Social killer application- April 20, 2004 There is currently a lot of hype about social software. There's Friendster and google's orkut and some seems to like it and others think these applications are too complicated to be useful. I personally currently don't use any of these online community applications, because at the moment I think I wouldn't have enough time to really use it often enough to get some benefit from them. The one social software I currently use is the social bookmark manager del.icio.us and I really like it..http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/social_killer_application Smalltalk's image based developement model- April 16, 2004 Ted wonders what the advantages are ofSmalltalks image based development model. Ok here are some answers from my side. Yes loading the image is usally quick, because all the Smalltalk VM does (at least the Squeak VM) is allocating one huge block of memory, loading the image into it, and adjusting the pointers. Pointers can be identified, because the have a special bit set. So yes a hacker could modify the VM. But I don't think that's different from Java, because class files are...http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/smalltalk_s_image_based_developement The best free Python IDE is ...- April 6, 2004 Eric3, because it's made in Germany. ;) To be serious, Eric offers a lot of features under a modern UI ( based on QT). I do not know any free Python IDE that comes close. Some of the best features are : Any number of editors with configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, auto indenting, brace highlighting, auto completion, calltips, bookmarks and macro recording capabilities. Autocompletion really works, and can make it use the whole Python library. class browser An...http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/the_best_free_python_ide Aspect oriented documentation- April 1, 2004 Subtext is an experimental plugin for eclipse that supports Aspect oriented documentation. From the webpage: It discovers and builds documentation dynamically using a language similar to AspectJ's pointcuts, enabling designers and developers to present crosscutting documentation where its actively needed during development. Interesting idea ...http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/aspect_oriented_documentation Where Smalltalk went right and Python went wrong- April 1, 2004 Ian told us where Smalltalk went wrong, which wasn't a perfect attempt. He went on and tried it a second time. Let me try to analyze some of his statements: There's also the syntax -- it's not a bad syntax, but it's not the dominant syntax, and it clashes badly with the dominant syntax So basically people are just too damn stupid to understand anything else than a C like syntax So how does is come that lot's of people seem to understand the python syntax, which replaces brackets by...http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/where_smalltalk_went_right_and How Ant evolved- April 1, 2004 This might be an aprils fool, but it's just too well written, that I could resist commenting it : James Duncan Davidson, the creator of Ant, has written (or maybe not) about how xml build files were invented Let me cite him : In retrospect, and many years later, XML probably wasn't as good a choice as it seemed at the time. I have now seen build files that are hundreds, and even thousands, of lines long and, at those sizes, it turns out that XML isn't quite as friendly a format to edit..http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/how_ant_evolved What does Ant have in common with XAML- April 1, 2004 Today I thought, it's time to try out what Microsoft's XAML is all about. After digging through Marc's myxaml blog and the simplegeek blog, I thought my god this is so much like Ant's model, that I can't really believe that this should be the future of UI programming. After all it's seems to me that XAML is an attempt have a direct serialization from object instances to XML. After all this is what Ant does as well. If you look at the source of Ant's javac task you will find that it...http://www.jroller.com/nil/entry/what_does_ant_have_in |