link

Nice slogan, too .. "Isn’t it nice when things just work?".

  I don't have a sample contract. The times I've worked this way the contracts
  have been verbal, not written.

  There were some comments about what to call these contracts. One analogy I
  found with the help of Greg Betty at Intelliware is "target costing". Target
  cost product development starts with a target cost (a $400 digital camera,
  for example). From that you can figure out how much you can pay to
  manufacture the product. The goal is to pack as much functionality as
  possible into the product given the price, either by reducing the cost of
  components or the cost of assembly. This process is called value
  engineering. I think Bill Wake's ideas about unbundling point to an
  effective way to do this in software development.

  You could write a target cost software development contract by specifying
  how much the contract would cost, along with the quality levels/practices
  and the process for choosing scope. The difference between fixed cost and
  target cost is that fixed cost contracts imply that the scope is fixed,
  while target cost contracts explicitly float the scope. One thing I like
  about target cost is that choosing scope is a value-added activity where
  choosing scope in fixed cost contracts is a transaction cost (the principle
  of opportunity at work).

  Kent Beck
  Three Rivers Institute

  #!/bin/bash
  lout -s <<END_OF_TEMPLATE | gv -
  @SysInclude{doc}
  @Document
  @InitialFont { Palatino Base 11p }
  //
  @Text @Begin
  @Verbatim @Begin
  @Include{"$1"}
  @End @Verbatim
  @End @Text
  END_OF_TEMPLATE

Then, the topic shifts to the problems of project management as Johanna tries to answer a tough question such as, "What is the greatest mistake you see project managers do most often?" which leads into an interesting discussion about multi-projecting and why it can pose a problem for your projects. Also, more interesting advice from Johanna emerges when asked to give advice for new team-leaders/managers Johanna also talks about her new book: Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds. And why she wrote it in the first place. To finish it all off Johanna answers one of the questions each project manager should ask themselves every once in a while: "What is the worst mistake youve done as a manager?"

Johanna Rothman is a well-known consultant, speaker, and author on managing high-technology product development. During her decade-long consulting career, she has enabled managers, teams, and organizations become more effective applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management. Shes helped Engineering organizations, IT organizations, and startups hire, manage, and release successful products faster. Her assessment reports have helped managers and teams create and execute action plans that help them improve their projects and their processes. She is a sought-after speaker and teacher in the areas of project management, people management, and problem-solving.

link

The key to become a good hacker is to work on what you love! :-)

 Finally, after what seemed to be an endless series
 of release candidates, I am happy to announce the
 final release of version 182-14. Happy New Year!

 This release of the One-Click Ruby Installer for
 Windows is built from Ruby 1.8.2 final. It includes
 OpenSSL, and upgrades RubyGems and FreeRIDE to their
 latest versions.

 You can download this release from:
 http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167

 Curt

 Changes Since 1.8.1-13:
 - This is a build of Ruby 1.8.2 final.
 - Added start menu shortcuts for the RubyGems
 RDoc Server, and for viewing the RDoc of
 all installed gems.
 - Added OpenSSL 0.9.7e
 - Added RubyGems 0.8.3
 - Added FreeRIDE 0.9.2
 - Updated FXRuby to 1.2.2
 - Upgraded Ruby-odbc to version 0.994
 - TCL/TK support no longer sets any environment
 variables.
 - Corrected missing OpenGL support.
 - Added Start Menu shortcuts to documentation
 on ruby-doc.org.
 - Eliminated the installer dialog message that
 warned you might need to reboot your system.
 This allows for unattended installs using the
 command-line arguments:
     /S /D=<install dir>
     - Changed the layout of the Windows registry
     entries.
     - Fixed a typo in a windows registry entry
     (bug 643).
     - Upgraded Expat to version 1.95.7
     - Upgraded DBI to 0.23

The Linux Virtual Server as an advanced load balancing solution can be used to build highly scalable and highly available network services, such as scalable web, cache, mail, ftp, media and VoIP services. link

 ruby -i.bak -pe 'sub "2004", "2005"' *

Stefan suggested:

 find . -print | xargs ruby ...
 :-)

