Archive for January, 2008

In Leopard, Apple has introduced a new mechanism for managing and maintaining your system path ($PATH).
Previously (and in most current Linux environments) paths were managed by updating the PATH environment variable directly in either the system profile (/etc/profile) or your local profile (~/.bash_profile).
Commonly you had entries like:

export JAVA_HOME = /usr/lib/j2se/jdk1.5.0_13/
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
[...]

I’ve been working my way through Working Effectively with Legacy Code and one of their strategies for testing classes has particularly hit home.
Situation

You’ve fixed a bug in a method that lacks any test cases and is not easily incorporated into a test harness.
More often than not this method is private (because we all test our [...]

From the Google Blog:

The contest said to “Innovate or Die” – and Team Aquaduct lives! In fact, the San Bruno, California team – consisting of John Lai, Adam Mack, Brian Mason, Eleanor Morgan, Paul Silberschatz – is living in grand (prize) style today after winning the first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine contest.
The contest encouraged [...]

A friend just pointed out a post over on Wired Science that talks a bit more about Google’s (previously) announced plans to begin providing infrastructure to enable scientists to more easily share and collaborate on large volumes of data.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Giving scientists access to large volumes of data is [...]

There was an interesting post (by David Brady) included in the most recent dzone.com email that discussed the notion of Dishonest Programming.
The last sentence does a decent job of summarizing the author’s thoughts:

Any time you feel yourself being clever, ask yourself a key question: are you being deceptively simple, or simply deceptive?

In my mind it [...]

The other night I sat down and spent some time playing around with Hadoop.
What follows here is based on my brief understanding of the project and one nights worth of experience
Hadoop is an Apache Lucene project that provides an open-source implementation of MapReduce. MapReduce is a programming model emphasizing parallel processing that has [...]

thesixtyone is a music discovery game that rewards those who help others listen to good new music.

If you’ve ever seen digg.com, this is essentially a music equivalent. Artists upload music, listeners vote, and gradually songs make their way up the chart. Very Web 2.0 (in a good way).
I’m sure there are others [...]




  • Pet Peeve: Don’t email my password to me in plain text You know the drill. Signup for some random service on the internet Receive a confirmation email with your account information or Forget a password for some random service ...

  • Eclipise Memory Analyzer (MAT) I must say the Eclipse Memory Analyzer looks pretty slick. There is some pretty good material over on the developers blog. Lastly, there was a talk on it ...

  • Open-source Web-based Code Review Tool: Rietveld Guido van Rossum, of Python fame, has recently released a Django-based application that enables web-based code reviews... Rietveld. It supports any language and currently can hook into Subversion repositories. You ...

  • An implementation of the JVM in Javascript? Caught this over on JavaPosse Google Groups. Essentially, some bright fellows over in Japan have developed a bytecode->javascript compiler. There's a demo floating around that took a Tetris ...

  • Facebook Chat? So it looks like the Facebook Chat service has finally started rolling out to my network (Facebook Chat has been mentioned previously). Not quite sure how ...





  • RSS Twitter Feed

    • Meetings all day, no time to hit the gym. Guess I better go now.... 6:30am.
    • Played around with Fring for a couple minutes tonight, Skype seemed to work (if only to call a test account of mine). 3G would be nice! :)
    • Watched nick and norahs tonight. Have to admit that it was pretty funny. Two weeks until W, wonder what that's going to be like.
    • Locly is a pretty sweet location-based app for the iPhone. Should have busted it out last week in Seattle.

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