Dorothy and Christopher joined me in Minneapolis, MN. During the days I attended ICSE, while they went off to visit the Mill Museum, the Mall of America, and other attractions. Overall it was a nice, clean city to visit, at least during the spring. I’m guessing there’s a really good reason that the downtown buildings are all connected to each other by walkways.
I presented a formal research demonstration at ICSE last week. The demo highlighted Spotlight, our research prototype for software plans. Software plans are like architectural plans of a building in that they allow programmers to work on semi-independent aspects of their programs in semi-independent views, then later integrate them to create the final system. You can check out the latest version of Spotlight, which is built in the Eclipse IDE here.
Let me know if you’re using WordPress 2.0.x and are having trouble with my Category Order plugin. One thing to try is to change this:
function get_category_by_slug($slug) {
$categories = get_categories();
in category_order.php to this:
function get_category_by_slug($slug) {
$categories =
$wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->categories ORDER BY cat_name");
Amber Gardner at UVa was nice enough to go ahead and upgrade Christopher’s software to the Fidelity 120 strategy recently released by Advanced Bionics. This strategy emulates 120 virtual channels on 12 physical electrodes by modulating the voltage between two adjacent electrodes. The quality is supposed to be a lot better, especially for music.
It’s great that we’re able to get the upgrade now. This means that he’ll have the new processing strategy for 2 months before we participate in a study in Madison, WI. Tina Grieco there is studying the language acquisition of kids with one versus two implants.
I’ve released a new version of the Category Access Wordpress 2 plugin. This plugin allows the blog maintainer to restrict access to posts belonging to particular categories on a user-by-user basis.
New changes:
Download it on my code page.
Lately Christopher has been amazing us with his understanding of abstractions. Dorothy showed him a puzzle piece that showed just the eyes and forehead of a horse, and he said “neigh”. Yesterday they were drawing circles on a page and he said “ball”.
I guess this is the first step toward being amazed by your kids. 