Year: 2008 (Page 47 of 52)

I was scanning my home page today and I noticed this:

aseigo: Deploying KDE to 52 million young

The above link is a blog post pointing out the impact of this:

Open Source Diary: ProInfo and Linux Educacional – KDE in Public Schools in Brazil

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I was immediately struck by how ground-breaking this is, then I started thinking about Microsoft. For a company that earns about a gillian in revenue each year, they really haven’t stepped up to the plate when it comes to education. I mean they may offer student discounts or some similar middle ground capitulation, but certainly no free hand-outs!

Who stepped up to the plate?? The open source community.

What does this mean for the open source community? More importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft? With the open source movement gaining steam at an exponential pace, how much heat (if any) is Microsoft feeling from it. One thing is for sure, you won’t see Microsoft bundled on any lab systems in Brazilian schools any time soon!!

ECMAScript 4.0 (ES4) is on its way. This will be the next standard for JavaScript. It’s not going to be usable on web pages for a while, though. In fact, I suspect I won’t be using it on my web page for at least 5 years. The problem is simple: as long as people still use older browsers, you won’t be able to assume that people have it.

However, the features in it are an interesting look at what the standards committee thinks is wrong with the current JavaScript. This is not a minor patch release. This is a dramatically overhaul of the current JavaScript (ES3). Oh, they’ve included a lot of minor things that are simply broken in ES3. These changes are certainly interesting, but today I’m going to talk about their major focus. They want to make it easier to develop large applications in JavaScript. Clearly, they understand that people are starting to develop large applications for web browsers, and they feel that there are problems with the currently available technologies for this.

I don’t have any experience with developing what I’d call a large JavaScript application, but we are starting to develop an extension of PC-Doctor for Windows that uses JavaScript in numerous places to control its behavior. In my dreams, I imagine that it will eventually become a large application made up of plugins that run on JavaScript.

Let’s go through the major features that the committee thinks I’ll need as our technology gets bigger…
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This article is going to have more questions in it than answers. It’s about a problem in software development that I’m not sure I’ve worried about enough. I’ve certainly thought about it for specific cases, but this is the first time I’ve tried to think about the problem in general.

My main question revolves around the cost of complexity in software. There is certainly a large cost in making software more complex. Maintenance becomes more difficult. Teaching new employees about the project becomes harder. In the end, you will get fewer engineers who understand a complex project than a simple one.

Unfortunately, almost any non-refactoring work will add to the complexity of a project. However, some changes can have a large effect on the complexity in a short period of time. Adding a new library or technique to the code base, for example, will make it so that the new technology will have to be understood by people working on the project.

What I really want to know is how much can this cost of complexity be mitigated? Besides switching libraries to add, what can be done to decrease the cost? My question is based on the assumption that some complexity is essential. So, given that you’re going to add a new library to the code base, for example, what can be done to reduce the cost? Continue reading

Technology presents new challenges in raising well rounded kids. I think technology has always been challenging for parents even back to my grandparents days. Kids will always want to do the new and exciting things rather than what they are supposed to be doing and what is good for them. Homework and chores are always challenged by technology.

Horses and books got my grandpa in trouble. My Dad’s generation was the first to have cars. When I was growing up, my parents had to deal with TV and early video games. Now my wife and I are dealing with computers, the internet, and cell phones.

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Why doesn’t Mac OS have a standard package manager?

This was final thought Sunday night as I flipped my MacBook shut and stumbled off to bed. I finally got around to configuring my MacBook as my primary development machine this weekend. It’s been 3-4 months since I got my MacBook and I’ve since converted the two other PC’s in my house into Linux machine (Debian and Ubuntu). With that conversion mostly complete it was time to get cracking on making my MacBook into the web development powerhouse for which it was intended. OK, before anyone says anything – it took me 3 months because I had a Lego Star Wars addiction – Don’t judge me!

So after installing Xcode, MacPorts and then Ruby, rubygems and postgresql – I then reconfigured my Eclipse to use the port installed version of Ruby and gems. Which is when I realized that the pre-installed Ruby and gems was not in any way connected to the Mac port installed version. Well, that’s inefficient – I thought.
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Why doesn’t macports just link into what is already installed and go from there? In fact why isn’t macports pre-installed so developers can hit the ground running?

I still think Mac OS is a great platform for development – particularly web apps – but if it came with an integrated package manager it would be awesome.