News

This week, Steve's been getting all paternal over new software. The excitement! The worry! The odd bout of nausea! It's all in Steve's latest post about delivery new software.

Read the post at AskSteve!

The Architecture of Open Source Applications volume II is now available (with all royalties being donated to Amnesty International). Edited by Amy Brown and Software Carpentry's Greg Wilson, the first volume provided case studies of 25 successful, open-source products including Audacity, Eclipse, CMake, Hadoop, and Mercurial. Each case study explains how the products are structured and, importantly, why the structure was chosen. Volume II adds another 24 case studies, including Git, PyPy, Firefox and SQLAlchemy.

Both volumes are available online and from epublisher Lulu. In the spirit of openness, both volumes are freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.

Our collaborators at SoundSoftware.ac.uk are running SoundSoftware 2012, a one-day workshop on 18 June 2012 in London on "Software and Data for Audio and Music Research" which will include talks and discussions on issues such as robust software development for audio and music research, reproducible research, management of research data, and open access.

The new look Ariadne magazine for Information Professionals was launched yesterday. It featured an article from Simon Choppin, one of our Agents, about the Collaborations Workshop.

"On the 21 and 22 March 2012 I attended a workshop which was unlike the stolid conferences I was used to. In the space of two sunny days I found I had spoken to more people and learnt more about them than I usually managed in an entire week. Presentations were short and focused, discussions were varied and fascinating, and the relaxed, open format was very effective in bringing people from differing disciplines together to consider a common theme. In this case the theme was software, and whether you used or developed it, there was plenty of food for thought."

To read the full article, visit the Ariadne website.

What we've been reading: "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" a fascinating and easy read - backed up with lots of evidence - for anyone interested in learning the truth about software development.

Over at AskSteve, the eponymous Steve answers a question from this year's Collaborations Workshop: what shouldn't you do when developing software?

Want to know more? Read the post.

Do you already have a little experience working with e-Infrastructure? Perhaps you find yourself engaging with clouds or grids for the first time? Ask yourself this: wouldn’t it be good to get practical advice and hands-on support for deploying e-infrastructure in your work?

"The summer school was a relaxed and friendly environment. The staff were very approachable and keen to show an interest in the attendees work. Overall it was a great experience I would recommend to anyone who has an interest in grid/cloud/HPC or who's work may benefit from such technologies. Thanks for a great course" - an attendee of last year's summer school.

If you want to know more, visit the summer school's website.

Steve Crouch's slides from the Advanced School on Scientific Software Development (February 2012, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste) are now available on SlideShare.

Two sets of slides are available:

1. Adopting open source software for longer term reuse
2. Managing sustainability into software (originally presented at the Digital Social Research workshop)

EPSRC have put out an invitation to participate in a workshop on 31st May to map the activities in the UK that currently support software as an infrastructure and find out where the gaps and challenges lie.