Ron Jefferies, one of the inventors of Extreme Programming, and a man I admire very much, is working on an online book, Adventures in C#, of which the latest installment is Adventures in C#: Using NUnit, Be sure to check this out.
I’m reading the tutorial while at work, it looks like an excellent resource. The tutorial made sense to me, having some experience with JUnit on the Java side of things.
Adventures in C# also has some great info for applying eXtreme Programming to .NET.
CNet:
Sun Microsystems, which controls the widely used Java standard, said Tuesday that it will push out the delivery of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 specification until this summer. The J2EE 1.4 specification, which gives Java licensees the blueprint for building Java programming tools and server software, was set to debut in the current quarter.
The forthcoming J2EE specification incorporates Web services protocols, a set of standards and a programming method for connecting disparate computing systems. Adoption of Web services is accelerating as companies look for ways to lower the cost of sharing information.
Sun representatives said the company chose to push back the finalized J2EE 1.4 specification in order to comply with interoperability guidelines set forth by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).
Here is the announcement for a port of uClinux to the Apple iPod, checkout the project page for extra details. Currently the frame buffer, audio and IDE devices are working. Still plenty of work to do.”
From the FAQ:
1.2 Why would you do that?
A number of reasons but mainly because its there.
I was reading over the trackback page this afternoon and discovered that the current implementation of trackback is slighly different than it has been in the past. It looks like just a few changes need to be made to tblib in order to gain backward compatability.
Hemos attended Linux.Conf.Au while myself and others were converging on New York City:
I’ve just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I’ve had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I’ve been to since ALS was still operating. I’ve got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what’s the plan for next year (It’ll be in Adelaide, and I’m greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie’s write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne’s excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well.
This was the geekier of two simultaneous Linux conferences. LinuxWorld was the east coast biz Linux show, while the one in Austrailia had Linus. ‘Nuff said.
Charles Cook: “After writing a lot of C#, returning to C++ make me realize how unproductive C++ is.” – This has been my experience as well. I’m looking forward to the day when I can spend most of my time implementing code in C#.
This is so true. It’s painful to go back to C++ after coding for awhile in C#. It’s just so easy to do so many things. I’ll be spending a good bit of time in C# this semester, and for that, I am quite happy.
One of the most prolific and active developers of FreeBSD, responsible for a lot of the latest advances in the FreeBSD kernel, lost his right to commit code to the source tree. The FreeBSD Project didn’t give a solid reason on what lead them to this decision. Last year, OSNews interviewed Matt about his (truly immense) work on FreeBSD.
Ouch.
NewsForge points to a Linux World Australia article about Firebird:
When you think of open source databases, MySQL or PostgreSQL may first spring to mind. However, hot on their heels is Firebird, a relational database which has been a hotbed of development activity for the past two and a half years.
Although a worldwide development effort, Firebird does have an Australian flavour: the FirebirdSQL Foundation (Inc.), an international non-profit organisation, was formed in New South Wales late last year. To discuss the Foundation and the development project, LinuxWorld talked to Helen Borrie, a Firebird project admin and documenter who is based in the Central Coast.
Speaking of public keys, here’s a SourceForge announcement for GPGrelay:
GPGrelay is a small email-relaying server that uses GnuPG (the GNU Privacy Guard) to sign/encrypt (SMTP-Relay) or verifies/decrypts (POP3-Relay) emails. This enables many email-clients to send and receive emails that are PGP-MIME conforming. This release includes bugfixes and minor feature enhancements.
As I see it, the most practical uses of public key encryption in blogging are going to be securing all those other things that we’re currently relying on a lack of idots to keep safe: Trackback, this FOAF thing, communication to community servers, and so on.
I’m hearing this more and more. Sam Ruby thinks that signing might be involved in his email comments experiment:
Signing is the next step, particularly given that e-mail clients already tend to have built in support for this. Ultimately, when the spam starts arriving, only signed e-mails will be accepted.
SMaL Camera Technologies have today announced their new Ultra-Pocket 1.3-Megapixel digital camera, this builds upon the award-winning 6mm thin Ultra-Pocket® VGA digital still camera. It has the same credit card size of its predecessor, with only a slight increase in thickness due to higher resolution optics, plus a strobe flash and an SD card for expanded memory storage.
David Czarnecki has been hard at work on Blojsom. It is available on SourceForge, committed to CVS, and the javadocs and site docs are available.
Sam Ruby is experimenting with weblog comments via email. He’s got the proof of concept up and working. The rest will follow.
This is too cool. Sam Gentile gets the scoop from John Lam:
using Channels = System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels;
This is really nice if you have namespace conflicts and need to disambiguate your type references, or if you’re from the school of thought that says that you must always use fully qualified type names, but don’t want to obscure your code with giant namespace references.
This is a great little tip. I am in the process of committing this to memory.
Russ redesigned his site. I like it, even though I usually read it via RSS. Clean lines are good.
A sneak peek of some of the tracks and presentations for PyCon DC 2003 are available on the PyCon Wiki.
OSNews points to an InformIT article (free reg req’d) about writing a multithreaded GUI app with Python.
LinuxToday has this weeks Python-URL. There are a few interesting links, but nothing spectacular.
I think that’s about it, I’m pretty much caught up on Python stuff.
*Yawn*
I’m tired. I’m hoping to catch up on my feeds later this evening.
I’m unplugging for a bit. This Google News query will give you the most up to date (most recent news at the top). It looks like Google News passed its first major disaster, it was extremely helpful today.
I blogged my first entry today at school. It was eerie. I was in class, learning about Java, JSPs, Servlets, RMI, and all kinds of stuff like that while I was reporting the news. I don’t think anyone else surfed over to a news site. Nobody seemed to acknowledge what had happened after class. I just left quickly and quietly.
The only reason that I knew something was up was because of RSS and my aggregator.
The rest of the news entries today were done while at work. I only caught some TV coverage, but felt pretty informed.
Today is grouped together with a few days in my life that I can remember exactly where I was when something major happened: Challenger, Desert Storm, 9/11, and this. I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones that come to mind.
This is one of those days that is like JFK’s assasination for my generation.
We won’t know exactly what happened for quite some time. We may never know completely.
The first indication of a potential problem occurred minutes before 9 a.m. EST, when there was a loss of temperature sensors on the shuttle’s left wing, said Ron Dittemore, the program manager. During Columbia’s liftoff, a piece of insulating foam from the fuel tank was believed to have hit that wing.
Dittemore said the loss of the sensors on the left wing was followed seconds later by several other problems, including a loss of tire pressure and indications of excessive structural heating.
[…]
Military satellites with infrared detectors recorded several flashes as Columbia broke apart, according to a defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity. It was unclear whether those “spikes” of heat indicated an explosion, the burning of pieces of debris re-entering the atmosphere or something else.
[…]
In another room at Kennedy Space Center, O’Keefe met with the astronauts’ families, who had been waiting at the landing site for the shuttle’s return, spokeswoman Melissa Motichek said. Six of the seven astronauts were married, and five of them had children.
This is so sad. I’m sorry that this had to happen to these people and their families.
[…]
“When the countdown clock, when it got to zero and then started going, instead of counting down, counting up and they were still not there, I told my friend, ‘I have a bad feeling. I think they are gone.’ And I was in tears,” Barr said.