Give 1. Get 1.

One Laptop Per Child -- XO Giving: "Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time in North America. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home. If you're interested in Give 1 Get 1, we'll be happy to send you a reminder email. Just sign up in the box to the left and you'll receive your reminder prior to the November 12 launch date."

Open standards that will allow avatars to roam from one virtual community to the next.

Free the Avatars - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog: " I.B.M. and Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, think it’s time to free the avatars.
...
I.B.M. also hosted a meeting on Tuesday in San Jose with a group of companies and some university researchers to discuss open standards for virtual worlds and plans for establishing an organization to promote the technologies needed for an interoperable 3D Internet. The companies included Cisco, Google, Linden Lab, Sony, Intel, Multiverse, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and others."

rdbms

No time to read this in detail -- but you might find it interesting.

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Language-MuldisD/lib/Language/MuldisD.pm

Do your webtools suck?

Perhaps I should give zope3 another chance!

zope3	10.0
catalyst	9.8
cherrypy	9.8
caml	9.2
c++	8.8
plone	8.5
python	8.4
django	8.3
turbogears	8.1
ruby on rails	7.8
c	7.3
zope	6.2
perl	5.7
lisp	5.4
pascal	5.3
php	5.2
java	4.9
j2ee	2.6
asp	1.9

Courtesy of www.sucks-rocks.com

... furthermore, this article [1] (and more persuasively the 60min mov video) also made me wonder about giving zope another whirl...

[1] - http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2006/03/10/framework-comparison-video/

Noted Linux kernel and Novell developer Greg Kroah-Hartman will be devoting all his time to helping create Linux drivers.

"...
'It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out,' Kroah-Hartman said. As of this September, 'It turns out that over 100 different developers offered up their services. Clearly this was a huge untapped group of talented people who wanted to help out.' And, 'the number of companies expressing interest in this has exceeded all of my wildest expectations. Already this announcement has caused a number of drivers to end up in the main Linux kernel source tree, with more in the pipeline.'
...
"
-- Full speed ahead for Linux drivers

Tutorial D

Simoens and I had a conversation about Tutorial D. It's a relational language that you folks might find interesting.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification)

http://dbappbuilder.sourceforge.net/Rel.html

Kick Mike! (or Google)

No wonder I haven't been seeing any new posts in google reader! The f'n url changed!

First one to put a Kick Me sign on Mikes back gets $10...

Can Your Team Pass The Elevator Test?

This is a snip from coding horror;

Can Your Team Pass The Elevator Test?

Software developers do love to code. But very few of them, in my experience, can explain why they're coding. Try this exercise on one of your teammates if you don't believe me. Ask them what they're doing. Then ask them why they're doing it, and keep asking until you get to a reason your customers would understand.

What are you working on?
I'm fixing the sort order on this datagrid.

Why are you working on that?
Because it's on the bug list.

Why is it on the bug list?
Because one of the testers reported it as a bug.

Why was it reported as a bug?
The tester thinks this field should sort in numeric order instead of alphanumeric order.

Why does the tester think that?
Evidently the users are having trouble finding things when item 2 is sorted under item 19.

If this conversation seems strange to you, you probably haven't worked with many software developers. Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, it might surprise you just how many times you have to ask "why" until you get to something-- anything-- your customers would actually care about.

It's a big disconnect.

Dismissing the Myths

Python: Myths about Indentation

If you "just don't like it", that's perfectly OK, but other than personal preference gripes, quit yer bitchin' !!!

The fine line between abstraction and obfuscation

Most of the books out there that teach OO design talk about Abstraction, but they don’t warn about Obfuscation at all. Its a shame.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2007/09/24/a-fine-line-between-abstraction-and-obfuscation/

PacketGarden - Grow a garden from network traffic

I know that Mike S. has always wanted the terrain in games to have a stronger correspondance to the network/hardware that's running them. Seems like this is very similar:
http://packetgarden.com/

New Name

Since the clu6 doesn't ever meet for 3reakfast anymore... I decided to change the name of our blog. Hope you all like it!

One of the Blessed,
M.

Read online

This may be old news, but I just discovered that The Internet Archive has real online books, including texts hundreds of years old.

Found this out by following a link from reCAPTCHA.

Google Presentations

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?fs=true&docid=dcq7txnh_41g75mbs#

Feed From The Frink?

... and on the 8th day The Frink said "Let there be RSS" and so there was. It came to pass, and the people saw it and said "It is good". They spake truthfully for indeed it was good and so say we all!

Chad's Open Journal

... and then, on the 9th day they said to The Frink "Yeah, and let too your favorite quotes be of RSS" and The Frink said "Hold now, what do you think? Do you think I can just extend the hours in the day?! I am not magic damn it!" and so the people bowed their heads and prayed "Maybe if we ask really really nicely?" and The Frink said "well maybe... I've been very busy... but perhaps I'll get bored on the 13th day, after I spend the 10th and 11th day fsking my drives..." and the people knew not of what he said, but nodded their heads anyways.

So say we all.

Well put Mr. Percival, well put!

Think before you code: "In a recent article about Y Combinator, Paul Graham pointed to the fact that two people had written 40,000 lines of code in three months as a sign that they were doing something right; he went on to point out that 'you never see that in a big company'. To me this number is, if anything, a sign that things are going horribly wrong: Anyone who is consistenly writing more than 5,000 lines of code per month is either (a) not working on a problem which is difficult enough to be interesting (any half-competent programmer can write binary searches, quicksorts, and depth-first graph traversals at a rate of thousands of lines of code per day); (b) utterly incompetent (we've all seen people who can replace ten lines of working code with a thousand lines of buggy code); or (c) going to have to throw out and rewrite most of their code once they realize that it doesn't solve the problem which they needed to solve -- with this realization most likely coming after their first release.
...
"Write code" is definitely important. "Release early", too. But more important than either of those is "Understand the problem you're trying to solve"; and most important of all: "Do it right".
"

In most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong.

Holding a Program in One's Head: "... Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Perhaps it will help to understand that the way programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do. It's not because they're irresponsible that they work in long binges during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that already works. It's not because they're unfriendly that they prefer to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door to say hello. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's head."

Electricity from body heat

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Research News 8-2007-Topic 1: "Making calls from a cell phone with no battery, using just the warmth of your hand? Perhaps that’s no more than a pipe dream right now. But new circuits are already making it possible to harness body heat for generating electricity."

Interesting future for javascript or just hopefulness?

http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-as-a-language/

Joel On Wiki

A part of Joel on Software, and a companion the Business of Software discussion group.

The "Business of Software" Wiki: "The point of this wiki is to bring under one roof as much high quality, useful information as possible about the business of software, whether it's microISVs selling desktop software, Web 2.0 sites or even the big enterprise kind of outfits."