FreePop is a computer game based on the classic Populous I and II games by Bullfrog Productions. It is currently in development and aspires to be a great improvement on the original games, being a fitting gift to the open source community, as well as a part of the open source community.

freepop.sourceforge.net

OK, So What’s Populous?

For those of you who were trapped in a small dark room during the late 1980’s and 1990’s, or otherwise similarly deprived, Populous is a series of games developed by Bullfrog Productions which created the god-sim genre. The premise is that you (the player) and your opponent (AI or human) are gods or equivalent deities, and you battle each other using your powers - such as the summoning of natural disasters and the ability to coax the will of your followers - in order to destroy the followers of the opponent. The winner is the god with remaining followers.

Some shots of Populous II:

freepop.sourceforge.net

The amazing thing is that it is soooo true :-).

Dilbert on meetings: link

.. transfering to couch tech support: link

In default mode, glark highlights matches and file names. glark.sourceforge.net/index.htm

(Seen in ‘agileprojectmanagement’ post by "Bob Corrick" <bobcorrick@hotmail.com>…)

www.lean-service.com/6-news-11.asp#2

 "Toyota Japan rejects ISO 9000"
 "My thanks to Takaji Nishizawa, a leading industrial consultant in
 Japan, for this item:

 >>
 "The following was reported in Nikkei Business. Nikkei Business is
 published weekly and one of the most popular business journals in
 Japan.

 "In October of 1999 it featured a three-week series about ISO 9000
 problems in Japan. In the articles it said that Toyota decided not to
 get ISO9000 because it saw no value in terms of quality and thus saw
 no need to register.

 "The decision had been made after the Shimoyama factory, which is an
 engine plant, had registered to ISO9001. When introducing new things,
 Toyota's philosophy is to test actually before installation rather
 than discuss on the desk. The Shimoyama factory had been selected as
 a test plant.

 "And after the test, Toyota concluded there was no value in ISO9000
 registration."

 There was a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia (over 10 years ago) who
 reported the observation that a company that manufactures concrete life
 preservers could maintain their ISO-9000 certification so long as they
 followed a documented process for notifying the next of kin.

Ron Jeffries posted:

 My limited experience is that many companies who go ISO do so for
 one or both of these two reasons:

 1. They are a supplier to a company that requires it;
 2. They believe it will improve their ability to market their
 products or services.

 I am sure there are companies that go ISO in order to improve, but
 I've not personally encountered one. (I did once encounter a company
 whose CEO had promised the board to get to CMM 2 by some date, IIRC
 as a response to low quality from his software teams.)

www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SturgeonsLaw.html

Changes: A plug-in to show spelling alternation of the search phrase was added. A bug in the search server was fixed

estraier.sf.net

 > http://www.teamellen.com/ellen-article-2380.html
 > Early this morning, one of the Sony VAIO laptops that power
 > the critical information systems onboard B&Q - including
 > routing and navigation software - suffered a meltdown. The
 > VAIO's have survived 70 days without a glitch, despite continual
 > pounding onboard B&Q but last night's storm was the last straw
 > for one of the two hard disks. At 0750 Charles Darbyshire,
 > Technology Manager, received a call to report the failure and
 > just seven minutes later, MacArthur had replaced the hard disk
 > with a pre-start mirrored backup unit, re-configured the software,
 > and was up and running again - preparation counts!

www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/index.html

This URL points to the place where I’ve dumped my thoughts about building, packing and distributing Ruby applications. Theory and practice. The ultimate goal is to be able to distribute just one executable which contains both the application and the Ruby interpreter.

That’s achieved by the combination of Tar2RubyScript [1] and RubyScript2Exe [2].

It’s definitely worth reading if you have to distribute your Ruby applications!

gegroet, Erik V.

 [1] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/tar2rubyscript/index.html
 [2] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html

www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/official-struts-demise

As announced in the Apache News Blog that there will be no further work to develop Struts 2.x.