This program allows you to record the output of any standard OSS program (one that uses /dev/dsp for sound) without having to modify or recompile the program. It uses the same idea as the esddsp wrapper from the Enlightened Sound Daemon (in fact, vsound is based on esddsp). That is, it preloads a library that intercepts calls to open /dev/dsp, and instead returns a handle to a normal file. It also intercepts ioctl’s on that file handle and logs them, to help convert the audio data from its raw form. Vsound then uses sox to convert the raw data to the desired file format.

The upshoot of this is that instead of playing sound to the sound card in your computer, the data is recorded to a file. This is similar to if you connected a loopback cable to the line in and line out jacks on your sound card, but no DA or AD conversions take place, so quality is not lost.

One use of vsound is to help convert real audio files to some other format. Since the real audio format is proprietary, and all we have is a player, we can use the vsound to create a wave file like so:

 vsound -t -f /data/dvdburn/LL2/s2.wav  realplay rtsp://18.39.0.30/ailab/mit-ll2-s2-09nov02-80k.rm

  ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.2-preview4.tar.gz
  md5sum: 2f53d4dc4b24e37799143645772aabd0

  The final 1.8.2 will be out on December 25th (JST), unless any
  critical bugs will be found.
                                      matz.

www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html

Apparently, this has been believed by many as a hoax, and so has been linked to the famous Alan Sokal hoax (the paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity").

However I think it’s more like: a serious article written in a tongue-in-cheek style and talking about an unusual topic.

Other authors i know who are writing about postmodern programming, are Larry Wall (Perl) and Richard Gabriel (new online book "Patterns of Software"). These days I am attempting to read the latter.

Richard Gabriel’s work on software patterns, and for that matter, all the work on software patterns for the last decade, has been tremendously influenced by a book supposedly on Architecture (!!!), by Christopher Alexander, called "The Timeless Way of Building".

Both C.Alexander and R.P.Gabriel spend a lot of time on an elusive concept they call "Quality", which I immediately connected to Robert Pirsig’s "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1976), a classic I finally read this year. The connection between the two is quite large (Pirsig’s book even more revolves around that "Quality" thing). It has to do with attempting to define the undefinable, in particular, those aspects of a thing that make it good and/or beautiful but that, trying to approach them from a formal standpoint, slip through our fingers.

There are a bunch of other interesting aspects (IMHO) in all of those texts.

Logo:

It comes with Gnome 2.8 and a 2.6 Kernel. The overall install was amazingly simple. Download it.

Was heute in der "Bild"-Zeitung steht, steht morgen ueberall. Vielleicht sollte man sich also mal genauer anschauen, was sie schreibt. Die kleinen Merkwuerdigkeiten und das grosse Schlimme.

link

Using Ruby and SQLite to create Linux clusters that take advantage of idle nodes and bypass expensive software solutions.

My friend Dave Clements always is game for a brainstorming session, especially if I’m buying the coffee. Recently, we met at the usual place and I explained my problem to him over the first cup. My office had a bunch of Linux nodes sitting idle and a stack of work lined up for them, but we had no way to distribute the work to them. Plus, the deadline for project completion loomed over us.

Over the second cup of coffee, I related how I had evaluated several packages, such as openMosix and Sun’s Grid Engine, but ultimately had decided against them. It all came down to this: I wanted something leaner than everything I’d seen, something fast and easy, not a giant software system that would require weeks of work to install and configure.

After the third cup of coffee, we had it: Why not simply create an NFS-mounted priority queue and let nodes pull jobs from it as fast as they could? No scheduler, no process migration, no central controller, no kernel mods—simply a collection of compute nodes working as fast as possible to complete a list of tasks. But there was one big question: was accessing an NFS-mounted queue concurrently from many nodes possible to do safely? Armed with my favorite development tools—a brilliant IDE named Vim and the Ruby programming language—I aimed to find out. link