Musings of a Software Development Manager

Does Google Gears expose your data to desktop security problems?
Google just kicked off another new product to offer offline web applications. There’s a simple plugin that’s available as a free download under a BSD license. It works for:

Firefox
IE
Safari (almost!)

(With Safari it works if you build Safari’s webkit from source.)
As for operating systems it [...]

May 23rd from 6:30-9:00pm the first Sacramento Ruby User Group Meeting was held at the Invision Design and Development offices in Old Sacramento. In attendance:

Ryan – a full time Rails developer with Invision.
Layton – a Rails developer.
Tom Mornini – CTO of EngineYard.
Ed Gibbs – author of this blog.

No planned agenda. No sponsored pizza [...]

Assumptions

You are experienced with Java and have at least dabbled around with Ruby on Rails.
These steps worked for me on a Mac OS X 1.0.4.9 system
I’ve walked through the steps 3 times from scratch, but your mileage may still vary.

Install and Configure JRuby
First step download install JRuby. You can get it at:

http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

After pulling down [...]

When we started Faces 1.0 it was very important for us to work with tools, that’s where a lot of our focus was. But now, we really want to focus on ease of development without tools.
- Roger Kitain
- Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
- Talk at Javapolis on Dynamic Applications With Faces and AJAX
A more enlightened [...]

The value of having continuous integration of your code is everyone knows when someone broke the build. The two most common errors are forgetting to check in all the changed code from someone’s desktop or forgetting to run the whole test suite before checking in.
There’s a tiny bit of guilt associated with breaking the [...]

Tomorrow we’ll demonstrate Fitnesse tests for a complete 30 days of work to the whole team. We’ve piloted Fitnesse tests before for portions of a Sprint’s code, but never for an entire Sprint’s worth of work.
Our experience so far:

Some of the team is still having trouble understanding what Fitnesse is for. Responses have [...]

Well we’re seeing a lot more MySQL customers these days.
– from a manager at a DBA outsourcing company
Purely anecdotal evidence, but I assume as databases like MySQL have proved themselves capable of doing a comparable job to Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server the cost issue has begun to make a difference. And if you’re [...]

Larry Dignan of ZDNet blogged about the sad state of corporate IT. He mentioned a speech from Gartner analyst, Steve Prentice:
“This industry is in danger of becoming one of failure. We’ve come to accept mediocrity as the norm. It’s not a lack of technology or skills. The problem comes down to [...]

You fight enough battles to remove impediments and eventually you stop beating your head on the wall. A lot of impediments can be removed with some attention and pestering, but others are above your grade to change. Often after a few attempts you learn to accept sub-optimization.
Lately I’ve been given a few lessons [...]