Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google’s Power
From the entry:
Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.
Category: Development
The other one…
Intro to the NetBeans IDE
The foundation for Sun’s development environment (Sun ONE Studio or something to that effect) is NetBeans (formerly known as Forte for Java) an Open Source development environment focused on Java.
Here is what they say:
The NetBeans IDE is a development environment – a tool for programmers to write, compile, debug and deploy programs. It is written in Java – but can support any programming language. It is a free product with no restrictions on how it can be used.
In case you didn’t know..
eclipse project FAQ
Eclipse is the open source IDE that has been taking the world by storm well not really but it is highly thought of and becoming very well rounded (I am told).
Here is what they say in the FAQ:
The Eclipse Platform is an open extensible IDE for anything and yet nothing in particular. The Eclipse Platform provides building blocks and a foundation for constructing and running integrated software-development tools. The Eclipse Platform allows tool builders to independently develop tools that integrate with other people’s tools so seamlessly you can’t tell where one tool ends and another starts.
Open Source QuickTime for Objective C effort
SourceForge.net: Project Info – QTKit
From the site:
Tired of waiting for Apple to really support QuickTime in Cocoa? QTKit is a project by and for Cocoa developers to provide full access to QuickTime from ObjC.
Somewhat similar to a project that I am involved in, OpenQTJ. In response to Apple’s lame current QuickTime for Java build. Oh yeah, visit https://openqtj.dev.java.net/ for more.
A new phone platform (based on Java)
SavaJe – Company
From the site:
SavaJe OS is an operating system and applications platform for mobile phones and wireless devices. Key design goals for the platform are:
ï A universal, open platform for mobile phones
ï The optimal platform for running Java applications
ï Provide complete security for resident, distributed and downloaded applications
ï Enable a deep and richly customizable user interface and allow application branding by OEM and/or operator
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop
From the site:
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a forum for the demonstration and discussion of innovative game designs. It provides a place for designers to showcase challenging, unproven work, and discuss it with peers.
By explicitly acknowledging the existence of a community of experimental game designers, the workshop helps legitimize gameplay-oriented research and development.
A related festival is The Independent Games Festival at http://www.igf.com/
Thanks Josh
Clay writes about “Situated Software”
Shirky: Situated Software
From the article:
Part of the future I believe I’m seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I’m calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I’ll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.
Posix for Java
Free Software by Gregory Guerin
From the description:
Imagine that you could catch signals, raise resource-limits, get mounted file-system info, manipulate file modes, or change effective user ID from Java. Imagine that many of the other interesting and useful POSIX system-calls were also accessible from Java. Imagine that they were organized in an easily understood and usable class library, which could be implemented for different platforms yet still be used transparently by any API-conforming user program.
Stop imagining and start downloading, because that’s what this class library does. It includes a working implementation for Mac OS X, but anyone with moderate JNI and Unix experience can create an implementation for other Unix platforms. It’s even possible to create implementations for non-Unix platforms, such as that operating system whose name starts with ‘Wind’.
Getting out of your employees way
InfoWorld: Fired up IT: March 19, 2004: By Chad Dickerson : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS
About the book: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
From the book review/article (culled from the book):
Protecting the productivity of your top performers is essential to managing successful projects. According to studies cited in the book, the best people will outperform the worst by about 10-to-1. The best performer will outperform a median performer by 2.5 times. Finally, on average, the one-half of performers who are better-than-median will typically outdo the other half by 2-to-1.
Dyne:bolic gets an update
d y n e . o r g :: dynebolic mailinglist
The description:
Dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists and artists to stimulate the production and not only the fruition of digital and analog informations. It takes birth as a grassroot effort to spread free software and the spirit of sharing information and knowledge.
This version supports hard drive booting and much much more..