Billy Corgan now claims that the breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins was James Iha's fault.
I really liked believing that the breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins was due to everyone agreeing that they had made their mark on the world and needed to move on. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case - it sounds like Billy and James had some sort of pissing contest, and nothing good came of it.
Listening to the breakup announcement again, when Billy went to KROQ on May 23, 2000, it's interesting to hear Billy speaking about how he wanted to "end on a good note" with the entire band. This was certainly true - the Pumpkins went through a lot - drugs, Billy's mother passing away, members leaving - and still managed to put out great music.
Truthfully, I think Billy should have continued to keep quiet. Now is the perfect time for him to make news - he wants to branch out as a solo artist. Whatever, we'll see.
On another note, our new Web site was featured on The Weekly Standards today.
Whenever I work on group projects in computer (science|engineering) classes, I always debate whether to ask my fellow developers to use CVS.
Ever since I started using CVS at work, I've realized that I can't program without it. It's useful for almost any work I do on my computer - including digital design labs, numerical analysis homework, and so on. I haven't put my entire life in CVS, but I'm close. (If I were to consider putting my home directory in CVS, I would first consider moving to Subversion.)
On group projects, I weigh the advantages and disadvantages of asking fellow students to use CVS. If I see a lot of code sharing happening, or it's a large group, I try to push for it - as long as it's understood that no one commits broken code. All of the logistical headaches of group development go away - there's no sending files back and forth over email and no confusion over which version we're all working from. Just a simple cvs up, and I have everyone's latest code.
The problem comes in introducing new users to version control in general and specifically to CVS. It was admittedly difficult at first, but I quickly became comfortable with the common commands. I try to give examples of how CVS will save your ass, and how it makes collaboration easier. Sometimes people welcome the idea, while other times I just get blank stares.
Asking others to use CVS also leads me to consider other students' build "process". Too many of my peers are accustomed to typing javac *.java, followed by java MyClass to compile and run their code. While not strictly necessary, build tools such as Ant and make greatly speed up development.
To prepare students for industry this situation absolutely needs to be improved. Training in standard version control and build utilities should happen at the undergraduate level, before we are on the job. Version control is mentioned in passing in our software engineering course, as are build tools, but I don't recall the instructor mentioning them more than once.
Using these tools does not require students to switch platforms, with the availability of great CVS frontends like TortoiseCVS (and TortoiseSVN for Subversion) and WinCVS. The difficulty comes in establishing a CVS repository for students, since that is not a "common" task when using CVS. It's also not all that easy to set up a repository on Windows, and not everyone has an always-on connection that allows them to host a repository.
Nathan and I discussed the idea of a department-wide (or university-wide) repository at one point. We decided that using CVS would probably be a bad idea due to its reliance on filesystem permissions (managing users and groups would be difficult) and its ignorance of binary files. Ideally, this repository would use GatorLink authentication, and would (automatically?) handle students who are part of a specific class and group. In other words, a specific repository would only allow access to GatorLink IDs of members in my group of CEN 4500C for Spring 2004. Turning in a project would be simple for the professor or TAs: just cvs tag everyone's files at the exact time it's due. Then, checkout based on that tag when grading.
There are obviously some issues with setting up a department- or university-wide repository. The main one is computing resources - mostly disk, but CPU and memory also need to be considered. Another is authentication - GatorLink is backed by LDAP, I believe, so plugging that in hopefully wouldn't be too difficult. Associating GatorLink IDs with courses and teams within a course is probably the one area that hasn't been dealt with at UF, though getting a list of GatorLink IDs registered for a course is apparently pretty standard. A little bit of glue code, and this shouldn't be too difficult.
Using version control, in my opinion, should not be optional at this level. We are supposedly professionals, and all the professionals use version control in one form or another. Many of our professors have been in industry before teaching - surely they collaborated with their peers.
I've been reading about infrared - more precisely, near infrared - photography. If you're curious about what this is, take a look at some of these articles:
The first article goes into a lot of depth about near infrared digital photography. I found this especially interesting:
Unlike ordinary films, most CCDs turn out to be quite sensitive to the near infrared (NIR) in the 700-1200 nm (0.7-1.2 µ) range - so much so, in fact, that the CCDs in digital cameras are usually fitted with special internal IR cut filters designed to reduce IR contamination in visible light work. These CCD-mounted filters vary in their IR transmission spectra, but most consumer-grade digital cameras let enough IR through to allow at least some near IR photography.
Some of the pictures in that article, and these pictures on PBase, have gotten me really excited about photography again. Now I just need to find a digital camera that I can afford and can use to experiment with infrared photography.
I unfortunately don't often remember to watch the Daily Show, so thanks to Lisa Rein for this. (Via Boing Boing.)
Spooks is one of my favorite TV shows. I was introduced to it by A&E's MI-5, but always preferred the BBC version because it was longer. Series 3 is apparently filming, and will be released in the fall!
I thought I'd managed to avoid it, but I finally received spam on AIM. The message was sent by someone authorized to talk to me, so my privacy settings had nothing to do with it. The message looked something like the following:
<span style='background: #FFFFFF;'><span style='font-family: Times New Roman; color: #000000; font-size: medium;'>check this out: <a HREF="http://some.website/osama_capture.php?$$$">http://some.website/osama_capture.php?$$$</a></span></span>The real link includes www.wgutv.com somewhere in there, probably supposed to look like a real TV news company's site.
Melanie tracked it down to a company called BuddyLinks (www.buddylinks.net). They have a screen name "removal" tool on their Web site, which I won't be filling out since I don't trust the company.
The sites related to this spam are registered to:
Drew Williams
1770 Mass. Ave #213
Cambridge, MA 02140
US
Phone: 6176614664Email addresses include: support@wgutv.com and support@buddylinks.net.
Believe me, if I continue to get AIM spam, I will be tracing this back to Drew Williams' hosting providers. Email is next to useless because of spam. ICQ failed in part due to spam. AIM doesn't need the same problems.
There's a lot of people with iPods on campus these days. I'm still surprised that people use the earbud headphones that come with the iPod - I didn't find them very comfortable, even with the the foam. They also sounded a little tinny, but good for earbuds, I guess. I'm even more surprised that people just hold them in their hands while walking. I'm clumsy enough that I'd probably drop mine.