python is receiving a lot of attention for many reasons. I’ve been a big fan of Python for a long time, and the more Perl I see out in the wild, the less I like [...]
Professor Ross Anderson at Light Blue Touchpaper writes:
With a single bound it was free!
My book on Security Engineering is now available online for free download here.
Professor Anderson’s book is an invaluable reference guide for anyone wishing to implement “secure” computer systems, or simply gain a better understanding of the field. This is [...]
Although I have not read this comparison paper[pdf] in detail, I found looking at their example code side-by-side to be most illuminating. Ruby’s pureness (mainly in object-orientation) may give it a theoretically superior (”cleaner”) syntax, but from a practitioner’s point of view, the Python’s syntax appears to be refreshingly uncluntered and easy to use. [...]
It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer.
The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that:
it causes the [...]
I actually finished binding the third copy of my thesis at 15:55 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, this being Cambridge, the Board of Graduate studies closes at 4pm so I had to wait until this morning to actually submit my thesis… but now it’s DONE! I shall have to prepare for the viva at some point, [...]
Several people have asked me how I make TODO appear in the margin of my thesis wherever I want to highlight an area that needs further work. The trick is to define a new LaTeX command called “todo” in your pre-amble:
\newcommand{\todo}[1]{\marginpar{\textsf{\textbf{TODO}}}
\texttt{\small{TODO:#1}}}
(all on one line)
TODO items can then be marked up in the text as:
\todo{Add a [...]
One of the problems of using LaTeX for presentations[1] is that positioning graphics is annoyingly fiddly. The web’s cascading style sheets — with it’s highly flexible and very powerful layout abilities — ought to be ideal for producing presentation slides, and indeed somebody has produced an impressive framework for doing so.
[1] Don’t get me started [...]
Tracking down references for my background chapter recently, the ACM Guide to Computing Literature has been very useful. Unfortunately its search feature is frustratingly useless. For example, searching for Access Control Policies XPath returns no hits, whereas googling for the same terms and restricting the search to acm.org returns the paper I was looking for [...]
Apparently the title of my thesis has to be fixed in advance of my submitting the dissertation itself. Unfortunately choosing exactly the right title is proving harder than writing the thing!
Possibilities are:
Trust and Risk in Access Control for Global Computing
Trust and Risk in Access Control for a Global Computing Infrastructure
Using Trust and Risk for Access [...]
Christophe Rhodes’ interesting JCSS talk on detecting musical structure has suggested that there is hope that one day computers may be able to automatically detect and filter out boy band music — yay!
More relevantly for my own research, one of Christophe’s motivations is the poor quality of musical meta-data from collaboratively assembled databases such [...]
Today’s Piled Higher and Deeper is particularly apt for me at the moment!
Progress on actual writing has stalled for the moment: this week I’ve spent a lot of time supervising, generating results graphs and producing the camera-ready version of a paper for iTrust. Hopefully my word count will start moving (upwards!) again [...]
A collection of links relevant to Cambridge Computer Scientists:
On line Dictionary of Computer Terms
ucam.cl.students - The Computer Lab student newsgroup
comp.risks — A very interesting, low-traffic newsgroup with anecdotes from around the world about software engineering and security practice. Recommended reading for Software Engineering and Security courses, as well as general interest.
Learn Useful Stuff
LaTeX Tips
WDG HTML [...]
While teaching somebody how to use LaTeX recently I noticed that my webpage of useful LaTeX tips and links was no longer accessible.
Hypertext help with LaTeX – handy reference guide.
Text processing with LaTeX — lots of good tutorials, covering the basics to advanced features.
Using imported graphics in LaTeX — essential guide to making graphics appear [...]