Anatomy Of A Debian Package
Google engEDU
56 min – Jul 21, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 21, 2006

Jonathan Oxer is the founder and technical director of Internet Vision Technologies in Australia, as well as the current president of Linux Australia, the national organization for Linux users, developers, and vendors. He is one of the authors of O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks.

ABSTRACT
Learn about the internal structure of Debian/Ubuntu packages and how to create them, starting with disection of a binary package and then going through the process of creating your own package using various build helper scripts to automate much of the process. Read the rest of this entry »

HTML forms Next Generation
Google engEDU
53 min – Mar 5, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 5, 2007

ABSTRACT

Web-based replacements for spreadsheets and simple forms

By Dave Raggett, W3C Fellow and Principal Researcher at Volantis Systems.

The ability to collect data from users and to submit it to servers has become a very important part of the Web. Forms are often supplemented by Web page scripts that enable the data to be checked as the user is filling out the form and before sending it to the server. These scripts can get quite complicated to develop and to maintain, making it interesting to explore ideas for replacing such scripts by equivalent declarative approaches.

XForms-Tiny is an incremental extension of HTML4 forms that can be deployed on today’s Web browsers using an open source cross-browser JavaScript library that works on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2, Opera 9, Konqueror 3.5, and Safari, When delivered via HTTP as a compressed file, the download size is only 6 Kilo Bytes.

XForms-Tiny provides authors with the means to use simple JavaScript expressions for validating field values and spreadsheet-like formulae for computed fields, but also the means to describe repeating groups of fields, e.g. for line items in a purchase order. XForms-Tiny further provides for suppression of irrelevant parts of forms and context dependent control over which fields must be filled out. All this is possible without the page author needing to write any lines of client-side script.

This talk will present XForms-Tiny and place it in the context of related work (Web Forms 2.0, XForms-Basic, and XForms full) as well as the challenges for dealing with the small displays on mobile devices.

You will also learn about new approaches for browser-based editors that avoid the pitfalls of designMode and which are paving the way for a replacement for spreadsheets, browser-based editing of slide presentations and much more.

If people are interested and there is time available, I could also give a brief summary of the impending W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications working group that applies markup and eventing to simplify the development of distributed applications across a wide variety of network appliances including desktop computers, office equipment, home media appliances, mobile devices (phones), physical sensors and effectors.

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/html-forms Read the rest of this entry »

Gears and the Mashup Problem
Google engEDU
44 min – Sep 20, 2007

Google Tech Talks
September, 20 2007

ABSTRACT

Mashups are the most interesting innovation in software development in decades. Unfortunately, the browser’s security model did not anticipate this development, so mashups are not safe if there is any confidential information in the page. Since virtually every page has at least some confidential information in it, this is a big problem. Google Gears may lead to the solution.

Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Douglas Crockford is the world’s foremost living authority on JavaScript. He is an architect with Yahoo’s Ajax Strike Force. He is the founder of two startups, and was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm Ltd., Director of New Media at
Paramount, and a researcher at Atari and SRI. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Recruit, Motivate, and Energize Superior Test Engineers
Google engEDU
59 min – Nov 9, 2005

Google Tech Talks
November 9, 2005

Jeff Feldstein

ABSTRACT
The expectations today are for increasingly high-quality software, requiring more sophisticated automation in testing. Test and QA teams must work more closely with development to ensure that this sophisticated automation is possible. This has lead to software engineers applying creativity, talent and expertise to not just application development, but testing as well. This transition from manual to scripting to highly engineered test automation changes the way we recruit, hire, motivate and retain great test engineering talent.

The speaker uses examples of how his team at Cisco changed the way it tests over the past six years. In this class, he’ll review eight points for why test is a better place for software developers than software development, and he’ll show how and when to express these points to hire, motivate and retain top talent. You’ll see how to inspire greater innovation and creativity in your testing processes, and how to manage and inspire test and development teams that are spread across different locations. You’ll also learn the place of manual testing in the new environment. Read the rest of this entry »

From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Oct 3, 2007

Google Tech Talks
October 10, 2007

ABSTRACT

We describe a new approach and a course that aims to demystify the integrated function of computer systems, using a hands-on approach. The course presents many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system from the ground up. In particular, we guide the students through a modular series of projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy, yielding a surprisingly powerful computer system.

The hardware projects are done in a simple hardware description language and a hardware simulator supplied by us. The software projects (assembler, VM, and a compiler for a simple object-based language) can be done in any language, using the APIs and test programs supplied by us. We also build a mini-OS. The result is a GameBoy-like computer, simulated on the student’s PC. We start the course (and this talk) by demonstrating some video games running on this computer, e.g. Tetris and Pong.

Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is — more than anything else — a triumph of human reasoning. We are able to squeeze all this into a single course since we deal with neither efficiency nor advanced features, leaving these subjects to other courses in the program. The resulting approach is completely self-contained, requiring only programming as a pre-requisite. Hence, courses based on the approach can be given at almost any stage in a CS program. Read the rest of this entry »