Inklings: a tumblelog

Also see The Local Change/Local Effect Principle and Domino Changes in Static Typing, both referenced in the post.

There’s a never ending battle going on in your software development team right now. It’s the battle between the Organic Engineers and the Mechanical Engineers.

Excellent!

Cleared up a few issues I had with reading it!

Heh!

And it’s a beautiful thing. :-) Also, read this comment on the entry that Tim mentioned (see ‘via’).

OpenBSD to start using mmap() at randomised locations in the virtual address space with guard pages to implement malloc() to prevent buffer overruns and underruns. Nifty!

Bob Martin compares Test Driven Development to Double-Entry Bookkeeping to explain why testing isn’t just a good idea, but an ethical obligation for developers.

Now, if only more people understood this.

Really must read and try to understand this.

Oh dear.

Heh!

A Win2K/WinXP task switcher that doesn’t suck as much as the regular one. Pity I’m stuck using Win98 right now. :-(

A short story by SFX contributer David Langford about an image capable to crashing your brain.

A library of freely distributable music.

Graphical interface for SQLite databases.

The Half-Moon won’t quite be the same–not as intimate–but this is good news! One reason at least to regret leaving Cork.

A nice, solid, and rather small Windows webserver. Even runs on this ancient Win98 box, and setting up PHP on it’s trivial.

An interesting side-effect of this definition is that the quality of a design is context sensitive. […] Most people, when they think of design, think of predictive design. […] There’s another side to design, though, one that experienced designers use every day. We just don’t talk about it much. What is it? Reflective design. […] Up until now, the conversation has been about up-front design versus evolutionary design. I’d like to eliminate that false dichotomy. Let’s put predictive design and reflective design on the table together.

And Keith Ray is saying similar things on his blog too.

It’s a great way of getting through things, but I can’t see it’d how work well for a developer.

Python Enterprise Application Kit’s new generic functions and predicative dispatch features enhance rapid app development.

What I take from this is that generic functions are essentially the same thing as multimethods, but I’m still not sure. Answers on a postcard…

Jakob makes baby Jesus cry! ;-)

Yup, I think I get it now.

A spam filter that uses Markovian filtering rather than Bayesian filtering, and gives better results than Bayesian filters.

A really small Bittorrent client.

aka “ActiveRecord, and why it kills anything ColdFusion has or could have with the Right Framework”.

Yup, that Charles Petzold.

Oh, how I despise that acronym! Not a bad article though.