Economy Size Geek

10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)

1. On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
   – David Parnas
2. A Note On Distributed Computing
   – Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, Sam Kendall
3. The Next 700 Programming Languages
   – P. J. Landin
4. Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?
   – John Backus
5. Reflections on Trusting Trust
   – Ken Thompson
6. Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big
   – Richard Gabriel
7. An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming
   – John Knight and Nancy Leveson
8. Arguments and Results
   – James Noble
9. A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking
   – Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham
10. Programming as an Experience: the inspiration for Self
    – David Ungar, Randall B. Smith

He actually gives a summary of each in his article.

How Friend Feed Uses MySQL

This completely fascinating. This is a clear lesson in how to take a relational database and subvert it almost completely for your own purposes. I look forward to the day when I have enough data to put this solution on the table…

SimplyNoise means you don’t have to

Saw your post on playing with *cough* Java *cough* .

You may be interested in Rhomobile. Haven’t played with it myself
’cause my phone is dumb, but if it helps you stay out of Java-land, it
may be worth a look:

From their website:

We at Rhomobile are big fans of both Ruby on Rails and Ruby. We’ve all developed quite a few applications, including mobile web applications, in Ruby. But we believe that the best mobile applications execute natively against local data, as opposed to connecting to remote websites. Rhodes allows you to build such applications easily, writing the app one time in a way such that it will run natively on all major smartphone operating systems: iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and Symbian.

Rhodes is essentially a combination of:

* a minimalist Ruby implementation for mobile devices
* a Model-View-Controller “microframework” that consists of a directory structure and file naming convention. Writing to this framework primarily consists of editing a set of ERB templates for creating HTML to display data
* an application generator called RhoGen which generates a basic Create-Read-Update-Delete controller and associated views for specified data objects
* the RhoSync synchronization engine client
* a simple object relational manager (ORM) called Rhom
* a web server which is installed on the mobile device and runs locally

All of Rhodes fits in around 2 megabytes of local storage on the mobile device. In this article we’ll describe how to use Rhodes to provide a mobile interface to your backend application. The first step of this is to provide a way to get data of interest available on your mobile device.

Sounds like something I need to try out….

Net::SSH, Capistrano, and Saying Goodbye

Secondly: I’m ceasing development on SQLite/Ruby, SQLite3/Ruby, Net::SSH (and related libs, Net::SFTP, Net::SCP, etc.) and Capistrano. I will no longer be accepting patches, bug reports, support requests, feature requests, or general emails related to any of these projects. For Capistrano, I will continue to follow the mailing list, and might appear in the #capistrano irc channel from time to time, but I am no longer the maintainer of these projects. I will continue to host the capify.org site and wiki for as long as they are of use to people.

I’m seriously hoping someone takes over leadership and keeps these tools alive. They’ve made my life a hell of a lot better.

From the Erlang List

The funny thing is that the OOP world have found one way to manage the
complexity and the code-bases that grow ugly: They are using unit
tests, and practice the art of writing testable code. (“Testable code”
is something that is simple to write unit tests for. )

* You make it very easy to supply the dependencies to code under test
need. Avoid things that go out and grab values from global state.
* You avoid side-effects, and the side-effects you need (database
updates, writing files etc) you make sure that you perform with a
layer of indirection so that during tests you can replace the real
object with (for example) a do-nothing mock.

What they are doing is that they are making as much of their code as
possible to be side-effect free and placing all that code in one
method so it can be called from a unit test. They are concentrating
side-effects to well-defined places, carefully avoiding mixing
side-effects and testable/test-worthy logic.

What they are doing is that they’re reinventing functional programming.

SheevaPlug – hoping mine don’t take forever to show up.

Update

Looks like next day shipping is included – so I should have it this weekend. Now I just need to get a usb->x10 bridge again.,

Update 2

Ok that was easy – cm19a is available for $10 – and looks like Linux supports it

Maybe this is the heart of the new build light system…

Response

To Richard’s point – yes are right – the WRT is still a valid option. I don’t currently want wireless (I think someone got in trouble for a rouge access point at work if I remember correctly.) But I haven’t forgotten about it. More that I wanted to play with something that was meant to be played with this way :)

Also the dev kit is $99 – the target for once that is done is actually $49 – which is an improvement.

Massimo Banzi – the point about the expense:

Xport (~$50) + Network Shield($15) + Ardunio ($30) = $95 (+ shipping)

You are correct that it is more expensive than a stock arduino – but the network port addition is really expensive (don’t event talk to me about bluetooth). Don’t get me wrong – I love the arduino as a platform (which I thank you for creating) but it is targeted at a different thing. That felt a lot more like hardware hacking – where as this is going to be all about the software.

but only so I can use JRuby to use Ruby to write an app for the frelling iPhone

What? This isn’t about you. This is their situation and their problem and we need to build this air filter!

Why functional programming doesn’t catch on

People that want to improve the world often overlook one fundamental problem: you cannot improve the world just by being right. You need to convince others of that fact if you want to exert influence. If you cannot convince them, find out why you cannot convince them. I think there is a bright future ahead for functional programming, as soon as someone stands up to convince the masses.

Why does it seem like I end up marinating in this kind of thinking when I have to put my battle pads on and go into the engineering thunderdome….