One thing I found interesting about his talk that I managed to relate to XP was when he talked about how humans have "normal" level to categorize things. For example he showed a picture of a tree. Whenever people see a picture of a tree and you ask them what it is, they say "tree", not "maple" or "plant". There seems to be a "middle" category that the mind tends toward.

Traditional software development takes either a top-down or bottom-up approach to categorizing things. That is we don’t start at the natural middle abstraction and work our way up or down the hierarchy.

I was wondering if when we take a TDD approach to design, we can manage to start at the natural middle level and then refactor to generalize or specialize as we need to.

 Potential Corporate SCO Defendants

 For those organizations threatened with legal action by SCO, the Legal
 Defense Center is the one, central source for objective information
 regarding common issues faced by all potential SCO defendants. Based
 in Washington DC and comprised of a carefully-selected Panel of
 highly-specialized Intellectual Property legal experts fully-briefed
 on the intricacies of the case, the Legal Defense Center provides
 unmatched legal and defense resources. Membership in the program is
 $100,000 annually and provides resources to its members that
 would cost in the millions if developed independently.

 Linux Kernel Developers

 Individual contributors to the Linux kernel gain access to the
 full resources of the Open Source Legal Defense Fund including
 guidance on how to best protect and defend their own intellectual
 property rights. They also receive $25,000 in legal protection
 from OSRM if they are named in future lawsuits involving their
 contributions to the Linux kernel. Membership for individuals
 is $250 annually.

 Version 0.7.0 of FreeRIDE has been released and is available for download!

 For details and downloads, go to:

    http://freeride.rubyforge.org/

    Many bugs have been fixed and there is also a bunch of new features
    (Experimental code Refactoring, Preferences plugin available, Debugger
    fully functional on Linux and Windows...)

    The Window's version still runs FreeRIDE with its own private copy of
    Ruby (that will not interfere with your installed version), but this
    private copy of Ruby is now version 1.8.2 preview 2.

    Linux users will find both a tgz and a rpm file ready for use with
    your own copy of Ruby.

    === FreeRIDE Overview ===

    FreeRIDE aims to be a full-featured, first-class IDE on a par with
    those available for other languages, with all the best-of-breed
    features that you would expect in a high-end IDE.

    Some of FreeRIDE's features include:

    * Multi-file editing
    * Syntax highlighting
    * Auto-indenting
    * Code Folding
    * Source navigation by module, class, method, etc.
    * Integrated debugging
    * Written in Ruby for easy extension

    Some planned features include:
    * Full internationalization
    * High-end refactoring support
    * Remote pair programming

    In its current state, FreeRIDE cannot yet be called a real IDE. What
    is does have is a stable infrastructure with all the working plumbing
    needed for the hordes of anxious Ruby developers that want to create
    plugins to extend the functionality of FreeRIDE. The FreeRIDE team
    will be working on such FreeRIDE plugins that we will individually
    release to incrementally improve the FreeRIDE system. Periodically we
    will rollup these added plugins into new releases of FreeRIDE.

    Even if you have not officially joined the FreeRIDE team you can still
    create plugins for you own use, share them with others, or send them
    to us and we will make them available for download from our project
    wiki. We may even ask for your permission to include them in the
    FreeRIDE core distribution.

XUL can give a richer widget than HTML. For a nice application look at the www.infodraft.com/~faser/mab/ Amazon browser. The author says on its webpage: 6/03/2003 I discovered XUL some months ago, when I found the O’Reilly’s book "Creating Applications with Mozilla", freely available at books.mozdev.org/ . I started to read the book and I understood that in my daily web development I could use all widgets I’m used to have in desktop applications. When I develop Content Management System, Control Panel, and Web Administrative tools, I find myself spending a lot of time designing the interface to reproduce the most basic widgets. Things like resizing the columns width of a data grid, make the application usable with the keyboard, scrolling result list with arrow keys, creating tab panels and so on, are not a so simple task in web development. I have to write or find somewhere a lot of javascript library and I waste my time in designing the basic interface when I want to focus on the business logic. I think web applications (that are a different things from public web site) should have a powerful user interface similar to the ones on desktop programs. XUL have almost all widgets. You can customize them using simple CSS or the GUI inherit the browser theme. I remind you that Mozilla is not just a browser, but a complete framework for building cross-platform applications. A big part of Mozilla is made with the same technology you can use in web applications: Javascript, CSS, XUL.

If uncertain about the dress code, also enjoy today’s Dilbert

What’s a day without Dilbert and UF?

• it seems to become more and more of a trend in the last 5 years: for the EM the wives and girl-friends of the Russian team took a nude photo session, for olympic games 2000, Australia’s women soccer team, the Dutch tean, Katie Vermeulen in the August Playboy, etc.
• I really liked the words on Bridgette Starrs photo. Yes, I like the photo, too :-), as two friends have commented at once.
• Yes, sex sells. It is really sad if the female athletes feel the necessity to pose nude for raising money.

