Contents tagged with Software Development
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The Designer/Developer Workflow Crisis (That Everyone’s Ignoring)
Let’s take an honest look at what passes for developer/designer workflow these days:
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Jon's News Wrapup - May 8, 2008 Edition
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Why CodingHorror is horribly wrong about Blacklists and Virus Scanners
Jeff and I had an interesting debate on virus scanners a few weeks ago. He posted his take on the conversation yesterday, and (surprise!) we both think we won the argument. I believe the difference of opinion really comes down to a few different assumptions about the problem we're trying to solve:
- Different classes of Anti-Virus Software (Quality AV Software vs. Bundleware)
- Antivirus Effectiveness (Is it really just 33% effective?)
- The Goal of Virus Protection (Risk Management vs. Invincibility)
- Modeling the Threat (Known malware vs. New malware)
- Approach to Security (Practical vs. Theoretical)
- Productivity Tradeoffs (Virus Scanning vs. Running As Administrator)
So, let's go through the list:
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We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines
One of the benefits of my new job at Vertigo Software is that I have more frequent opportunities to talk with my co-worker, Jeff Atwood. If everything goes right, we argue... because if we agree, neither of us is going to learn anything. Recently, we argued about virtual machines. I think machine virtualization is hugely oversold. We let the technical elegance (gee whiz, a program that lets me pretend to run another computer as another program!) distract us from the fact that virtual machines are a sleazy, inelegant hack.
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The value of "good enough" technology
Twitter drives all my tech-savvy friends crazy. We all agree that the idea - a simple mix of blog, chat, and IM - is a good one. However the site does very little, and what it does it does poorly - slow response, frequent outages, etc. Most developers figure they could write a "better Twitter" in a lazy afternoon, and some already have. Good idea, poor execution, and yet... it's good enough. -
A simple example of a fluent interface
Roiy recently released a really nice c# image enhancement filters library on CodeProject. It includes a nice collection of easy to use image transformation filters - ResizeFilter, RotateFilter, ImageWatermarkFilter, etc. They follow a simple pattern:
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Can Operating Systems tell if they're running in a Virtual Machine?
Or, do androids know they're dreaming of electric sheep...
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Job Application? Name and weblog only, please!
Scott Hanselman wrote about being put off by a resume submission with this sort of e-mail signature: Joe Blow, MCSE, MCSE+I, MCSD, MCT, MCP. He jokingly (?) proposed that we sign our names with something a bit more useful: Scott Hanselman, 11 Successful Large Projects, 3 Open Source Applications, 1 Collossal Failure.
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Assault on 13th Labour - Cross Platform Distributed Computing in .NET
BoingBoing linked to a distributed program attack on an encryption puzzle on Perspex City called Assault on 13th Labour. What caught my eye was the fact that it's a .NET console application which runs on Mac and Linux under Mono as well as Windows under the Microsoft.NET runtime. -
The Death Star - The Ultimate Waterfall Project?
James Higgs asks a great question: Was the Death Star built using waterfall?