Bruno Unna

Agile Web Development with Rails, version 2005-9-13, page 152. Used without permission. :)

The CartTest class highlights another case where the setup() method is useful. Both of the test methods need a Cart object. Cart is a model, but it's not actually stored in the database since it's not a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base. That means we can't use fixtures to load Cart objects because fixtures load objects into the database. Instead, we can initialize a @cart instance variable in the setup() method for all the test methods to use.

def setup
  @cart = Cart.new
end


So I have modified the automatically-generated unit tests for the inheriting models, removed the fixture invocation and replaced it with setup() methods.

Perhaps I would have used a slightly softer set of terms, but I think Linus is basically right when expressing his position on the matter:

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

Steve Wosniak, part 2

The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.

Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0.

This is Part 2 of 2.

The 'to have done list'

Don’t get freaked out by the items on your to-do list; think of the tasks in terms of what they’ll mean to you once they’re done.

As usual, the messages from 43f have a lot of common sense on them.

SOA programming model, Part 1: The advantages of SOA

Listen to this informative interview with one of the IBM experts in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation. First in the WebSphere Technical Podcast series on developerWorks, this 15-minute discussion will help you understand the advantages of SOA, the skills you will need to implement it, and the fundamental principles behind the programming model and the Software Component Architecture.

Or better yet: the kind of company I would love to see dissappearing.

This is (according to Sony/BMG) the company that handed them the software they -cowardly IMHO- included in their CDs.

The truth about DRM: it sucks and should be taken care of by everone. People should be aware that their rights are being taken away from them.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a consumer electronics company called Sony. And this company was a good, sucessful one, until the day it decided to enter the mass media market.

It joined forces with another mass-media company called BMG, and it started the domination of the media in the planet this story takes place. It became a bad, bad company.

One day, the bad company decided to tighten up its control on the consumers. So it added a trojan horse (a rootkit, as a matter of fact) to the music CDs it sold to the public.

Thus, when a consumer bought a CD and put it to play in his/her computer, a rootkit would be secretly installed in the computer, thus giving Sony access and control of the consumer's machine.

That way of protecting their interests, besides, proved to be unremovable: if the DRM drivers are removed, the machine gets broken.

Fortunately, this is pure fiction and such an abuse from a company on the consumers could not possibly take place in the real life! It would prompt for a position from the general people: would people swallow and tolerate such an abuse? Or would it stand up and fight against it, perhaps boycotting the evil company?

The story of JBoss mirrors some of the hottest trends in IT today. The company's open-source implementation of the J2EE standard now carries enough weight to influence J2EE3 and beyond, and its innovation in aspect-oriented programming is reverberating around the entire application development world. In this conversation recorded at JavaOne, JBoss Founder, Chairman and CEO Marc Fleury speaks with guest producer Scott Mace about the state of professional open source, Java and EJB3, Eclipse, .Net, Mono, application development for rich Internet clients, Red Hat's success and detractors, Sun's detente with Microsoft, and why trained physicists such as himself make good Internet application innovators.

Born in Paris in 1968, Marc Fleury got his Ph.D in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He started in Sales at Sun Microsystems France and then moved to the US where he worked on early Java enablement of SAP at SAPLabs. Marc started the JBoss project in 1999. An ex-lieutenant in the paratroopers, Marc holds a degree in Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, a master in Theoretical Physics from the Ecole Normale ULM and was a visiting scientist at MIT during his thesis. Marc's research interest focuses on aspect oriented middleware.

If someone knows about middleware and server-side Java in general, that's Mark Fleury. In this podcast he makes very interesting aseverations about what was the state -and the future- of Java as of the middle of 2004. And what he says is valid today, though his words should now be analyised over again, under the light of the new scripting-for-web-applications phenomena: Ruby on Rails.

He tells the truth: the only way for Sun to get some credit when speaking about open-sourcing Java is by means of open-sourcing the JVM. And he tells the truth when he says that the middleware layer of Microsoft, even when they have very good -mainly architectural- ideas to copy from, is very weak as of now in the implementation. Specially when it comes to persistency.

