Link blog

Links to pages that we found interesting or worthy of a look.

Code Monkeyism: What Developers Need to Know About Agile

Friday, 26th February 2010 - 3:25am by Richard Bennett

http://codemonkeyism.com/developers-agile/

"Agile is mostly driven driven by managment and consultants, seldom bottom up by developers. Some developes are suprised about agile and don’t know how to react. Lots of literature is written about agile, but very little with the developer in mind. What do you need to know about agile as a developer?"

PHP: Past, Present and Future

Wednesday, 20th January 2010 - 3:39pm by Richard Bennett

http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_driver/2009/12/03/php-past-present-and-future/

"The PHP worldwide developer count will grow to as high as 5 million developers by 2013, up from 3 million in 2007 and 4 million in 2009."

Show #49 Eric Ries, Lean Startup and product/market fit - The Startup Success Podcast

Thursday, 14th January 2010 - 6:23pm by Richard Bennett

http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/show-49-eric-ries-lean-startup-and-productmarket-fit/

This week Bob talks with Eric Ries about his Lean Startup concept and taking an entirely different approach to building your startup. Is 1 success and 9 failures the only way to build software startups? Eric doesn’t think so, and he convinced me. This is an approach to building your startup that I predict will get a lot of attention in 2010.

No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Wednesday, 16th December 2009 - 1:30pm by Richard Bennett

http://nocleanfeed.com/

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and will not make anyone safer.

Aussie content filters "work" (not counting IM, P2P, FTP...)

Wednesday, 16th December 2009 - 1:18pm by Richard Bennett

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/aussie-content-filters-work-if-you-dont-count-im-p2p-ftp.ars

"Results of a public trial have bolstered the Australian government's plan to implement both mandatory and optional ISP filtering in 2010. For the moment, though, violent video games are safe."

In case you misinterpret the sarcasm, we do not agree with the study, the outcome or the actual proposal.

Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0: Draft report for comment | Government 2.0 Taskforce

Tuesday, 8th December 2009 - 1:50pm by Richard Bennett

http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/12/07/draftreport/

"The Government 2.0 Taskforce is being formed against a backdrop of increased interest by governments worldwide in the potential uses of public sector information and online engagement."

"The Taskforce will advise Government on structural barriers that prevent, and policies to promote, greater information disclosure, digital innovation and online engagement including the division of responsibilities for, and overall coordination of, these issues within government.

"The Taskforce will work with the public, private, cultural and not for profit sectors to fund and develop seed projects that demonstrate the potential of proactive information disclosure and digital engagement for government."

Naked objects -- Richard Pawson's Thesis

Wednesday, 18th November 2009 - 11:41pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.nakedobjects.org/downloads/Pawson%20thesis.pdf

The contribution of this research is the development of the ‘naked objects’ approach to designing business systems, and the demonstration that the adoption of this approach yields significant benefits both to the developed system and to the development process. Using the naked objects approach to designing a business system, the domain objects (such as Customer, Product and Order) are exposed explicitly, and automatically, to the user, such that all user actions consist of viewing objects, and invoking behaviours that are encapsulated in those objects.

Object-oriented user interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wednesday, 18th November 2009 - 11:39pm by Richard Bennett

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_user_interface

In an OOUI, the user interacts explicitly with objects that represent entities in the domain that the application is concerned with. Many vector drawing applications, for example, have an OOUI - the objects being lines, circles and canvases. The user may explicitly select an object, alter its properties (such as size or colour), or invoke other actions upon it (such as to move, copy, or re-align it). If a business application has any OOUI, the user may be selecting and/or invoking actions on objects representing entities in the business domain such as customers, products or orders.

YUI Graded Browser Support

Friday, 16th October 2009 - 2:33am by Richard Bennett

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

This chart lists browsers that receive A-grade support as defined by Graded Browser Support. All YUI projects, including YUI 2 and YUI 3, aim to provide full A-grade support.

Big GPL copyright enforcement win in Paris Court of Appeals - Ars Technica

Friday, 25th September 2009 - 11:17am by Richard Bennett

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/big-gpl-copyright-enforcement-win-in-paris-court-of-appeals.ars

An education organization in France has successfully sued a software vendor for failing to comply with the open source General Public License. The ruling is significant because it demonstrates that software recipients, and not just developers, can launch GPL enforcement cases in France.

patterns & practices - Performance Testing Guidance

Wednesday, 9th September 2009 - 3:35pm by Richard Bennett

http://perftesting.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=How%20Tos

These are patterns & practices produced performance testing How Tos. You get to see them here first, before their final destination on MSDN. These How Tos represent current recommended practices. Use the how tos to supplement product documentation. Using the How Tos below, you can drill deeper into performance testing related areas, such as user experience modeling.

Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel on Software

Monday, 27th July 2009 - 3:20pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten.

Lessons Learned: Five Whys

Wednesday, 15th July 2009 - 12:19am by Richard Bennett

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/five-whys.html

So far, this isn't much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. The next step is this: you have to commit to make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis.

SproutCore 1.0 Update

Monday, 13th July 2009 - 12:59pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.sproutcore.com/2009/03/24/sproutcore-10-update/

SproutCore 1.0 is a huge milestone. It’s the point where you tell developers your code is good enough for them to base their business on it. You only get to do it once, so its worthwhile to take the time to get things right. Sometimes that means doing more surgery than you would like. In the end, though, it is worth the effort to have something you can really love to use.

Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted

Monday, 15th June 2009 - 1:35pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted.

YouTube - The Downfall of Agile Hitler

Friday, 12th June 2009 - 11:40pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wKO3rID9g

Great parody of Agile vs. waterfall methodologies. Hitler goes crazy when he learns his team has not been following the tenets of the Agile Manifesto.

Conditional Compilation of JScript/JavaScript in IE

Thursday, 11th June 2009 - 3:50pm by Richard Bennett

http://javascriptkit.com/javatutors/conditionalcompile.shtml

In IE, there is a little known feature called conditional compilation. Supported since IE4, this feature starting getting some attention when it began showing up in some Ajax related JavaScripts.

The Uncarved Blog: Partial Function Application is not Currying

Thursday, 11th June 2009 - 12:55am by Richard Bennett

http://www.uncarved.com/blog/not_currying.mrk

Often you will see in computer books and articles a pattern where a function is applied to some but not all of it's required arguments, resulting in a function of fewer arguments. [..] This is called "partial function application"

Currying - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thursday, 11th June 2009 - 12:47am by Richard Bennett

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying

In computer science, currying, invented by Moses Schönfinkel and later re-invented by Haskell Curry, is the technique of transforming a function that takes multiple arguments (or more accurately an n-tuple as argument) in such a way that it can be called as a chain of functions each with a single argument.

Guy Harpaz Blog: PHP IDE Debug Protocol

Thursday, 4th June 2009 - 11:25pm by Richard Bennett

http://guyharpaz.blogspot.com/2006/05/php-ide-debug-protocol.html

Today there are two leading debug protocols: DBGp, an open source protocol and Zend Studio's protocol. Both protocols have been used in commercial products in the last few years and are good solutions for debugging PHP applications and PHP web servers.

Agile Alliance

Thursday, 4th June 2009 - 9:40pm by Richard Bennett

http://www.agilealliance.org/

With more than members located around the globe, the Agile Alliance is driven by the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

We recommend agile approaches to software development because they deliver value to organizations and end users faster and with higher quality.

more...

Link blog