# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

"J'ai un indicateur pour savoir si une conférence a été bénéfique pour moi ou pas. C'est le nombre d'idées qui me vient en écoutant les différentes interventions. C'est un compteur qui crépite. Cette fois-ci, il n'a même pas passé le niveau critique de détection, à l'exception de la conférence de Steph Downes."

Your name is finally called, along with the name of the 'Genius' who will be assisting you. You walk down the line at the Bar to Brian. Brian is a short, cross-eyed troglodyte, whose attempt at a hipster 'do, nose ring, and smug, self-assured demeanor do little to hide the fact that he's clearly thrilled to have access, for the first time in his life, to an unending supply of technologically retarded women he can simultaneously punish and save.

You set your iPod on the shiny counter. You've been waiting almost three hours. 'So, the wheel is, like, stuck,' you begin. 'It's been kind of slow since I got it.'

Brian smirks and holds up a hand for silence. 'Wait, wait, wait,' he says in the same tone your tutor used on you when you were twelve and you asked if dogs in France barked with an accent. 'What's your name?'

You're slightly taken aback and a little annoyed, but this guy holds the keys to a new iPod, one that hasn't been dropped multiple times and continuously pawed at during long subway rides. You tell him your name and smile tightly.

'Well, I'm Brian,' he says magnanimously. 'What can I do for you?'

The two companies intend to devote programmers to make PHP work better with corporate databases and Web services protocols. IBM also plans to establish an area dedicated to PHP on its developer Web site, which will include technical resources such as white papers.

"She estimates the 512MB of flash in the cheaper of Apple's two IPod Shuffle models costs the company around $37.50 for each player. That's about two thirds of the estimated total $59 that Apple spends on materials needed to make each 512MB IPod Shuffle. The product retails for $99 giving the company a profit of about $40, or roughly 40 percent."

"XML was frozen and published in February 1998. As it came toward the end and it became obvious—well, not obvious, but likely anyhow—that this was going to get a lot of momentum, we were besieged by requests for extra features of one kind or another. We basically lied and told the world, we would do all that stuff in version 2. You have to shoot the engineers and ship at some point, right? I think there will never be an XML version 2. There is an XML version 1.1, but it’s controversial and not widely supported."

"Your equipment DOES NOT affect the quality of your image. The less time and effort you spend worrying about your equipment the more time and effort you can spend creating great images. The right equipment just makes it easier, faster or more convenient for you to get the results you need."

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

'In companies that have a lot of overtime, they waste a lot of hours during the workday,' said Tom DeMarco, a consultant at The Atlantic Systems Guild who has written about human resource issues in the technology field. 'A normal workday has come to be selected over time because it is productive.'

http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all

Please do not poll any single RSS feed more often than every 30 minutes. RSS feeds are not updated more than twice an hour, and you will receive an error if you try to crawl more frequently.

The role of communities of practice in the socialization of students into a profession

As society’s need for specialists has increased, universities have responded by providing professional education is areas such as medicine, law, engineering, management, and education. A professional education is meant to provide an intensive and specialized intellectual training to individuals seeking to gain membership to a specific profession. Professional education is typically conceived and thought of in terms of a formal curriculum, a perspective which reduces the process to a series of courses to be completed successfully by the student. While the curriculum perspective addresses the manner in which students acquire an understanding of the theoretical and practical knowledge on which professional practice depends, it does little to ensure that students develop a professional identity or become a part of the larger social and culture structures of their chosen profession.

My research will use communities of practice as more a more comprehensive, holistic perspective from which to study the process of professional education. Through a qualitative research methodology, I will investigate the professional education of software engineers with the goal of exploring and understanding the varied and shifting social contexts of learning that students participate in as they move through and try to make sense of their professional education. From this process, I will seek develop a model of professional education that brings to the fore the processes that enhance and impede the professional socialization of students.

This presentation will provide an overview of professional education, professional socialization, and the development of professional identity. It will show how communities of practice can be used to provide a useful perspective on professional education, both for the researcher as well as for the participants in the process.

When the Eatdrinkfeelgood Markup Language was conceived, a review of the existing work of describing recipes in XML yielded two observations. First, most applications simply lacked the features I was looking for. Second, the rest seemed only to exist as an effort to 'monetize the recipe space.' So, I sat down and wrote my own.

About this story, Cory says, 'Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives.'

However, I notice that nobody mentions that most gel pen ink seeps through the silky pages and often stains the facing page too.

"With this major development project, we are reconfirming our educational commitment to provide support for the talent of tomorrow while allowing us to reach our goal of creating 1,000 new jobs in Montreal by 2010," said Martin Tremblay, president and COO of Ubisoft's Montreal studio.

In the end, I had spent a few hundred bucks to learn, finally, that there was nothing I could buy that was going to get me organized. Fast-forward a few years. Today's PDA are nice, feature-packed, but expensive as hell. Expensive to me, since the risk of it turning into shelfware are pretty high.

So I came up with a plan. Get organized first, and then look into purchasing some technology to make the job of staying organized even easier.

Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Auutonomy project head at Ford's training department says 'Metadata is for the birds' because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging.

Je suis en colère, donc désolé par avance. Mais j'emmerde tous les briseurs de création, tous les protectionnistes de l'image, laissez moi prendre la ville comme je l'aime.

# It performs as specified, is easy to use, and has powerful configuration and maintenance options. It provides an effective Web index.
# It costs real money (a per-two-year fixed fee), and is dependent on the vendor for support in the case of hardware or software failure.
# It is not maintenance-free-Oxford, for example, would expect to continue to devote ongoing time to tuning and analysis (perhaps 0.05 FTE).
# It is not clear that a single box can always provide an external search as well as an internal one."

Can cheap semantics scale?

There are no inbound links to this site from bloggers currently in our database.