> This seems like another in a string of Escapist articles > that tries too hard to think deep thoughts.
So true. As another fellow here said more eloquently a few days ago, I wish folks would just stick to writing about game experiences rather than trying to make games into a philosophy degree. For example, check out Cedric Otaku's blog entry on fighting hard instances in World of Warcraft. You can tell that (although he's no longer playing) he enjoyed the game and and he knows the issues involved in these monstrous battles. It's cool stuff, and a lot more fun to read than... well, other things.
Since no post is complete without a plug of some sort... here's my book!
...has been tracking the various Sun Java-related giveaways; you can hear them talk about the Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise giveaway in JavaPosse # 13.
I highly recommend the JavaPosse podcasts; it's a great way to keep up with the latest developments in Java. Haha, get it, developments! Anyhow. They do a nice job of tracking things that most Java developers may not be using but will be someday - i.e., the recent discussions of the Mustang Hotspot speed improvements and such.
Disclaimer: They just interviewed me about PMD and my book PMD Applied. But still!
Team System's response to this problem is a Logical Datacenter Designer, which integrates clients, Web servers, SQL Servers and any other servers into constrained, schema-driven models that permit solution architectures to truly embrace the big picture with proper attention to networking and its impact on interface with data sources. This concept is especially welcome as Web services become increasingly central to integrated application systems.
Because to me, there is no significant difference - except for clothing preference - between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed.
Well said. Game programming is great stuff - for me, even writing a little DOOM utility was a very rewarding task. I learned lots about Ruby bit-packing, bitmap formats, and so on. And it's a great conversation piece...
...developers need to be aware of how to write secure server-side code. Joseph Hemler's book Network Security Tools has a chapter about finding security flaws with static analysis tools like PMD.
Whew! That's a monster. And yup, hopefully autovacuum will be nicer.
> Greenplum has contributed some AMAZING changes back to postgres
Very, very cool. And thanks for the informative post. I've just converted all my PG databases to 8.1 and I'm happy to hear that it's got so much good stuff in it!
You may want to check out the comments about the "checkpoint_segments" configuration parameter here; tweaking that appears to improve bulk loading performance considerably.
PostgreSQL is doing a fine job for my database, although it's a much smaller installation than yours. Only 4M records, but, hey.
...I've downloaded and searched the report and can't find anything about "implementing new business requirements". The study seems to be mostly about totting up the Mitre CVE DB vulnerability reports for each platform.
At least, in that they're filled with lots of random little suggestions on how to do things.
The O'Reilly books are incredibly useful, though - at least Linux Server Hacks certainly was; I just used hack # 99 (the RewriteMap hack) a week or so ago to do some simple load-balancing. Very handy.
Dr Stephen Edwards teaches about this in his classes. He's written an interesting paper "Using Software Testing to Move Students from Trial-and-Error to Reflection-In-Action" about his experiences with test driven design at VA Tech. You can see his home page here and that paper is the third one in the list.
I've recently been working on a BlueJ extension for PMD and he's quite active on the bluej-discuss list.
Nah, no big deal, a pg_dump of that only takes about a minute, even with the database processing queries. Not sure how long a pg_restore will take; probably not much longer since I'll turn off Apache for that.
> every dollar invested in OSS which leads to publicly released > code is a dollar whose benefit will last long beyond any potential > demise of the original VC group and/or development team.
Well said sir. And that's as opposed to those huge corporate systems on which armies slave for years - and then are unceremoniously dumped.
The beauty of it, too, is that a company can have a closed source product and still contribute to open projects. Running a backend database? Contribute something to PostgreSQL. Running a web server? Answer questions about Apache. Coding a propriety Java app? Buy a book on an open source Java code quality tool.:-)
True, true... I guess I felt it was the "less evil" of the two proposals. Big government-sponsored companies trying to "do open source"... sounds DoublePlusUnGood to me... lots of UML diagrams would be produced though, I dare say.
