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On myth and religion in the incredibly ugly network   26 Apr 06
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Comop.lang.smalltalk excerpt between Joachim Tuchel and Andre Schnoor.
 Joachim Tuchel wrote:
 > >> ... Why on earth does it seem everybody believes that JBOSS or any EJB
 > >> environment will scale with no limits? After all, it's a bunch of Java
 > >> classes running in a JVM, just like seaside is a bunch of SMalltalk
 > >> classes runnung in a Smalltalk-VM....

 Andre Schnoor answered
 Marketing. The right buzz words and false promises within a perfect
 > opportunity window in history - and there you are. If something is new (I
 > mean so new that nobody can actually grasp it), hype and buzz sometimes
 > work like religion: You believe what you want to believe. You find
 > yourself spreading the word before you actually had a look at it. Suddenly
 > there are 5 million people chiming in, while only a mere 0,05% of them
 > really know what they are talking about. The big bang of myths.
 >
 > I ran rather large sites with 8 million+ monthly visitors and 7-8
 > Terrabytes of bandwith on a single 4 CPU Sun. Others required 16 Suns for
 > less traffic. It mostly depends on your database model and how frequently
 > users interact with content that is compiled "live" (not cached). The
 > basic application scripting doesn't account much to it.
 >
 >  From the perspective of a classic software engineer (and with an extra
 > bias towards German "Gruendlichkeit"), web technology in general is a huge
 > pile of complicated, heterogenous, incredibly expensive and annoying crap.
 > All that in-band signalling, all those stone age protocols and character
 > sets, quick & dirty hacks, spaghetti scripting,
 >   what-happens-next-machines ... think about how incredibly *ugly* this
 > network actually is  ;-)
 >
 > Seaside looks like a very beautiful and innovative thing. You should give
 > it a try.
 >
 >

.. Largo Argentino ..

Top ten lines of entrepreneurs   26 Apr 06
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Guy Kawasaki has a nice blog posting.

.. and here are the top ten lies of venture capitalists.

Croquet video   26 Apr 06
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Marcus Denker’s Seaside talk from 22C3 is available as video now: events.ccc.de/2006/04/21/gentlemen-fire-up-your-clients/

The file is called 22C3-599-en-seaside_squeak.mp4 (almost an hour, 346 MB).

The image used (This contains all slides as Squeak Projects): www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/talks/22c3.zip "Slides" as pdf (e.g. for printing): www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/talks/22c3.pdf

My favorite gem command   07 Apr 06
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This tiny command installs all the doc to all installed gems.
 gem rdoc --all

Then start the gem server

 gem_server

BSP on MPI   31 Mar 06
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BSPonMPI is a platform-independent communication library for developing parallel (SPMD) programs. It implements the BSPlib standard and runs on all machines which have MPI.

Great pics from Italy   31 Mar 06
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Anna, a big thanks for the link.

When will I next be in Italy? :-).

puf - Parallel URL fetcher   31 Mar 06
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puf is a download tool for UNIX-like systems. You may use it to download single files or to mirror entire servers. It is similar to GNU wget (and has a partly compatible command line), but has the ability to do many downloads in parallel. This is very interesting, if you have a high-bandwidth internet connection.

On debian:

  apt-get install puf

puf is one of these great commandline tools that one simply loves!

Zebra tables: making nicer tables with CSS   07 Mar 06
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Thanks to Sven C. Koehler for the link. It explains how to make zebra tables without needing to apply a CSS class to each tr.

Must read: Bjarne Stroustrup Interview about C++   03 Mar 06
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hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA000092/jokes/strup.html

Linkdump on CSS   02 Mar 06
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I asked Stefan for help on some CSS problems and here are the links that he recommended after fixing my problem:

www.dezwozhere.com/links.html

www.meyerweb.com/eric/writing.html

www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/resources/

www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/

Fun with Spotlight   01 Mar 06
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Thank to Sven C. Koehler for the following scripts. He uses spotlight to datamine the Enron email data :-).

# convertEnronEmail

 #!/usr/bin/perl -0p
 s/^M//gsm;
 ($date) = /^(Date: [^\n]+)/sm;
 ($from) = /^From:\s*([^\n]+)/sm;
 print "From $from @{[scalar localtime]}\n";
 s/\Z/\n/;

#enronEmailsForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 mdfind "kMDItemTextContent == '${1+"$@"}'" | grep /enron/

#enronGrep

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs grep ${1+"$@"}

#enronMailBoxForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs -n+1 convertEnronEmail

#enronThreadForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs cat

TimeSummer: new logo and some new features   01 Mar 06
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I managed to work a bit this weekend on TimeSummer. Timesummer is a simple RoR timesheet application.

