Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: January 28, 2003

  • XP Bashing

    TheServerSide did a little bashing of eXtreme Programming this morning.  If you’d rather not apply XP and pair programming to your project, take a few things out from the XP philosophy (use Ant, integrate continuously, generate tests, etc) and apply it to a traditionally managed project.

    I think you can get a lot out of taking just one or two things from the XP philosophy.  Even if you’re one programmer on an assignment, generate tests and run them constantly.  Use JUnit to test your Java stuff, other test frameworks for other platforms.  Think about giving the customer something useful quickly, then adding features.

    You might not be pair programming, but it just might help.

  • News Briefs

    Here’s a quick lunchtime roundup from my RSS feeds:

    • Mark would like to have quickies like this or his ‘in brief’ posts autogenerated.  Me too.  It’d be nice to have a section of autogenerated links at the bottom of each day (or something like that)
    • Rael is posting to his Blosxom blog with NetNewsWire Pro
    • CK Sample has a mini-review of the 12 inch Powerbook
    • Ingo wants to write a .NET column, and get paid for it!
    • Diego notes that Microsoft forgot to patch some boxes.
    • PC Linux Online notes that there is a new Gnomemeeting release.

  • Mitnick on Kojo

    Kevin Mitnick was on the Kojo Nnamdi show this afternoon on WAMU.  I’ve got two words after hearing the interview/Q&A session:

    Social Engineering.

  • PyXML 0.8.2

    PyXML 0.8.2 has been released:

    Version 0.8.2 of the Python/XML distribution is now available. It should be considered a beta release. The Python/XML distribution contains the basic tools required for processing XML data using the Python programming language, assembled into one easy-to-install package. The distribution includes parsers and standard interfaces such as SAX and DOM, along with various other useful modules.

    From my limited experience, the built-in XML tools that ship with the Python Standard Library are quite good.  Of course, I’ve been parsing extremely small and simple files, and I’m sure it could be done more efficiently.

    I haven’t had a chance to check this package out, but I’ll let you know if I do.

  • New Apple Hadware

    Slashdot:

    Same old ‘scary cyclops’ quicksilver face. Up to 1.42 Ghz, FireWire 800, 802.11g and entry-level pricing has dropped.

    MacNN:

    Apple today announced speed-bumped Power Mac G4s, featuring up to dual-1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processors. The updated Power Macs also feature FireWire 800 and offer internal support for 54Mbps AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless networking. Based on Apple’s Xserve (up to 2MB of DDR Level 3 cache and 333 MHz DDR memory), the new Macs offer up to 21 gigaflops (21 billion floating point operations per second) of performance. The Macs bundle both iLife and QuickBooks for Mac New User Edition. The 1GHz Power Mac G4 ($1,500) and dual-1.25GHz Power Mac G4 ($2,000) are available now, while the dual-1.42GHz Power Mac G4 ($2,700) will be available starting next month.

    • single 1GHz G4/133MHz bus/256MB PC2100/60GB/Combo drive/Nvidia GeForce4 MX — $1,500.
    • dual-1.25GHz G4/167MHz bus/256MB PC2700/80GB/Combo drive/ATI Radeon 9000 Pro — $2,000
    • dual-1.42GHz G4/167MHz bus/512MB PC2700/120GB/SuperDrive/ATI Radeon 9000 Pro — $2,700

    Mac Rumors has similar information, announcement of a 20 inch LCD, as well as some discussion on the new hardware.  Mac Rumors also reports that OSX 10.2.4 and iLife are due out soon.

    • Axis

      Sam Ruby:

      InfoWorld: The Internet owes much of its success to a core infrastructure that is free and commoditized. The Apache Axis project’s gift to the world is a powerful, high-performance, open-source Web services stack.

      Go Axis!

    • Commercial Weblogs

      Ed Cone:

      This [weblogs at Jupiter Research]  could be very useful to me. It’s a great commercial use of weblogs.

    • WSIF

      WebServices.Org:

      The Apache WSIF (Web Services Invocation Framework) team is proud to announce the first open release of Apache WSIF. A WSDL-based API for invoking WSDL-described services. With WSIF, developers work with the same programming model regardless of how the Web service is implemented and accessed.

    • Apache 2.0: I’ll Wait for the Modules

      NewsFactor has the obvious story about why Apache 2.0 is not widely adopted yet:

      Another reason Rackspace is not rushing to switch is the lack of module support for Apache 2.0. Many of the standard modules used with Apache 1.3, such as PHP and mod_perl, are still considered “experimental” in the latest version. According to Elmendorf, “Apache is great, but it really serves as a platform to build all this other stuff on…. When you look at a core module like PHP not being supported, there’s no rush getting into it.”

      [via NewsForge]

    • FreeBSD Fun Stuff

      Dru Lavigne has some really cool FreeBSD tips and tricks.

    • The effect of RSS On Design

      Dane Carlson redesigned his weblog.  (I like it btw)  This begs the question:

      If a redesign happens and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?