Tag: Software development
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Search Engine on CBC
This probably isn’t news to many people by now but CBC’s Search Engine will not be returning in the fall. What a loss. To me Search Engine is a great example of what a radio show and Podcast can be. The show had strong audience participation and felt almost more like a blog post than…
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End-to-end in standards and software
Two things. Both relate to Microsoft but that is just by coincidence. The first Apparently IE8 will allow the HTML author to specify the name and version number of the browser that the page was designed for. For example, the author can add a meta tag that says essentially “IE6”. IE8 will see this tag…
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Linus on distributed version control and Git
Recently Linus Torvalds did a presentation at Google about distributed version control. This is a great introduction to distributed version control if you have wondered what the big deal is. Unsurprisingly, the presentation also spends a considerable amount time talking about Git and picking on CVS and Subversion.
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The Future of Computing
The Future of Computing: From mainframes to microblades, farewell to GHz CPUs provides a nice overview of trends in CPU and system design. I have a couple of comments to add. When in late 1950s computers became fast enough to relieve some of the coding burden from the shoulders of programmers high level languages were…
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Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken
If you follow many software or computer science related blogs you may have already seen the article linked below. I’m going to link to it again anyway because everyone who is involved in software should read it. Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken The general lesson…
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Using exceptions properly
Avoiding Java Exception Abuse
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Software as speech
Well, my sense of software is that it’s something that is both speech and a device, depending on how you define it. When you talk about software as speech, many good things tend to flow from that. When you use software as a device you can get into great benefits and also fairly scary issues.…
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Software analogy
Inside Risks is the last page column in Communications of the ACM. The Inside Risks column in the September 2005 issue, written by Barbara Simons and Jim Horning, discusses how hard it is to get non-technical people to understand why writing bug-free, and more importantly secure software is so hard. The article offers a nice…
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Alan Kay quote
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort – but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each…
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LQL#
Work has begun on the long promised Mono (C#) bindings for LQL. This little C# program will display traffic statistics for all of the queueing disciplines that are supported by the C LQL library. using System; using LQL; class MainClass { public static void Main(string[] args) { Gtk.Application.Init(); LQL.Con con = new LQL.Con(); GLib.List ifList…