world– by Robert Merkel at Larvatus Prodeo. Published October 14, 2011 at 09:02AM The technology world has just lost another giant, though one without the towering public persona of Steve Jobs. If you’re not actually a programmer, you’ve probably never heard of Dennis Ritchie. But the vast majority of software you use was built using [...]
“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.” via Dennis Ritchie: The [...]
The UNIX time zone database has been shut down because of copyright complaints! Overthrow the DCMA! http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html
So Oracle in its wisdom doesn’t have Mac OSX version of its free database. This is of course really annoying to Mac users who need to develop systems that use Oracle databases – Oracle XE is a great little database especially for development environments. Recently I found myself in a situation where I would be [...]
It always amazes me how many IT infrastructure managers apparently fail to understand just what a ‘subdomain’ is. How many of the developers reading this blog entry have ever been confronted with the situation of deploying their applications onto infrastructure that’s named like the following? Local development: localhost, localhost, localhost, joes-dev-box Development / Integration: tomcatdev-svr1, [...]
Recently I found a Maven plugin that wouldn’t run under Maven version 2.0.6, and I had to upgrade it on my Macintosh. I quickly discovered the usual *nix upgrade (unpack, then update ${PATH}) didn’t seem to work, as the Macintosh OS X 10.5 comes with Maven pre-installed in /usr/share/ directory. Tip – I found where [...]
In the course of a series of comments around my post about Oracle’s ADF, I started to think about “vendors” and their technology stacks. Of all the big vendors whose technology comes closest to playing nice with Agile development and (especially) agile engineering practise and discipline (e.g. test-driven design, pair programming, fearless refactoring, etc), I [...]