A big thanks to Andreas for the new logo.

The logo reminds me of the "Blub Blub Spinat advertisement by Verona Feldbusch", but you probably do not understand that joke if you are not German :-).

New features:

  • Simple Excel export
  • Simple adding of historic data
  • Simple editing of existing data

The focus right now is on bug fixing and improving the design before we continue to add more features.

As usual enjoy it and make sure you send me any feedback, esp. bugs and wishes.

Active RBAC   28 Feb 06
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ActiveRBAC is a library for Ruby On Rails that provides a full stack for managing users and permissions. It runs as a Rails Engine and can be set up within minutes for your existing Rails projects.

Timesummer - a simple RoR timesheet   24 Feb 06
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Timesummer is a simple timekeeping application. It was written to make our life as a single remote cowboy programmer easier. The client did not only want working code, but also reports how time was spent. As keeping an excel list or a simple text-file is too much work, we wrote this tiny application.

Getting started:

  • Get a free account.
  • You book your time on accounts. So setup tasks (accounts)

The general structure is client.project.task. The client might be IBM, the project might be XRT and the task might be design. Then you can add t asks like IBM.XRT.testing, which would mean a testing task.

This client.project.task structure has the advantage that it makes it easier to run more complex reports on the data. How much data we do for client X? How much did we do on project Y?

Here we create the client BMW with project RoR and task design. If the client already exists, only the project and the task are created. If the client and the project exist, only the task gets created.

You can add tasks only to existing client.project.task combinations, but by entering IBM.XRT.testing, you automatically create the client IBM, the project XRT and the task testing if they did not exist before.

Starting/Stopping task

Enough! Some people got work todo! OK, it’s as simple as a cd-player. Press the start and stop button.

Task not running

Task running

This client.project.task structure has the advantage that it makes it easier to run more complex reports on the data. How much data we do for client X? How much did we do on project Y?

Enjoy timesummer, and please use the forms on the site to send us feedback.

ANN Ruby GetText-Package-1.2.0   24 Feb 06
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Ruby-GetText-Package-1.2.0 is now available.
 Changes for RoR
 ---------------
 * Works with rjs templates.
 * Add methods to change the error message dialog(?) title/explanation.
 * Bugfixes.
 * Added GetText.Nn_().

rubyforge.org/projects/gettext/

View rendered source chart -- Firefox extension   23 Feb 06
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Jennifer Madden has released an amazing firefox extension:
  • Creates a Colorful Chart of a Webpage’s Rendered Source Code
  • Displays Source in its Altered State After the DOM has been Manipulated by JavaScript

Source charting …

  • Clearly Defines Nested Containers
  • Easy Way to Identify Structure and Hierarchy
  • Great Visual Aid Tool for Learning Environments
  • Intuitive and Efficient Way to Analize Source
  • Dramatically Enhances Your Debugging Capability

Book Review: Math You Can't Use   22 Feb 06
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A new book showing the madness of patents. Don’t forget that Fourier transformations are patented .. even though they were invented ny Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier living 1768-1830.

Prototype cheatsheet   20 Feb 06
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Jonathan Snook has posted some nice cheat sheets/desktop backgrounds on Prototype 1.5.0_pre0.

ANN Switchtower 1.0   19 Feb 06
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SwitchTower is a utility that can execute commands in parallel on multiple servers. It allows you to define tasks, which can include commands that are executed on the servers. You can also define roles for your servers, and then specify that certain tasks apply only to certain roles.

Manual: manuals.rubyonrails.org/read/book/17

Project: rubyforge.org/projects/switchtower

Download: rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1014

Install: gem install switchtower

SwitchTower 1.0 fixes several bugs and adds many new features.

Using Selenium to test asynchronous calls   19 Feb 06
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Great read
 >Luckily, Selenium has a feature that is horribly documented: waitForValue,
 >which you can use in the test case directly, and waitForCondition,
 >callable in a JavaScript-based extension. Using a combination of these,
 >you can make your Ajax call and wait for any condition that should happen,
 >such as the DOM changing or values updating.

 

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