I've finally been able to configure my tiger-x86 image using vmware-workstation 5 for GNU/Linux, so now I have a fully functional Mac OS X. It works like a charm, though it haven't been exactly what I'd call "a piece of cake".

Several things had to be taken care of before the machine was usable.

1. Obviously, a vmware-workstation with a valid license must be available. The details of getting to this point exceed this explanation.



2. Obviously as well, the famous tiger-x86 image should be available. It can easily be found using a P2P service.



3. Time to boot for the first time. It can be useful for the virtual machine performance to deactivate the serial and parallel ports in the BIOS of the virtual machine, unless they are really needed.



4. Of the utmost importance is the deletion of a certain file: /System/Library/Extensions/AppleTPMACPI.kext



5. Time to reboot the virtual machine.



6. Certain applications (iTunes, for example) require a CPU with sse3 capabilities. Whether the machine has that capabilities or not can be found by running cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags in the host machine. If it happens that the CPU is sse2, the fabulous patch solution, by the fabulous Maxxuss, should be obtained and installed.



7. Time to reboot the virtual machine.



8. Almost there. The network card that vmware provides to the virtual machine is not usable by it, unless the fabulous AMD-PCNET-II Network Driver, by the fabulous Maxxus, is fetched and installed.



9. Time to reboot the virtual machine (hopefuly for the last time).

Most probably, the single most useful reference for me has been http://osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ Kudos for them. And undoubtedly the most useful utilities have been the Maxxuss pcnet driver and patch solution. Without them it would have been impossible to make this work. My thanks to him.

Hard to believe, but true: my blog engine is not allowing me to put links to Maxxuss site. I'll keep trying, but in the meanwhile, a google search can easily find his page.

Three o'clock in the morning. Mabel is working with the computer, preparing a presentation she has to present at 11 o'clock. She's been working on it for several hours now. Meanwhile, I'm in a semiconscious state, half listening to an interesting podcast and half dreaming of it.

Ten minutes later, she awakes me very worried, telling me that something's wrong with the machine. Suddenly, with no further ado, windows decided it was time to shutdown the machine. She tried to stop it, to no avail. And the best part: the files she had been working on are no longer there!

-Ok, don't panic- I tell her. And I begin the search for the files. Again, to no avail. Wow! I ask the explorer program to show the hidden files. Nothing. I look in the list of recently opened documents. Nothing.

I notice something: some files (.ppt files, mainly) have their name written in blue letters. Besides that, and the fact that the files are not there, everything seems to be working all right. At that moment I started suspecting of some form of malware (besides the MS one).

I boot the machine in GNU/Linux. I mount the windows partition. I perform a find command, and voilà: there they are, the unconspicuous files. From this moment on, the recovery process is trivial and worthless to describe here.

What happened to the files? What happened to the machine? I don't know, and I suspect I'll never know. I have verified the presence and actuality of an antivirus. I have verified the configuration of the firewall, seemingly all right.

But people seems to like being treated the way microsoft treats them...

The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.

Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0. This is Part 1 of 2.

This is actually one of the most entertaining podcasts I've listened to.

Alistair Cockburn had been a hardware designer and researcher for 16 years when IBM asked him to write a methodology for object-oriented projects. He's spent the last decade studying and writing about software development and learned that some of the most successful projects have the simplest processes. In 2001 he and 16 other software-development heavyweights met to discuss so-called lightweight methodologies, and one result was the Agile Software Development Manifesto, which includes four value statements: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan.

In this insightful interview with IT Conversations' producer Doug Kaye, Alistair explains how he uses games as a model for software projects, and how he discovered that the term "software engineering" was created on a whim in 1968. He also discusses the American and European aversion to copying: the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome. "If you want to become a senior designer, you don't get there by finding all the components that are free on the web" even though "that's very cost effective, the customer likes it, the boss likes that, but you didn't get promoted."

Alistair explains how Agile is different from XP (eXtreme Programming) and talks about his forthcoming book on Crystal Clear, his answer to XP.