Saturday, September 29, 2007

Gears and the Mashup Problem



via Google Video

Douglas Crockford from Yahoo talks about how mashups are insecure, and how google gears might solve the problem.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Advanced Python or Understanding Python



via Google Video

Windows install date

To lookup when windows was installed:

wmic os get InstallDate

Same output:
C:\Documents and Settings\adnan_wasim>wmic os get InstallDate
InstallDate
20060918120036.000000-300

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Julien Lecomte: "Introducing the YUI Compressor"



via YUI Theater

FreeBSD and ZFS screencasts

FreeBSD ZFS practical examples screencasts and slide.s: "Here, you can learn some ZFS basics, like adding/replacing disks into a zpool, while in this screencast you will learn how to create disk snapshots on ZFS. After that, you can try some more interesting stuff, like snapshoting and cloning UFS on top of ZFS. ZFS also offers compression features, which you can learn more about, as well as doing some compression ratio analysis, in this screencast. Finally, the useful self-healing feature demonstration here."



(Via bsdnews.com.)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Lotus Symphony

I was a little surprised that the IBM Lotus Symphony was based on Openoffice.org. Whatever happened to the old Lotus Office suite? When I went to download the application suite, I found their are Linux and Windows binaries, but no OS X. The download for Windows was about 112 MB or so.

Its a pretty standard office suite, though the interface kind of reminded me of the eclipse IDE.

Update: Its funny, but I just ran into Joel Spolsky's article about the old and new Lotus Symphony:

IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli.

Update 2: Ok, so Joel is talking about a version way older than what I was thinking of. I was thinking of Lotus Smartsuite. Why didn't they open source Smartsuite? I guess its way easier to adopt Openoffice.org code base after Sun has done all the hardwork around license issues and such!

Links for 9/18/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Launchd: One Program to Rule them All



From the description:
Launchd isn't just an init replacement though--it provides a powerful XML interface for defining when, where, and how programs should be invoked on OS X. In this talk, Dave, who developed launchd, will discuss the rationale behind launchd and how the program came to be.


via Google Video

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Linux Finds Home On More Desktops

Linux Finds Home On More Desktops

This is good news, however, I still find reasons to have another operating system around. I occassionally need to do video chats with my family back home. I can't do it on Linux. No driver for the webcam on my system. And even if I did have the driver, none of the popular chatting solutions (skype, msn messenger on gaim) would support video chat on Linux.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Google Developers Day US - Python Design Patterns



via Youtube

Agile Testing



via Google Video

hak5 bbs


This is awesome, hak5 now has a bbs If you don't know, hak5 is an internet show about technology.

python 3000 breaks hello world

python 3000 breaks hello world:

" ./python
Python 3.0a1 (py3k, Sep 1 2007, 14:48:21)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type 'help', 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information.
>>> print 'hello world'
File '', line 1
print 'hello world'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Weird. I've been trying to learn this python programming language, but the first command in my lecture notes, the three textbooks I have, and all the online tutorials seem to be wrong.

Anyone know how to get hello world working?
Update: oh it seems that print is a function. ---> ;)
Maybe it should show this in the shell, kind of like what typing help does:

>>> help
Type help() for interactive help, or help(object) for help about object.

>>>print 'hello world'
Type print('hello world') to print a string, or print(object) to print an object."

(Via unofficial planet python.)


hahaha... Now I thought that was funny! :)
Even hello world is different in Python 3000!

Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...