Planet SCM

What TheServerside.com is missing is notifying about responses to a thread that you have posted to. If this feature were there, we could respond to new posts instantaneously, the discussions would be more dynamic and the participation would be more active. Right now the only way to be reminded is to manually look up through your threads and try to figure out what was up. Which is just under the normal laziness threshold.

We need automatic e-mail notifications!

Members of the Parabuild community!

Viewtier has nominated its flagship product Continuous Integration server Parabuild for the Java Developers' Journal Readers' Choice awards.

Here is the list of Parabuild nominations:

- Best Team Development Tool (Frame #23)
- Best Java Project Build Tool (Frame #29)

The voting is open! I would like to invite you to spend a couple of minutes to register and cast your vote for Parabuild.

Your vote may be deciding!

http://www2.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2004/framevote.cfm


Thank you!

Slava Imeshev

Members of the Parabuild community!

Viewtier has nominated its flagship product Continuous Integration server Parabuild for the Java Developers' Journal Readers' Choice awards.

Here is the list of Parabuild nominations:

- Best Team Development Tool (Frame #23)
- Best Java Project Build Tool (Frame #29)

The voting is open! I would like to invite you to spend a couple of minutes to register and cast your vote for Parabuild.

Your vote may be deciding!

http://www2.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2004/framevote.cfm


Thank you!

Slava Imeshev

DZone could have much higher adoption if it had a more useable story submission process.

The part that is missing is an ability to submit a story right off the IE or FireFox page of interest. It would integrate with the right-click menu and pop-up a plain dialog that would minimally provide entry fields for the news or story headline copies from the page title, story description and name-password if a user has not been logged in.

It is important that it is limited to the right-click menu integration. More fancy means such as toolbars wouldn't cut it because most of the users will be likely reluctant to give up another chunk of the browser's real estate to something used occasionally.

DZone could have much higher adoption if it had a more useable story submission process.

The part that is missing is an ability to submit a story right off the IE or FireFox page of interest. It would integrate with the right-click menu and pop-up a plain dialog that would minimally provide entry fields for the news or story headline copies from the page title, story description and name-password if a user has not been logged in.

It is important that it is limited to the right-click menu integration. More fancy means such as toolbars wouldn't cut it because most of the users will be likely reluctant to give up another chunk of the browser's real estate to something used occasionally.

Robert Sheckley defined me as a SCI-FI reader. This is sad.

Robert Sheckley defined me as a SCI-FI reader. This is sad.

If you had a chance to read a great "Refactoring" book, there is a notion of "Code Smell" there - the code cries for improvement. I think same applies to design also. These are my favorite signs of "design smell" that signal severe project troubles:

Design smells if the following design approaches are present:

- Design is generic and framework based;
- Processing is asychronous;
- Everything is XML-driven;
- Application is highly configurable;
- Rule-engine under development.

The ulimate "design smell" A.K.A "design stink" reads the following: "An asynchrounous rule engine-based XML-driven configurable framework". If you come across somethig like this - run like hell from it if you can.
Tired of your job? Need to hire developers? Visit DZone Jobs: great people, great opportunities.

If you had a chance to read a great "Refactoring" book, there is a notion of "Code Smell" there - the code cries for improvement. I think same applies to design also. These are my favorite signs of "design smell" that signal severe project troubles:

Design smells if the following design approaches are present:

- Design is generic and framework based;
- Processing is asychronous;
- Everything is XML-driven;
- Application is highly configurable;
- Rule-engine under development.

The ulimate "design smell" A.K.A "design stink" reads the following: "An asynchrounous rule engine-based XML-driven configurable framework". If you come across somethig like this - run like hell from it if you can.

Recently I had to update BIOS on a box that reported itself having the Tyan Thunder 215x motherboard. Amazingly, Tyan's website search doesn't find 251x at all, nor Google was able to fetch anything useful about 251x. So the challenge was to find out what version of BIOS was appropriate for 251x. It turns out it is possible to find what the actual motherboard this 215x is: you have to look directly on the motherboard (between the PCI riser and the closest MB edge - it may be covered by a card in the riser) and look for some white silk screening. This white silk screening may say Tyan's name and it will also list the actual motherboard model #. That is where you will be able to tell exactly which product you have (S2510 or S2515 or S2518). In my case it was 2510. BIOS updates can be found at Tyan's website. Have fun!

