Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

My Computer Science department at Michigan State University is looking for an assistant professor! We are casting a fairly wide net (databases, graphics, medical imaging, and bioinformatics) but I'd really like to attract a bioinformatician.

Here's the job posting.

The Computer Science department at MSU is a nice, small department that's highly ranked in software engineering and digital life studies, among others. The opportunities for research and collaboration in many different areas of bioinformatics are excellent: in particular, people interested in phylogenetics and metagenomics will find many interesting collaborators.

Please e-mail me if you have any questions.

--titus

Hi folks,

just a quick note -- Kumar McMillan has offered to take over wsgi_intercept. You can see the new project over at code.google.com, http://code.google.com/p/wsgi-intercept/.

While I will miss the income from the project, I think that Kumar will treat it well.

--titus

I'm going through some of my saved up e-mail from the last few months, and found these two gems.

Noah Gift on grokking threads, from the testing-in-python list:

Trying to understand what massive pools of threads that spawn other
massive spools of threads, that spawn other massive pools of threads,
are doing, is like pushing a cart full of toys down a steep hill and
then running after the cart, and trying to dig for a specific toy
you want before the cart crashes or you fall, or both, all while
running as fast as you can.

DV Henkel-Wallace from the Interesting People mailing list, on Brian Reid's claim of age discrimination against google:

I like the "too old to matter" part.  In non-academic computing a
great way to be brilliant is merely to mine "old" (i.e. 20 years or
so) journals for algorithms and advice.  The best part is you don't
have to falsely take credit for it -- show someone the journal and
they _still_ will consider it novel.

--titus

Dear lazyweb,

I would like to be able to write Python code like the following:

page_obj = parse(html_code)

form_obj = page_obj.forms[0]

form_obj.my_name = 'bob'
form_obj.my_select.choose('option2')

new_html_code = page_obj.emit_html()

That is, we have an existing HTML form, and I would like to be able to parse it, programmatically update the form settings, and then emit it again as HTML with the same style attributes, etc., but with updated form data.

(I'm horrendously out of date with HTML libraries in Python, so I thought I'd just ask... ;)

thanks,

--titus

Here are some factoids about the GHOP/Python project, from the end of the first 30 hours.

Of 63 tasks, 32 remain unclaimed.

26 tasks have been claimed by students and are being worked on; some of those are nearing completion.

5 have already been completed: all three Rosetta Code tasks (which has made Python the language with the most rosetta code examples!), a translation of Crunchy into Estonian (!?), and some new (and helpful!) example code for the ConfigParser docs.

Projecting this activity level into the future, I predict that our current tasks will be exhausted within two weeks, and even if we fill up to 102 tasks (the maximum) those will be completed by sometime in mid December.

So, I asked Leslie Hawthorn (Google) if we could increase our task limit to 200, and she agreed. I will soon be sending solicitations out to specific projects asking for task suggestions and mentors. I would welcome tasks from other projects, too, so please consider sending them to us!

Incidentally, one complaint I saw on slashdot is that there aren't enough "good" coding tasks. Now, I can't speak for the Python community, but if I were you I wouldn't take that kind of abuse...

--titus

p.s. As you can tell I'm excited about all of this, largely because it's been surprisingly good fun. The students are all very interested and motivated, and it's a pleasure to interact with them. Plus, stuff's actually getting done!

p.p.s. Some of the current mentors (Doug Hellmann, Georg Brandl, Andre Roberge) are real machines, but we could use some help interacting with the participants... hint hint.