Another year and another great performance by my programming students. They have already solved two problems and still have an hour left to go. Come on “Team Red C”! Hard work and dedication (we had to leave Samford at 5:30AM this morning and won’t get back until 10:30PM - 17 hours!)
Viva Las Vegas! After a three day drive that included quick visits to friends and family along the way in Texas and Arizona as well as brief visits to the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam at night (very cool!), and finally to Las Vegas, I arrived just in time to showcase my Ajax Performance Monitor Toolkit. The kids love the pools here at the hotel including a wave pool and lazy river.
My presentation went well, and there seemed to be interest in the toolkit and porting it to work with other server-side scripting languages. Download the powerpoint slides (3.28MB). If you are interested in trying it out, you may also download a preliminary version of the toolkit (644KB) with a very limited amount of documentation.
Wow - Sun microsystems has been busy - discreetly releasing and/or acquiring all kinds of important open source software projects. The banner of logos shown above just about summarizes it.
Today I discovered VirtualBox while working on a cluster computing project. VirtualBox isn’t directly related to cluster computing, but it can be used to run multiple compute nodes for testing. VirtualBox is an open-source equivalent to VMWare’s popular VMWare Workstation product. With the performance of today’s hardware, the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single machine is becoming a reality for more and more people.
The basic idea is that by installing VirtualBox you install an application and a small set of services that allow you to create virtual machines for running an entirely different operating system in a window on your host operating system. I have just completed an install of the latest version of the Debian OS into a virtual machine. The entire process (including the several hundred megabyte download) took less than one hour to complete. Now I can boot up a Linux operating system whenever I want to run an application only available in Linux ( e.g., Kmines 
).
The screenshots below give you a glimpse into how it works. The first screenshot shows the virtual machine configuration options, which represents everything you would find on a real machine. The second shows Linux running in a window on my Windows Vista host operating system.
This morning we went live with Mesa Online, a website for students taking Spanish courses in the World Languages department. The idea behind the Mesa program is that students sign-up for a time to have lunch or dinner with a small group of students and one faculty member. During the lunch or dinner, all conversation must be in Spanish. The previous sign-up system involved a large list of timeslots posted on the wall. My Fall 2008 software engineering class took upon themselves the task of converting the paper-based system to an online system. I helped the students bring the project to a conclusion just in time for it to go live today for the Spring 2009 semester. As of 3:00PM, exactly 100 students have created their Mesa accounts. There is still work left to be done on the administrative part of the website, but I will post updates as the semester progresses and as we see whether the system effectively meets the needs of the World Languages Department here at Samford.
Website development occupies a significant portion of my time spent working with computers as evidenced by the number of active research and teaching projects in which I am engaged. So any tool that can enhance my productivity in this area is greatly valued. Here is a sampling of the tools that I find useful in my day-to-day web development activities:
 |
Eclipse - an open development platform (eclipse.org)
|
 |
Mozilla Firefox web browser (firefox.org)
|
 |
Windows Vista Snipping Tool (windowshelp.microsoft.com)
|
 |
Microsoft Office OneNote (office.microsoft.com)
|
 |
Adobe Photoshop CS2 (adobe.com)
|
Happy website development, enjoy!
