Daniel Lemire's blog

NSERC – Policy on Intellectual Property

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NSERC is the main funding body for research in science and engineering in Canada. It has an interesting policy on IP: NSERC expects that any IP resulting from research it funds wholly or in part will be owned by the university or the inventor, according to university policy. Access to IP should be…

Online courses force a deeper understanding

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From eLearn Magazine, I got this quote in a paper by George P. Schell: Online courses force a deeper understanding of information technology simply because they require immersion in the technology that supports the subject being taught. If students fail to master the technology skills required by…

Does JavaScript scale?

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This post talks about how hard it is to debug JavaScript. In general, pushing the UI to Javascript makes it hard to develop and debug. There are limited tools, the language is too lenient (no objects, weak typing), and testing involves cycling through webpages over and over again. Obviously, this…

Creative Commons Remix Contest

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From Slashdot comes mention of a Creative Commons Remix Contest where, from what I understand, people are invited to submit remixed music under a liberal license and the winner will get his music pressed on a CD. It seems like this is derived from work started by Lucas Gonze of WebJay fame.

My experience so far with Google ads

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This is depressing. My blog gets millions of page loads per day (not really). So, being greedy (not really), I decided to put some ads on it. Hence, I put some Google ads following Yuhong’s foot steps. Well, so far, not a single click. Not one of you guys clicked on one of the ads. I never…

Paquets… ou Seb en français

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Seb is now available in French through Paquets… de quoi? Multi-language blogging is an interesting topic I covered elsewhere in my blog. I will eventually open a blog in French, but I’m worried that having too many blogs will kill the fun. I like having one spot to call mine… if I have to run…

Why encyclopaedic row speaks volumes about the old guard

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John Naughton wrote about people doubting wikipedia this well phrased bit: we have become so imbued by the conventional wisdom of managerial capitalism that we think the only way to do things is via hierarchical, top-down, tightly controlled organisations I certainly can see this phenomenon among…

Tim Berners-Lee first executive summary of the World Wide Web

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I copy this here for historical reasons. Notice how Tim didn’t simply point to a specification, he actually pointed to a working demo of what the Web could be. (Complete version can be found on the w3c Web site.) From :Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@info_.cern.ch) Subject :WorldWideWeb:…

The Medici Effect

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Harold talks about the The Medici Effect: Johansson tells you to look for reversals which may give you insights into new ways of doing things. He uses a restaurant as an example, saying that the assumption is that restaurants have menus, but the reversal would be a restaurant without a menu. This…

Mozilla Web Developer´s documentation

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I wasted a lot of time last night searching for JavaScript documentation. My friend Scott Flinn was nice enough to give me these pointers regarding DOM and general Web work: http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/ http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/ This is much better than flying blind, but I…

Joel on Software – Advice for Computer Science College Students

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Through slashdot, I saw this nice article by Joel on what you should do if you want to become a programmer and are studying Computer Science: Joel on Software – Advice for Computer Science College Students here are Joel’s Seven Pieces of Free Advice for Computer Science College Students (worth…