Archive for March, 2010

Fix my street

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Today someone (AJ) pasted a link to FixMyStreet into #srcf. It actually looks rather good and could be an important way of fixing the current pot hole problem resulting from the snow last winter and in general improving the quality of our local environment.

So far I have reported some pot holes and an abandoned car. :-) Maybe they will now magically disappear.
I also noticed that other people had reported most of the problems I had been thinking I should report in Cambridge :-).

See Web 2.0 can do something useful :-).

Ada Lovelace day

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

It is Ada Lovelace day today.

I would like to thank Frances Zhang for putting up with me in supervisions this year and for being really hard working and understanding things I don’t (e.g. probability) and not boasting about it as I tend to (sorry).

Dina Bester is generally awesome, has supplied pizza for many hungry CompScis and was willing to take on project Bravo which I thought looked pretty impossible and got a good project out at the end.

Sarah Gordon for doing a Women@CL talk which showed how testing can be exciting and be just as complicated and technical as writing the code that runs the project while requiring a greater understanding of how the whole project fits together.

I also think that Ada Lovelace day is a good idea and I am glad that my operating system (Ubuntu) is supporting it (or at least the Ubuntu Planet is). Making the internet a better place, one step at a time :-).

The first programmer was a women (Ada), the first programmers (ENIAC) were women, it is sad that the proportion of women in Computer Science now is as low as it is. Especially since they get proportionally more 1sts in CompSci.