| The Open Source Paradigm Shift
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Tim O’Reilly) In a nutshell Tim tells us that a fundamental
change is happening and if we want to benefit from it we should think hard
about the implications. The "three Cs" — long term trends
- software as Commodity
- network-enabled Collaboration
- customizability and software-as-Service
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| [ANN] FreeRIDE 0.7.0 Released!
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25 Sep 04 |
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Curt Hibbs posted it to ruby-lang.
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.
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| Pictures Diary by Cedric Le Foll
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25 Sep 04 |
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By accident I came across this great blog by Cedric Le Foll.
Enjoy it.
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| CleverCS: computer science ideas
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25 Sep 04 |
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Thanks to Sven C. Koehler for the interesting link.
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| Open Source Risk Management Insurance
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25 Sep 04 |
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Not sure what to think of this. I would
really like to know how they worked out the yearly membership costs. They
are the same group that think that the current linux kernel as to worry
about 283 patents, where about two thirds of them are held by Linux
non-friendly companies like Microsoft.
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.
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| Natural Language vs. Computer Language
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Toivo Deutsch, xp-ML) This is exactly what David Ungar’s
talk at Oopsla 2003 was about. (See www.smalltalkconsulting.com/html/OOPSLA2003d4.html
for some notes)
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.
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| Maybe you shouldn't ask
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25 Sep 04 |
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I found this entry on Seth Godin’s blog
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 Godinīs blog
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| Ruby for the Web: The Arrow Web Application Framewor
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25 Sep 04 |
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I’ve posted the slides from my session "Ruby for the Web: The
Arrow Web Application Framework" on Arrow’s project page
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.
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| Heisenberg principle of projects
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25 Sep 04 |
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At Incipient(thoughts) blog I
tound this nce quote:
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.
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| No one gets fired ..
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: The Register) The old saying goes that you can’t be fired
for picking IBM in a major IT rollout. This theory, however, does not seem
to apply to other vendors of elevated status - namely Cisco and SAP.
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)."
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| New blog: Alexander's Weblog: The world and beyond
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25 Sep 04 |
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There is a new blog about economics, the world, politics and other
interesting real life stuff. Written by a German working in Bangkok. link
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| Rapid Application Development with Mozilla
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25 Sep 04 |
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This Prenticall Hall book by Nigel McFarlane can now be downloaded complete
from the internet: www.informit.com/content/downloads/perens/0131423436_pdf.zip
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.
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| ANN: Madeleine 0.7
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25 Sep 04 |
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sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=74624
"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
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| OObench
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25 Sep 04 |
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OO-Bench compares the speed of the same object-oriented tasks in several
object-oriented languages. It also has a statistics tool (written in Java),
which can be used to easily compare the speed of the several versions of a
given benchmark
Sven C. Koehler has not had much time lately to add more languages or
benchmarks, but it is an impressive collection of benchmarks. link
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| Ukraine joins France .. no Russian pop music allowed in the bus!
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25 Sep 04 |
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Local Ukrainian politicians have now drafted a language law which would
take away the licences of bus drivers playing Russian pop music.
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
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| Good customer service
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25 Sep 04 |
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I wish my bank, my tax office and most of all my mobile phone provider
would do that! Good cuomster service pays off. Good case story
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| PowerPoint Is Evil
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Wired, Edward Tufte) Information design guru Edward R. Tufte
argues that PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes
content while ignoring the most important rule of speaking: Respect your
audience. www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
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| Rails 0.65 is out!
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25 Sep 04 |
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Enjoy.
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.
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| Tristan: Schwimmen und Schweigen!
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25 Sep 04 |
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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))
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| Cryptogram: Breaking Iranian Code
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25 Sep 04 |
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Good as always: link
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.
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