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.

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.

 Fast Company has a terrific cover piece this month about Jeff Bezos.
 My favorite part is when he talks about asking other people (experts, even)
 for their opinion about new projects.

 Inevitably, people say no. Don't do it. I don't like it. It'll fail.
 Don't bother.

 When I think about every successful project (whether it's a book
 or a business or a website) the people I trust have always given
 me exceedingly bad advice. And more often than not, that advice
 is about being conservative.

 The incentive plan here is pretty clear. If someone dissuades you
 from trying, you can hardly blame them for the failure that doesn't
 happen, right? If, on the other hand, they egg you on and you crash,
 that really puts a crimp in the relationship...

 I think the problem lies in the question. Instead of saying,
 "what do you think?" as in, "what do you think about Amazon
 offering 1,000,000 different titles even though some of them are really
 hard for us to get..." the question ought to be, "how can I make this
 project even MORE remarkable?"

I highly recommend you to read more of Seth Godin´s blog

I thought the sessions went well, considering that we were in a room off in a corner on a floor completely separate from the other conference events. Quite a lot of people showed up at the sessions I saw (standing-room only), and people seemed interested.

 This came up in conversation with a client today - the problem with
 projects is the equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
 The more control you want on their status (or position), the less you
 have over their velocity. Pick one of the two - and pick wisely.

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

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.

  "Are you still using a database?"

    Madeleine is a Ruby implementation of Object Prevalence:
    Transparent persistence of business objects using command
    logging and snapshots.

     http://madeleine.sourceforge.net/

          Hi,

          Just figured it was a good time to release all the good stuff I and
          Stephen Sykes have been preparing in the Madeleine CVS. YAML marshalling
          and snapshot compression should be the highlights for our existing
          users.

          Madeleine 0.7 (July 23, 2004):

         * Broken clock unit test on win32 fixed.
         * AutomaticSnapshotMadeleine detects snapshot format on recovery
         * Snapshot compression with Madeleine::ZMarshal
         * YAML snapshots supported for automatic commands
         * SOAP snapshots supported for automatic commands
         * Read-only methods for automatic commands

        If you're planning to use either YAML or SOAP marshalling, beware that
        there are objects and classes that Ruby's own Marshal can handle but
        these can't. You will have to try for yourself if your application
        works, both to make a snapshot and to read it back, with the marshaller
        you want to use.

                                  cheers

                                  /Anders

Sven C. Koehler has not had much time lately to add more languages or benchmarks, but it is an impressive collection of benchmarks. link

I always think of such measures as inferiority complex. People will listen to what is best, no need to purify one’s language. Evolution will win in the end anyhow. .. but doesn’t marketing power brainwash us? Yes, but vote with your money and buy the cds of the language you want to support.

How come some sucessful bands like "Wir sind Helden" still sing German in Germany? If you sing English, the audience is much larger .. where is the problem? It’s a good thing .. people can actually understand it.

Countries like France that try to push French even in scientific publication only shoot themselves in the leg and live in the past. Sorry, vive la belle France!

There are cultural differences between countries. The French are still more likely to buy a French car than Germans buying German cars.

Why does Europe not wake up and only use one official language? Already now with 11 languages we wasted 550 million euros per year on translation. 1,300 translaters translate 1.5 million pages a year. Now the budget will increase to 800 million euros.

BBC-story-Ukraine

BBC-story-Translation

P.S.: Do not

 gem install rails

if you have files in app

Update: David has fixed that bug, but it should teach us all a leson to keep using CVS/Subversion all the time.

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))

Make sure you also read the story about Crypto AG and the Iraq-Iran Conflict.

 The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already
 been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler,
 a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors
 in the encryption machines it sold to Iran -- at the request of the NSA.
 He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally
 released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for
 his freedom -- then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money.
 At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the
 relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

link

Last night there was once again spam in the Rubygems wiki. I guess we need to pass it through a Bayesian filter before committing changes or finally install CAPTCHA.

The problem with spam is .. people! Spam simply works .. and as long as spam works it will not stop.

On /. is an article that Wikipedia has now reached 300,000 articles! For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica’s 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.)

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