Recently I had to update BIOS on a box that reported itself having the Tyan Thunder 215x motherboard. Amazingly, Tyan's website search doesn't find 251x at all, nor Google was able to fetch anything useful about 251x. So the challenge was to find out what version of BIOS was appropriate for 251x. It turns out it is possible to find what the actual motherboard this 215x is: you have to look directly on the motherboard (between the PCI riser and the closest MB edge - it may be covered by a card in the riser) and look for some white silk screening. This white silk screening may say Tyan's name and it will also list the actual motherboard model #. That is where you will be able to tell exactly which product you have (S2510 or S2515 or S2518). In my case it was 2510. BIOS updates can be found at Tyan's website. Have fun!

Modern IT is like a hospital where the only education most of the physicians have is "Learn Heart Surgery in 24 Hours".

All good software engineers I know have two things in common:

1. They all like coffee and chocolate.
2. They are fond of reading science fiction.

Not having problems with coffee and chocolate, recently I have found myself running out of good Sci-Fi reading. Then it dawned on me to get through the list of nominees of Hugo Award and Nebula Award. I did read most of the novels, some of them back when I was a third-grader :). The great thing is that what is left still promises hours and hours of really good Sci-Fi stuff. Check it out (first links from google):

Nebula Awards
http://dpsinfo.com/awardweb/nebulas/

Hugo Awards
http://worldcon.org/hy.html

For those who like making a quick price check on the books, I use http://www.isbn.nu - sometimes it fetches prices twice lower than you can find at Amazon. There are other sites like this, yet I have bought most of my books using their search engine.

Regards,

Slava Imeshev

According to inewswire, "Novell Teams with IBM to Promote SUSE LINUX and Linux on POWER to Software Providers."

In this climate of market consolidation, does this mean that IBM is after one of the major Linux distros, or looking even further behind the horizon, after the Novell itself? What makes me think so? To me, this quote from the press release sounds like a pilot project in preparation for something interesting:

"Vendors can also profit from co-marketing with Novell and IBM by joining the Novell® PartnerNet® for Technology Partners program and registering their Linux-ready products with IBM and Novell to take advantage of a large client base, a rapidly expanding market, and a motivated sales force."

What do you think?


Regards,

Slava Imeshev

Yesterday I was moonlighting at home doing some coding when my daughter approached me and asked what all those letters on the screen were. I said that I was writing a program. I gave her two minutes overview of notions of source code and control flow commands. After that we quickly progressed to discussing ideas of a CPU and command sets that ended up with a demonstration of a hex dump of javac. At that moment I felt that my daughter?s just born understanding of what a program was started fading. So I decided to give here some real life examples and suggested to have a contest on who would find most of the processor-equipped hardware in the house and would get a correct count of all CPU chips. There an innocent question "Dad, what're you doing?" turned into an exiting hunt for CPUs. We have found 36 gadgets in the house that had processor chips inside! After that, explaining a program was easy. As for the number of CPUs - I won. I cheated - I didn't tell her that my box had two of them :).

According to Techworld, Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up.

"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said."

Look, there is no escape- with *nix you can't be sure if it comes back after reboot in the same state you have seen it online last time. Thus, high uptimes :)

All in all, I think crash of a Windows server is a decent reason for a failure of airport radio communications. Last time the LA aiport powergrid went off because of a crow sat on a wire...

In need of cash, I'm thinking about producing and selling cups, T-shirts, jackets, bags and posters with the best Hani's sayings printed on. I'd even buy a set for myself. Oh, and baseball hats with "JBoss sucks" on them - $30/pc :)

Update. It's also a good idea to make and sell Cameron's style t-shirt. It would be a stylish, black on white, Times 30 t-shirt with "My cache is bigger than yours" on it.

AOP will go with "I can explain it in two sentences", and then there will by a hundred lines of tiny unreadable text below it.

Will Sargent talks about using Apache mod_gzip and caching to deliver a better website performance here. IMHO sending compressed stream to a client makes sense only if a website hits bandwidth limitations. Otherwise, it is just a loss of CPU cycles both on a server and on a client. Yet, mime type-based caching Will talks about does make sense. In fact, it makes even more sense for semi-dynamic content-providing applications such as news feeds.

Actually, those simple performance improvements are still in my task list. However, it is a good P3 task. Remember the advanced rule of optimization: "Don't Optimize It, Yet".