...sounds more interesting to me. He proposes an "Artistic Freedom Voucher", whereby people would be provided with a voucher for, say, $100, which they could direct to a person engaged in creative work (like writing open source software). This sounds rather nifty, since it would allow folks to "pay" for the projects they find most useful personally.
Of course, another way for open source programmers to make money is to publish a book. Programming in Java? Give it a look! Think of it as sponsoring an artist:-)
Seems perfect for Nokia, especially since newer versions of GForge have a SOAP API; they could have shown some examples of a Nokia phone accessing GForge via a little proxy or some such.
And GForge certainly could handle the load; check out the numbers on some of the bigger installations on the list of public GForge sites.
On the other hand, sometime you can really tell that one author wrote a book and was interested in the topic - i.e., Component Development for the Java Platform by Stuart Halloway comes to mind. This was an excellent book for intermediate to advanced Java programmers and Stuart's interest in how things really work in Java serialization, classloaders, and so forth shines through.
We use it to manage the RubyForge mirror system and it's a lifesaver. Check out the traffic dropoff chart that the mirrors provide (not the number of hits, the number of KB served); rsync really helps make RubyForge tick.
> I like Evolution but would like to see a cross-platform PIM > in the suite as an alternative.
Tor Lillqvist was hired by Novell to help get Evolution running on Windows. While I was working on Revolution and was subscribed to evolution-hackers I remember that he'd occasionally post progress notes there.
I'm not sure how far that effort is along at this point, although Tor certainly seemed to be making excellent progress and was patching all sorts of Gnome/Win32 bugs in various projects.
Cool, yup, right on, I should have said "syntax changes", like new keywords or whatever. At least, I don't think any have been introduced.
On the other hand, most folks I know are still on JDK 1.4, so I wonder how many people will move to 1.6? I even still get PMD parsing bug reports and whatnot for JDK 1.3...
Slashdot Mirror
> And honestly nobody needs scripting abilities in their email client
And if you need to script Evolution, just use the Ruby bindings - Revolution. Good times!
> This seems like another in a string of Escapist articles
> that tries too hard to think deep thoughts.
So true. As another fellow here said more eloquently a few days ago, I wish folks would just stick to writing about game experiences rather than trying to make games into a philosophy degree. For example, check out Cedric Otaku's blog entry on fighting hard instances in World of Warcraft. You can tell that (although he's no longer playing) he enjoyed the game and and he knows the issues involved in these monstrous battles. It's cool stuff, and a lot more fun to read than... well, other things.
Since no post is complete without a plug of some sort... here's my book!
...has been tracking the various Sun Java-related giveaways; you can hear them talk about the Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise giveaway in JavaPosse # 13.
I highly recommend the JavaPosse podcasts; it's a great way to keep up with the latest developments in Java. Haha, get it, developments! Anyhow. They do a nice job of tracking things that most Java developers may not be using but will be someday - i.e., the recent discussions of the Mustang Hotspot speed improvements and such.
Disclaimer: They just interviewed me about PMD and my book PMD Applied. But still!
...developers need to be aware of how to write secure server-side code. Joseph Hemler's book Network Security Tools has a chapter about finding security flaws with static analysis tools like PMD.
> Actually that WAS done
Ah, OK, cool.
> 48M rows
Whew! That's a monster. And yup, hopefully autovacuum will be nicer.
> Greenplum has contributed some AMAZING changes back to postgres
Very, very cool. And thanks for the informative post. I've just converted all my PG databases to 8.1 and I'm happy to hear that it's got so much good stuff in it!
> took 8 hours to restore!
You may want to check out the comments about the "checkpoint_segments" configuration parameter here; tweaking that appears to improve bulk loading performance considerably.
PostgreSQL is doing a fine job for my database, although it's a much smaller installation than yours. Only 4M records, but, hey.
> vnunet linked to the wrong report
Ah ha! I wondered why there was all that about MySQL vulnerability reports and whatnot in there. Thanks!
...I've downloaded and searched the report and can't find anything about "implementing new business requirements". The study seems to be mostly about totting up the Mitre CVE DB vulnerability reports for each platform.
