Category: tech
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Switching to the white side
A little over 4 years ago I saw an iPod for the first time. It was a 1st generation 'moving wheel' 5GB model. I knew then it was the mp3 player I'd been looking for, but it had one major flaw - you could only copy music on to it with an Apple Mac. I'd never so much as touched the keyboard of a Mac and was not about to now, no matter how good the iPod was. I dutifully waited, hoping that Steve Jobs would do the unthinkable, and support PC users.
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Tree Surgeon has moved, and Google Code
I have moved Tree Surgeon to Google Code and Google Groups - its new home is http://code.google.com/p/treesurgeon/, and the mailing list is now at http://groups.google.com/group/treesurgeon. This applies to mailing lists, source code, issue tracking and file releases. Tree Surgeon is my open source project that generates a stub .NET development tree.
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CruiseControl.NET 1.1 Released
CruiseControl.NET 1.1 was released this week. I've been taking a bit of a back seat on the project in recent months, but it's been good to see a number of other people stepping up and getting involved, plus of course Owen Rogers continues to provide project leadership.
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The power of a fast build
When I build the project I currently work on, I smile every time I see the last 2 lines:
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Team City vs. CruiseControl.NET
I'm a big fan of JetBrains. Their IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, which I first used 5 years ago, I think was the biggest step forward in code-editting productivity since the Smalltalk browser, and they continue to innovate on this idea while adding similar products in the .NET world with ReSharper.
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Careful with those member variables, Eugene
OOP (Object oriented programming,) or just OO, is a wonderful way of programming. I'm quite happy to say that since I'll be honest and say I didn't really get it properly until 2 or 3 years ago. Sure, I've been programming with Java and C# since 1998, but that doesn't really mean I was doing OO all that time. A lot of people use Java or C# to write 'object procedural' or 'class oriented' programming. If you understand OO, you probably know already what I'm talking about, and if you don't.... well I'll try and explain.
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Sun X4500 - Taking the phrase 'disk space is cheap' to the next level
I love it when big old-school technology companies do something that surprises me. Sun's new X4500 server does just that. It takes 48 (yes, 48) standard hard disks and puts them in a 4U server. With the 500GB hard disks available today that's 24 terabytes in one server. That's a frak load of disk space. To put it another way, in a 48 U rack (and the mother of all air conditioning units) that's ... umm my head can't cope ... 288 TB ... What comes after 'Terra'? When 1TB disks come out later this year, 1 rack will be over half way there.
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3 shells of Agile
As an agile software consultant, I've now been involved with quite a few clients who are either trying out, or transitioning to, agile methods to deliver software within their organization. Some of the following types of questions are frequently raised:
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Buildix - a complete SCM strategy in a free box
Buildix is a Linux distribution with a bundled source control server, issue tracker and continuous integration. In short, its a complete development server in a box, which requires almost no configuration. Even better its completely free since it uses only open-source software. And even better than that there's a free VMWare virtual appliance (which will work with the free VMWare Server) so you can try it out with almost zero barrier to entry (apart from the download time and about half an hour to try it out.)
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A peace-sign
I'm British, working in America, for a German company, and part of my team is in Russia. I reckon if I told someone 20 years ago that this might happen in 20 year's time, I'd probably have been thrown in a loony bin.