Yesterday I dropped into the Manchester Digital Laboratory (aka MadLab) in Edge Street for the MadLab Café Pancake Day, and enjoyed a couple of hours chatting to various friendly people while eating an extremely tasty pancake and drinking cups of tea (one of my favourite pastimes), and at one point even discussing Outkast's back catalogue.
MadLab describes itself as "a community space for people who want to do and make interesting stuff - a place for geeks, artists, designers, illustrators, hackers, tinkerers, innovators and idle dreamers; an autonomous R&D laboratory and a release valve for Manchester's creative communities." I'm not sure precisely where I'd put myself in that list - I've only been there a couple of times before, for the Python Northwest user group meetings - but the folks I met seemed to be a representative cross section of the target community.
There's a packed and eclectic schedule of (mostly free) events hosted there, which is well-worth checking out (see http://madlab.org.uk/events/), but their most recent new development is the Omniversity of Manchester - a programme of professional-level training courses that so far have covered experimental film making and physical computing with Arduino, with plans to extend to topics as diverse as web design, Ruby on Rails, writing workshops and urban gardening. These courses won't be free, but the fees will go towards keeping MadLab sustainable and supporting the other free events.
If you're interested in learning more then you can watch out a video, and register the subjects you'd like to see covered by taking a moment to fill in their survey:
Personally I think it's a really exciting idea - I'm generally a fan of courses, and many of the proposed workshops are things that I'd love to learn more about, so it would also be great to see the Omniversity take off and help MadLab expand and flourish as a focal point for Manchester's digital community - the more people who find out about it and get involved the better. And in the meantime I'll be looking forward to the next (undoubtedly tasty) MadLab café event.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Book review: "Simply SQL" by Rudy Limeback
Rudy Limeback's "Simply SQL" (Sitepoint) is an overview of SQL targeted at web application developers, and intended to fill a gap between the basic "SQL 101"-type tutorials (seemingly compulsory in just about every introductory article or book about web programming) and more advanced texts covering topics which at first glance don't seem so relevant to the straightforward day-to-day requirements of many web applications.
The chapters are grouped into two main sections. The first deals with the details of the SQL language and comprises the bulk of the book. It starts with a short introduction to the SQL commands most commonly needed by web developers to create and modify data within the database (all the usual suspects - CREATE, ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and so on - are quickly dealt with here). The rest of this section focuses on the SELECT command (the one used to retrieve information), with each chapter covering one specific clause - FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY and so on - in quite extensive detail, and illustrated with examples from sample applications.
The second section of the book has three chapters covering some basic database design concepts, specifically SQL data types, relational integrity, and the use of "special structures" (such as tables that refer to themselves) for particular situations. The appendices then outline the basics of using some specific SQL implementations, along with details of the sample applications and scripts used in the main part of the book.
The heavy emphasis on the SELECT statement might seem odd, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of web applications where data is typically read from the database far more than it's written. The detailed examples are also excellent - at times invaluable - for clarifying things like (for example) the nuances of the different types of JOINS, the subtleties of the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses (useful for aggregating data from subsets of rows in conjunction with summing and averaging functions), and the issues with working with time data. I certainly learnt a few things - the GROUP BY clause was completely new to me, as were the distinctions between the FLOAT and DECIMAL data types (DECIMALs are exact - within certain limits - while FLOATs are approximate). I found the brief sections on views, derived tables and subqueries extremely enlightening, as was the discussion of foreign keys in the chapter on relational integrity, and the clear writing style throughout made the book a pleasure to read.
It's important to note that "Simply SQL" is based on the SQL standard, rather than the syntax of specific implementations (although in places it does indicate where there are notable deviations from the standard, particularly for MySQL) - also it doesn't cover any of the programming APIs, so it's not really a reference text (admittedly it doesn't claim to be). However with its clear and detailed explanations it looks like it would be a useful companion to more traditional reference or cookbooks and will definitely reward re-reading - least ways, I'm sure I'll be squeezing plenty more juice out of it in the future. So overall highly recommended.
The chapters are grouped into two main sections. The first deals with the details of the SQL language and comprises the bulk of the book. It starts with a short introduction to the SQL commands most commonly needed by web developers to create and modify data within the database (all the usual suspects - CREATE, ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and so on - are quickly dealt with here). The rest of this section focuses on the SELECT command (the one used to retrieve information), with each chapter covering one specific clause - FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY and so on - in quite extensive detail, and illustrated with examples from sample applications.
The second section of the book has three chapters covering some basic database design concepts, specifically SQL data types, relational integrity, and the use of "special structures" (such as tables that refer to themselves) for particular situations. The appendices then outline the basics of using some specific SQL implementations, along with details of the sample applications and scripts used in the main part of the book.
