Tuesday March 20, 2007
On The Margins(Masood Mortazavi)
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John W. Backus
Today, The New York Times carries an obituary to John W. Backus, of the "Backus | Naur form" notation and the lead of the IBM team who brought us Fortran. Many a scientific computing wizard will today salute Mr. Backus for what he and his team accomplished. While the need for new programming models was dire in the 1950s, a move by Backus to initiate an applied research program to invent a higher-level language led to a revolution in software. The first Fortran team worked on the language from 1953 to 1957. ("The first written reference to 'software' as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958," according to The NYT.) In my experience with Fortran, I join many others who used this first-generation higher-level language to do useful things, including much scientific research. I wrote my first toy computer program, which calculated the first 1000 primes, in Fortran. Later on, I wrote Fortran programs to calculate temperature profiles in three dimensional body embedded in a heated environment, to study dispersion and diffusion of particles in turbulent flows, to investigate the dynamics of particle-particle collisions and systems, and to perform direct numerical simulations of fluid flow and vortex-vortex interaction in an infinite body. In short, in the mid 1980s, I spent many hours doing scientific programming in Fortran. (Some of this work got its way into my masters dissertation and other to my Ph.D. dissertation. Much of it remained at the level of pure investigation and study.) Note: For a modern progeny, see Fortress.
2007-03-20 08:59:43.0 --
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Railing about Rails
While I may rail about Rails here, you could do something more useful by consulting
Peter Schow on how to get Rails 1.2 up and running on Solaris 10 with PostgreSQL, and by checking it out and sharing on Open Solaris. Alternatively, for another Web 2.0 development environment, consider Phobos.
2007-02-04 22:54:51.0 --
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Scrum and Sprints
Scrum is a light-weight agile software development process composed of Sprints, during which the next release of a system is being developed. To read about Scrum see ControlChaos and MountainGoatSoftware. (MountainGoatSoftware's Scrum page summarizes things quite nicely in the first paragraph on the top.)
2007-01-21 20:43:13.0 --
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TDD
The cost savings and efficiencies of Test-Driven Development (TDD) should be clear not just to any hardware engineer but also to software and other engineers, system designers and developers. In fact, even when we imagine we are developing without a test, we implicitly have some kind of test in mind: We build systems in order to elicit specific responses to specific stimuli (tests?) upon those systems. Most software developers know how a good test can drive their work, particularly when the system is complex with multitude of constraints and also when there are volumes of existing tests to detect regressions. Peter Marklunds describes TDD with Ruby in some detail.
2007-01-17 23:00:34.0 --
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Statistics on Open Source Projects
Now, we have places to go to for open source project statistics. For example, see the Ohloh statistics for Apache / Derby.
2006-12-21 19:10:43.0 --
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Power Javascripting
jMaki means business with power Javascripting and more, including Phobos. If you know your stuff, you'll check them out!
2006-12-07 16:50:53.0 --
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Innovation Communities and Open Source Software
For a brief but a very useful history of open source software, see chapter 7 ("Innovation Communities") of Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation (also available online) under Creative Commons ("Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0") license. Von Hippel underlines the user-based innovation communities and presents open source communities as a prime example.
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Brevity
Having been raised on spinach, many may end up hating it.
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Just for the Record
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Another Law Blogger
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Test, Test and Test Again
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The Whole Point of the Dictionary
Really, I don't even want to know
all the string methods; it's kind of like knowing every
word in the dictionary. I can speak English
just fine without knowing every word in
the dictionary... and isn't that really the whole
point of the dictionary? So you don't have
to know what's in it?
-- Chris Pine
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Open Source Licenses
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A Nice Little Introduction to Programming
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Open Source Mantras
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Equal, But Not Equal Before The Law
2006-07-16 15:27:46.0 --
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The Mind of the Maker
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., in his essay The Mythical Man-Month, refers to Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker. Sayers divides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, the interaction. The idea stage occurs outside of time and space. It represents an ideal of what is to be made. The implementation stage occurs in the confines of time and space and has to come to grips with the limitations of the medium used to realize an implementation. The interaction stage begins when that which is made arrives at the hands of its users. Brooks notes that the medium of implementation for programming has proved relatively tractable compared to that for other creative work. This tractability, along with the positive, theoretical aspect of the idea stage, Brooks takes to be the sources of over-optimistic estimates in programming projects. Brooks' other important insight has to do with the simple fact that not all "men" are equal and that not all tasks can be partitioned into perfectly parallel pieces whose accomplishment requires no communication among those who work in parallel. In fact, addition of resources to a project often pushes its delivery date farther back.
2006-01-29 18:01:16.0 --
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Gonzales vs. Google
FindLaw has posted U.S. Department of Justice motion against Google. (You might want to check FindLaw's Law and Internet pages.) Among other things, Gonzales is asking Google to turn over "a multi-stage random sample of one million URL's," and "the text of each search string entered onto Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)." The Internet, is the greatest distribution, copy and search machine in the world.
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Open Source Jahrbuch
If you know German and want to read an European perspective on Open Source, you might consider turning to the Open Source Jahrbuch 2005. (This link comes courtesy of Craig Russell, a.k.a. the father of JDO, who also just recently led an Apache project of the same name out of incubation.) The Jahrbuch, in its 498 page length (available for free in parts as well as in whole), touches on everything related to open source: case studies, technologies, economics, political and social aspects, open content and open innovation. The chapter on economics, contains a paper on the use of open source as economic signal and a paper on standardization and open source.
2005-12-19 17:42:03.0 --
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Good Time To Support Creative Commons
If there was a good time to support Creative Commons, it might be now. Does this mean that even with all the wide use of Creative Commons licensing by the public, on the web and on many weblogs, actual financial support is required to grant non-profit status to Creative Commons dot Org?
2005-10-09 10:37:33.0 --
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DisclaimerI work at Sun Microsystems. The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.Coordinates
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