Archive for July, 2004
Monday, July 26th, 2004
It is easier to bang in a nail with the back of a screwdriver than with a handleless hammer (believe me, I've tried and it wasn't pretty). Even though a hammer is the right tool for that job, sometimes you have to switch tools if the one that you ...
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Friday, July 23rd, 2004
The team that's going to be working on Helium this fall had its first meeting last night. If all goes well, eleven of the department's best undergraduate students will build on all the hard work that Michelle, Laurie, Jason, Eric, and Wilfred have put in this summer, and deliver ...
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Wednesday, July 21st, 2004
The list of Helium dependencies is growing longer by the day. What I've found interesting, however, has been our decisions about when we're going to incorporate an external package into Helium and when we're going to build our own. It's a delicate balance.
Right now, Helium is using JavaMail ...
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Wednesday, July 21st, 2004
I spent a twenty minutes this morning throwing together a couple of Python scripts to measure Helium's progress over time. The first script checks Helium out of CVS for each day since the project started, and counts the number of lines of source and test code. The second ...
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Friday, July 16th, 2004
According to Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, three characteristics distinguish good programmers: laziness, impatience, and hubris. Of these, I think hubris is the most important, although I prefer to think of it as a sense of adventure. The best programmers I know are all comfortable with:
googling various ...
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Saturday, July 10th, 2004
Now that I have your attention (as I'm sure I do with a title like that ;-) ... Five items came across my screen this morning that made me think, yet again, about why Microsoft dominates the desktop.
Item one: the .NET Book Club, which is "...an organization to promote reading ...
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Sunday, July 4th, 2004
The Helium team hit a milestone last week: they demoed working pages, backed by a persistent store. It may sound pretty tame, but when you consider that none of us had seen Tapestry or Hibernate eight weeks ago, it's not bad.
We now have to face a difficult design decision. The ...
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Thursday, July 1st, 2004
Harald Koch just pointed me at XMLStarlet, a command-line toolset for manipulating XML. This isn't the first beast of its ilk --- Sean McGrath built similar tools several years ago in Python, for example --- but it seems to be more mature than others.
Clicking through the documentation, I'm struck ...
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