The heavy emphasis on the SELECT statement might seem odd, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of web applications where data is typically read from the database far more than it's written. The detailed examples are also excellent - at times invaluable - for clarifying things like (for example) the nuances of the different types of JOINS, the subtleties of the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses (useful for aggregating data from subsets of rows in conjunction with summing and averaging functions), and the issues with working with time data. I certainly learnt a few things - the GROUP BY clause was completely new to me, as were the distinctions between the FLOAT and DECIMAL data types (DECIMALs are exact - within certain limits - while FLOATs are approximate). I found the brief sections on views, derived tables and subqueries extremely enlightening, as was the discussion of foreign keys in the chapter on relational integrity, and the clear writing style throughout made the book a pleasure to read.
It's important to note that "Simply SQL" is based on the SQL standard, rather than the syntax of specific implementations (although in places it does indicate where there are notable deviations from the standard, particularly for MySQL) - also it doesn't cover any of the programming APIs, so it's not really a reference text (admittedly it doesn't claim to be). However with its clear and detailed explanations it looks like it would be a useful companion to more traditional reference or cookbooks and will definitely reward re-reading - least ways, I'm sure I'll be squeezing plenty more juice out of it in the future. So overall highly recommended.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Don Knuth: BCS/IET Turing Lecture
Earlier this week was the annual Manchester BCS/IET Turing Lecture, and this year's guest speaker was Don Knuth. Possibly he's best known (at least to me) as the author of the seminal "The Art of Computer Programming" (a multi-volume book which he began in 1962, and continues to work on to this day - subvolume 4A is the most recently published, with another 5 sections still to come), and the typesetting system TeX (pronounced "tek", and used for typesetting countless Ph.D theses - including mine). However Knuth's contributions to computer science throughout his long career (he's now in his seventies) are staggering - as are his "extra-curricular" activities, which include writing novels and playing the pipe organ.
So it was quite an opportunity to be able to listen to this giant of computing first hand - even more so since rather than a straightforward lecture, this was actually a Q&A, with Knuth taking questions from the audience. After opening with a concise explanation of the significance of the number 885205232 (which I won't spoil by revealing here, since it's a puzzle in his book "Selected Papers on Fun & Games", other than noting that it involves Alan Turing's manual for programming the Ferranti Mk. I computer), Knuth fielded questions on various topics including: elegance in programming languages, the public's fear of computers, "busy beaver" numbers, the best way to teach programming to elementary schoolchildren, and whether an aptitude for programming is an art or a "genetic defect".
Throughout his answers were thoughtful, often surprising (for example, making a case for pointers in C as an elegant language feature), consistently interesting, and delivered with characteristic humour (Knuth was once published in MAD magazine, and is famous for the quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proven it correct, not tried it", amongst others). In response to a question about "what are we 'enabling the information society' to do" (a reference to the BCS's current mission statement), Knuth initially replied "to have jobs", before more seriously reflecting that "there's a long way to go improving what we already have at the moment."
Although Knuth's world of computing feels like it's a long way from the one I inhabit, it was a great privilege to see and hear such a legendary figure - in spite of his age he seems as lively as ever, both physically and intellectually, and still enjoying it - and his career is truly inspiring: when asked what he'd do differently if he had his time again, his reply was that he wouldn't change anything. "In my case," he said, "Murphy's Law hasn't worked - so many things that could have gone wrong didn't."
So it was quite an opportunity to be able to listen to this giant of computing first hand - even more so since rather than a straightforward lecture, this was actually a Q&A, with Knuth taking questions from the audience. After opening with a concise explanation of the significance of the number 885205232 (which I won't spoil by revealing here, since it's a puzzle in his book "Selected Papers on Fun & Games", other than noting that it involves Alan Turing's manual for programming the Ferranti Mk. I computer), Knuth fielded questions on various topics including: elegance in programming languages, the public's fear of computers, "busy beaver" numbers, the best way to teach programming to elementary schoolchildren, and whether an aptitude for programming is an art or a "genetic defect".
Throughout his answers were thoughtful, often surprising (for example, making a case for pointers in C as an elegant language feature), consistently interesting, and delivered with characteristic humour (Knuth was once published in MAD magazine, and is famous for the quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proven it correct, not tried it", amongst others). In response to a question about "what are we 'enabling the information society' to do" (a reference to the BCS's current mission statement), Knuth initially replied "to have jobs", before more seriously reflecting that "there's a long way to go improving what we already have at the moment."
Although Knuth's world of computing feels like it's a long way from the one I inhabit, it was a great privilege to see and hear such a legendary figure - in spite of his age he seems as lively as ever, both physically and intellectually, and still enjoying it - and his career is truly inspiring: when asked what he'd do differently if he had his time again, his reply was that he wouldn't change anything. "In my case," he said, "Murphy's Law hasn't worked - so many things that could have gone wrong didn't."
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