Thanks to long weekend and more quiet time in last couple of days (Happy 140th Birthday, Canada!), I managed to read something else than Ruby-ism/Rail-ism. Among others, I finished the Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, a book promising to explain why software is hard.
It is pretty tough question to answer. The way this books tries to address it is following the story not very well known open source project named Chandler through it's beginning over period of 3 years. Chandler was - and still is - developed by the OSAF - Open Source Application's Foundation, founded (and financed) by Mitch Kapor, who was before the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of the "Ur-spreadsheet" Lotus 1-2-3.
An interesting article on JavaLobby caught my eye today: Do .NET Applications Run Better on Java?
Normally, knowing the not exactly impartial focus of the Java centric site such as JavaLobby or theserverside.com, one should be careful when reading how much Java outperforms .NET. The bias works the other way too - just look at the Theserverside.net or other .NET centric side how much is C# superior :-). With that in mind, I looked at the technical report.
One thing that is on my Someday/Maybe list for quite some time is to get some off-site storage for my digital images. They are reasonably safe on RAID-5 NAS with a copy on USB disk, but what is missing is off-site copy. At minimum, a remote backup, ideally with an UI resembling something like Aperture or Photoshop Elements or Shoebox: photo organizer with Web intefarce and remote storage. So that in addition to have offline backup I would have an option to work with images from any location.
I have spent last two days (and few evenings before) playing with Rails and using Netbeans Ruby IDE. What a great experience ! Unlike before, it is so much easier to have really good debugger that allows put breakpoints not only into the Ruby code in controllers and model - but even into the RHTML view files !
Netbeans team works hard on improving the tool. With latest build - 2434, I have noticed great addition - Rails console. The IDE had IRB window even before, but the environment did not load the Rails context and would not recognize e.g. ActiveRecord. Now with latest build, everything works like charm.
The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes
What is so worthy mentioning on this obvious stament, describing fate likely shared by many thousand or milions of software developers worldwide ? Not much, only the date. According this book (which is a pretty good read btw),
Sir Maurice came to the sad realization mentioned above in the year 1949.
As seen in the video at http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/IDT2RMJNvSA#searchkeywords
The source code:
Very good explanation is in the video mentioned above. So far so good - unfortunately the technique, however cool it is, does seem to work in Firefox only. Or at least it does not work in the still most prevalent browser on the Net.
Here is how it renders (properly) in Firefox (tested with 1.5)
and here is how it looks in IE7:
Today's blog of the day is not really a blog, but a screencast. Dedicated to Ruby on Rails, the Railscast offers (as of today) 46 episodes of short, targeted practical advice on various aspects of Rails development.
Unlike some other screencasts who try to record the screen action as MPEG movie, this one is perfectly legible. In addition to the Rails enlightenment, you can also enjoy the speed and aesthetics of using TextMate - with many great Ruby editing shortcuts and beautiful OS-X typography.
Judging by the number of hits, Joel (and myself) are not the only people who would like to see nicer, better and faster MSDN documentation. As a very nice surprise, some of the feedback came directly from the people than actually can do something about it - like Darren Parker from Microsoft and Anand Raman from the Sandcastle project. Rob Relyea suggested and interesting looking tool based on XAML.
Thanks everybody - it is always nice to find out that even really big companies listen to the developers and want to address the problems. It almost feels like OpenSource experience where (it was few years back) we have encountered an issue in one of many Java templating libraries, posted to discussion group a question and few hours + several emails later had patch for the bug from the library creator :-). But back to the topic.
Did it ever happened to you that you were using some tool day after day - and never realized it's pretty big deficiencies ? Until somebody, coming from different background pointed out what everything is wrong with the tool ? Before that moment of revelation, the issues were just inconvenience, but right after that they became real annoyance ?
Exactly this happened to me last week and the credit for pointing out what is wrong with MSDN documentation (and the "standard" .NET documentation format in general) goes to Joel :-)
Today's Blog Of The Day is named Strange Maps, which strangely accurate name. If you have are into maps, or information visualization - or combination of both, do NOT visit this link, because you risk sticking there for few hours :-).
Some ideas presented are quite original and wonderful: for example the map of the USA, having instead of names of the states name of the countries with same GDP as the state. You will find out that Canada == Texas, France == California and Hungary == New Mexico. Or a transposition of the map of Europe and map of Middle Earth - this places Rohan to southern Germany (not a bad match), Isengard is Hamburg. The Mordor ended up in Transylvania with Mount Doom in Romania, Minas Morgul in Hungary and Minas Tirith approximately in Austria.