March » 2003 » Always Where

CSS, Site Design, Apathy…

The site A List Apart is an excellent resource. I’m especially tempted, someday, to update the CS-ED.org site to be more… compliant. Right now, it is my own nasty set of tables within tables that work, but I know they aren’t The Right Way To Do It^TM.

So when I look at things like the List Apart Practical CSS Layout articles, or examples like those at bluerobot, I’m tempted. For now, that isn’t so important, really, but it is tempting to make the site moderately standards compliant.

Why? I don’t know why. But I do think it is important to do important things right. And, I consider CS-ED.org important. At least, I hope it is. Someday. …

In other news, I am hacking the default template to allow an optional, per-blogger left hand menu on the main page of the site. This way, you can easily upload a small HTML file that includes links and bits to the rest of the world from your blog. This seems like a simple, but important feature. I hope to do some doc writing today as well; I’m just not up to doing more data entry on the lit review right now…

You might be a computer science student if…

1. … you fear natural light, as it both destroys your ability to focus on CRTs for long periods of time, and makes your natural, nocturnal life-cycle more difficult to maintain.
2. … you flee all social situations when they present themselves, or collapse into a quivering mass of anti-social goo.
3. … you shun office furniture of all kinds, as cabinets and the like only take up space that could otherwise be used for useful things, like a microwave for reconstituting Spicy Prawn Pot Noodle, your favorite meal.

Yes, I like the new ready.gov site…

Are you ready.gov?

This was passed on by Carrie; I thought it was really something else. First we have ready.gov, which is some excellent spin-doctoring and fear-mongering on the part of the Bush administration. Takes you back to the good-ol’ days of black-and-white “What to do in case of a Nuclear War” movies. Then, we have an excellent reinterpretation of a number of these pictures.

I haven’t gone through the entire ready.gov site, but I intend to; those pictures are priceless, and I think I need a local archive of these marginally valuable iconographic messages. Besides, my tax dollars paid for the production of all of them…

Tech report away!

And, our tech report entitled Naive tools for studying compilation histories has been submitted to the Kent document handling system. As a tech report, it doesn’t really break any amazing ground, although it does provide a basis for thinking about how we might do some cool analysis of student programming and compilation behaviors.

I’m going to call it a day at this point, and start looking at the WebIt! framework (which didn’t install cleanly first try… hmmm.). I’ve wanted a bit of a web publishing framework that is extensible in Scheme for managing my webpages for quite some time, and even hacked something together once that really wasn’t usable. Something that uses templates, builds a glossary of documents (and allows easy referential linking), etc., etc. Perhaps something is already out there that’s close?

Perhaps I’ll write all my webpages in LaTeX, and use tex2page to render them…

Nah.

Anyway. I digress, I ramble, and I’m done with the week. More next week on SIGCSE articles (perhaps), mapping literature spaces, and whatever else comes to mind.

New Participants, Docs? References?

Four new participants, and still no posts… I need to write some “Getting Started” -type material, or link to such documents. I know people have written about “getting started with your weblog” before, so it must be something I can find.

And, I can use the resources section of the site to link it in. Oooh… appropriate use of technology…. mmmm.

Apocalypse 6…

The Perl Apocalypses have been, I think, very interesting reading. While I’ve heard them poo-pooed by some serious programming language peoples, there is something very interesting about seeing behind the curtain in a large, community-driven language evolution process. The anthropologists and sociologists would do well to be all over this one. There probably would even be research dollars available.

Hell, I think they’re interesting from a PL perspective as well, because the blindfolded philosophers (who don’t even know they’re dealing with an elephant) are trying to reshape it into something completely different! That is to say, Perl is many things to many people, and maintaining that compatibility, while trying to provide a portable run-time, retargetable compiler, extensible framework for language evolution, and ability to interop with other languages (just a few of the massive goals of the evolution to Perl 6) is an incredibly difficult task.

Off to London!

For the next three days, I’m out of touch. Well, except by mobile, but that doesn’t do web users much good.

Two friends from Kenyon are spending time travelling England, and we’re going to catch up with them for a day or two in London. Should be good fun. Yes, Noel, I should get my a** up to a few of the Scheme workshops, too…

When I get back, I’ll post a link to my first tech report (mildly exciting), and continue writing on some of the threads I had hinted at before. Also, I can throw together something on a nice little tool I put together for the lit review. It really is quite cool–I wrote a little script to process my bibliography, and then render it as a graph, showing all the papers that link to all the other papers. This allows me (at a glance) to see

Which papers are cited often, or critical,
Which papers are uncited (or rarely cited) and should be cited more often,
What papers seem to form “social groups,” and don’t do a good job of citing outside their group,
etc….

There are a number of other nice analyses I can do, and will have to look at Citeseer for some of the things they look at with their index. This little script will be a powerful addition to the literature review, and really give me some nice perspectives on the body of literature that I otherwise would have to guess at and infer.

CS-ED.org wish-list…

Personal Links. I’d like to have a RH side to this webpage, where participants can upload a list of links. I think this blog could just about replace my homepage if I could link to external documents from it…

Time is a problem… I’m busy for the next few weeks/months. I’m sure it will happen some evening. I just want to make sure I get it right, so it is nice and flexible for me to extend and users to use. I personally like the way the resources worked out, but they haven’t been stress-tested at all…

Citeseer, lit review, Citeseer, quotation

Noel Welsh, after reading the last post, also suggested Citeseer. I hadn’t forgotten it, but I had instead assumed I’d make a “second pass” through the material I was examining.

Now, my approach was to spider my way through some bibliographies, until I exhausted what looked like viable/useful material. Along that path, I’d incidentally find other things of interest (by crawling author’s homepages, for example). However, I think the idea of having to go back, and retrace steps, is (obviously?) a bad idea.

So, I’ll retrace my steps for what I’ve done so far, and think about any other resources I can use in my search.

The interesting bit that came out of the exchange, however, was

From: Noel Welsh
Date: Fri Mar 7, 2003  11:43:21 AM Europe/London
To: Matt Jadud
Subject: Re: citeseer

<snip/>

You can add papers to citeseer.  Give it a URL and it
will index everything it finds there.  <snip/> I did this with
readscheme.org to get it to index our paper from the
Scheme Workshop.  See e.g.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/site/551066

HTH,
N.

And yes, it does. However, before I do that, I have to figure out where papers I’ve written will continue to live for a reasonably long time. Put another way, I don’t like the fact that every time I leave one university location, the paper will have to move from one WWW home to another. A few things come to mind

I could put things on jadud.com, but that is a personal site, not an academic one.
I may be able to make use of some facility of MoveableType to allow CS-ED.org participants to keep papers there. This way, even if the entire project moves, the URL will remain.
Sourceforge is in the business of hosting content for open-source projects… perhaps I can create a CS-ED.org project, and we could actually store academic content there? There are certainly copyright issues here… but, then again, some of the papers I just checked for in Citeseer (they are there) are available from the authors themselves, when legally they probably shouldn’t be…

It needs more thought.

Postscript:
This post raises the question of how I should properly include private communication in a blog. One approach would be to always ask first. Another approach would be to assume that communication via email is a dangerous thing at best, and you should always assume it might be logged, blogged, or otherwise published with or without your consent. I imagine, if I simply exercise good judgment, then I won’t get myself into trouble. Besides, I can always edit/remove posts if someone complains (“it’s easier to ask forgiveness…”).

And a follow-on…

The lit review will, I think, be harder than I thought…

Just started digging past the surface level… oy. And, the learning begins.