At least, in that they're filled with lots of random little suggestions on how to do things.
The O'Reilly books are incredibly useful, though - at least Linux Server Hacks certainly was; I just used hack # 99 (the RewriteMap hack) a week or so ago to do some simple load-balancing. Very handy.
Dr Stephen Edwards teaches about this in his classes. He's written an interesting paper "Using Software Testing to Move Students from Trial-and-Error to Reflection-In-Action" about his experiences with test driven design at VA Tech. You can see his home page here and that paper is the third one in the list.
I've recently been working on a BlueJ extension for PMD and he's quite active on the bluej-discuss list.
Nah, no big deal, a pg_dump of that only takes about a minute, even with the database processing queries. Not sure how long a pg_restore will take; probably not much longer since I'll turn off Apache for that.
Time to upgrade my Jabber server from PostgreSQL 8.0.4. And with RubyForge getting up past 3.5M records now, performance improvements are good news...
> every dollar invested in OSS which leads to publicly released
:-)
> code is a dollar whose benefit will last long beyond any potential
> demise of the original VC group and/or development team.
Well said sir. And that's as opposed to those huge corporate systems on which armies slave for years - and then are unceremoniously dumped.
The beauty of it, too, is that a company can have a closed source product and still contribute to open projects. Running a backend database? Contribute something to PostgreSQL. Running a web server? Answer questions about Apache. Coding a propriety Java app? Buy a book on an open source Java code quality tool.
At least in terms of unused code. I ran PMD's unused code rules on it and found no problems. Good stuff!
True, true... I guess I felt it was the "less evil" of the two proposals. Big government-sponsored companies trying to "do open source"... sounds DoublePlusUnGood to me... lots of UML diagrams would be produced though, I dare say.
...sounds more interesting to me. He proposes an "Artistic Freedom Voucher", whereby people would be provided with a voucher for, say, $100, which they could direct to a person engaged in creative work (like writing open source software). This sounds rather nifty, since it would allow folks to "pay" for the projects they find most useful personally.
:-)
Of course, another way for open source programmers to make money is to publish a book. Programming in Java? Give it a look! Think of it as sponsoring an artist
...of course, that's on a rather technical web site, RubyForge. Numbers are here.
Seems perfect for Nokia, especially since newer versions of GForge have a SOAP API; they could have shown some examples of a Nokia phone accessing GForge via a little proxy or some such.
And GForge certainly could handle the load; check out the numbers on some of the bigger installations on the list of public GForge sites.
Sometime this seems to work out well, sometimes not. I thought that the Pattern Languages of Program Design editors did a nice job on making that work, and the same goes for the excellent Game Programming Gems series.
:-)
On the other hand, sometime you can really tell that one author wrote a book and was interested in the topic - i.e., Component Development for the Java Platform by Stuart Halloway comes to mind. This was an excellent book for intermediate to advanced Java programmers and Stuart's interest in how things really work in Java serialization, classloaders, and so forth shines through.
And hopefully the same goes for PMD Applied
We use it to manage the RubyForge mirror system and it's a lifesaver. Check out the traffic dropoff chart that the mirrors provide (not the number of hits, the number of KB served); rsync really helps make RubyForge tick.
> I like Evolution but would like to see a cross-platform PIM
> in the suite as an alternative.
Tor Lillqvist was hired by Novell to help get Evolution running on Windows. While I was working on Revolution and was subscribed to evolution-hackers I remember that he'd occasionally post progress notes there.
I'm not sure how far that effort is along at this point, although Tor certainly seemed to be making excellent progress and was patching all sorts of Gnome/Win32 bugs in various projects.
Cool, yup, right on, I should have said "syntax changes", like new keywords or whatever. At least, I don't think any have been introduced.
On the other hand, most folks I know are still on JDK 1.4, so I wonder how many people will move to 1.6? I even still get PMD parsing bug reports and whatnot for JDK 1.3...