It’s sad if the athletes feel it necessary to pose nude to raise money.

Make sure you read the motto on the picture.

rubyforge.org/projects/net-ssh

Version 0.0.2 brings the implementation to full compliance with the SSH2 protocol, since you can now use ssh-dss key types.

The most significant new feature is a limited implementation of the SFTP protocol. Only a subset of the features of SFTP are implemented, namely directory enumeration, and getting and storing files. More features are coming.

The SSH protocol itself is asynchronous, so the "core" implementation of the SFTP protocol (Net::SSH::SFTP::Session) is also asynchronous. However, a synchronous version (useful when you don’t need multiple channels open simultaneously) is also available (Net::SSH::SFTP::Simple).

Until Ruby 1.8.2 is released, you need to also install the patched version of the OpenSSL module for Ruby (also available from the Net::SSH site). Ruby 1.8.2 will include the patched version of OpenSSL, though, so once you have installed you’ll need nothing else to run Net::SSH.

A Cisco purchase gone wrong has cost San Jose, California’s CIO Wandzia Grycz her job. Grycz exited her CIO post earlier this week just ahead of an audit release detailing the city’s findings on a recent computer and phone network installation proposal. Grycz has publicly denied that she allowed Cisco to craft the nature of the IT contact.

…

A new $51m computer system has had so many bugs that city officials can’t get the technology up and running at all. And the culprit looks like SAP.

"We find problems on a daily basis, and part of that is getting the (computer) system to work for us," Diane Supler, budget director in Tacoma told the Associated Press. "Every time we think we’ve identified all of the issues, something else happens in SAP (the system software)."

link

Registration and Infopage

high-resolution version

So, lets talk about SQLites handsome features:

• SQLite is swift. In my own testing, I have found it to be speedy. Some speed comparisons with MySQL and PostgreSQL are here.
• SQLite is not a large database server, such as MySQL. You dont connect to the database. Using SQLite, you access a database file. Everything happens in-process.
• SQLite is an ACID database. Supports transactions, triggers.
• SQLite is public domain. Absolutely no licensing issues.
• SQLite is typeless. Any type or length of data may be stored in a column, regardless of the declared type. This allows extreme flexibility and avoidance of type errors.
• SQLite allows custom functions and aggregates. This is my favorite feature of SQLite, which we will explore shortly.

link

Rails is an open source web-application framework for Ruby. It ships with an answer for every letter in MVC: Action Pack for the Controller and View, Active Record for the Model.

Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files. Like Basecamp, which was launched after 4 KLOCs and two months of developement by a single programmer.

Enjoy the Show, dont tell! 10 minute setup video (22MB).

Have fun with Ruby .. says a tired Armin right now coding simple cgi-stuff without any frameworks :-)

This is the inital announcements for Arachno Ruby on this newsgroup.

Arachno Ruby IDE is a commercial IDE that is currently available for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. A Linux version will follow later this year.

The most important feature is the integrated debugger which is the first debugger not based on "debug.rb" and which allows to debug GUI’s, Interactive Console Applications and Web Applications.

For the later it comes with a full integrated local apache environment that is started and stopped behind the scenes, whenever you open/close a project. It is possible to set breakpoints in CGI and ERuby (.rhtml) scripts and single step through the code.

The editor has some convenience features based on Emacs and the Delphi CodeRush IDE plugin like stack based markers (Control-Enter drops a quickmark, ESC goes back), one key copy/cut, incremental search, autoindentation, good syntax highlighting (handles even nested heredocs) and a mixture of tiled/tabbed window handling.

www.ruby-ide.com/download_ruby.php

 have a look at googlism.com and type bush or chirac or armin roehrl :-)

I came across this on why the lucky stiff’s blog.

 georg nussbaumer
 Tristan: Schwimmen und Schweigen!
 piano, mezzo soprano, tuba, bass drum, cymbals, 4 video screens,
 location:  indoor swimming pool (swimming audience (optional))

We’d like to share what the Internet sounds like when it sleeps, and in its current highly agitated state, we think it’s worth sharing. www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34227.html

 I had posted this 6 months ago, but the link has changed.

The world is changing, and it’s changing faster than we think. Programmers are going to have to move up the value chain, and move up fast, if they are to keep their jobs in the coming years. The recession isn’t helping, as its effects are masking a significant underlying trend. When the recession ends, the truth is going to scare folks who aren’t prepared.

slides

India lags far behind China in Internet numbers - just 17 million people are online, according to IDC. But it is a growth market - Internet subscribers are expected to reach 30 million in 2006. link