I'm not sure if I want all my data stored on the 'cloud'

Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors charge enormous licensing fees. Despite being “free”, these open source defect tracking systems have many features its expensive counterparts lack.

Users make mistakes, no matter how good your user interface is designed. But there is something you can do about it. There are approaches you can use to allow users to recover from errors, or even better to prevent errors. One such approach is called forgiveness. Let's explain it in more detail and see some inspiring examples.

Before we talk about Cloud, I want to quickly review where SOA came from. Most of us who started our IT careers in the 80s and 90s will clearly remember the pre-web Enterprise environment. Of course, so will everyone else - because that legacy is still with us. The typical systems were monolithic, complex applications that were completely self-reliant. Any interfacing with other systems was done through batch dumps. Applications grew and grew and grew into monsters because the only option was to enlarge the application - inter-application connectivity was too complex and unreliable to envisage.

In the relative short time that websites have been around, compared to other media, much has been learnt about web design. There aren’t any ‘rules’ beyond web standards and even then, they’re only guidelines. There are a number of other guidelines or rules that you should be adhering to when designing for the web

I've received independent confirmations as to the authorship of Notepad, so I'm inclined to believe it. Sorry you didn't get to go to the award ceremony. The original author of Notepad also served as the development manager for Windows 95. His job was to herd the cats that made up the programmers who worked on Windows 95, a job which you can imagine falls into the "not easy" category. After Windows 95, he retired from the software industry and became a high school science teacher. At a social event some years later, I met him again and asked about the transition from software development manager to high school science teacher. His response: "You'd be surprised how many of the skills transfer."

A good discussion about the deployment problems developer face with python apps independent of the target platform.

In the previous post to this blog, we looked at orchestrating JBossESB services from a RiftSaw BPEL process. In this post, we'll look at the other side of the RiftSaw-JBossESB integration; invoking a RiftSaw BPEL process from an ESB service.

Of the new languages that are emerging these days, no two are as interesting as Scala and Clojure. Both claim to be functional and geared for concurrency, one is a Lisp the other a Curly braces language. On paper, they stack fairly well against each other, so let’s investigate how well they are suited for business.

In my previous post I gave some examples on how caching can evolve. However , what annoys me in the second and third approach is that I have some extra code and dependencies which are not really related to my class. The example details how you can use a decorator to cache another class.

You get all this honking and hoopla and what not, but nobody seems to think about the big Silverlight 4 Question: Can I install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services, The November 2009 SIlverlight Toolkit, and Blend 4 Trial on the same machine that I have Visual Studio 2008, Siverlight 3, SIlverlight 3 Toolkit, Blend 3 and so on – and will they co-exist peacefully on the same machine?

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes you will have it running in a virtual machine.

I have always wanted to have generator in Java. After all, Python have this feature, Ruby and C#(*) too. A generator is a way to define an iterator but instead of implementing hasNext()/next(), you just implement a method (here generate) and use the keyword yield (or here a method yield) to send value that will be returned by next().

This document provides instructions and notes on upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (code name "Karmic Koala"), the most recent release of Ubuntu, released on the 29th of October 2009.

After not finding the full set of silent install options by searching, I decided to hunt them down myself and posted a write-up on silently deploying JDK 6.

A stable version of PHP 5.3.1 is finally here! Download link and links to view the release announcement, key changes and the full changelog within.

I’ve always been distrustful by default with the “main way of thinking”. Which doesn’t mean that I systematically reject the opinion of the majority. But given the strong tendency of human beings towards laziness and our natural tendency to sheep-like behaviour, the faster something gets popular, the more I question it.

As humans we seem to have an innate desire for structure in our lives. Structure permeates through our societies; it’s found within our families, education systems, governments, etc. I suppose it’s no surprise then that we also seek to force structure upon the work that we, as software developers, do. The problem is the work we do isn’t structured. It is not deterministic. There is no grand blue print, process, nor methodology that we can follow to pay dirt. We live in a chaotic and complex world that is itself continuously changing and adapting. Software product development is a creative activity taking place in the midst of that complex and adaptive world. So doesn’t it make sense that we, as software developers, might benefit from admitting that we are indeed doing creative, unstructured, adaptive work? I sure think so!

More updates today on the closures announcement for JDK 7. Google announced the release of its source code for Chrome OS and the NSA announced that it helped beef up security in Windows 7.

The company has confirmed the rumors and the upcoming OS will get a thorough presentation at Googleplex

I've been messing around more with Scala to see some of its more interesting features, two of which are pattern matching and currying. These are really handy in certain situations, and I decided to share them with you today. The example I'm using is the Euler method for approximating a solution to a differential equation. This is probably not the most intuitive way of doing the Euler method, but it uses a lot of Scala's interesting features and I think it is a good way of illustrating them.

The immediate release of Silverlight 4 Beta was just announced at Microsoft's PDC conference. The new version comes on the heels of Silverlight 3, which was released four months ago. The version 4 beta includes many of the top requested features from Silverlight developers.

On November 9, Python BDFL ("Benevolent Dictator For Life") Guido van Rossum froze the Python language's syntax and grammar in their current form for at least the upcoming Python 2.7 and 3.2 releases, and possibly for longer still. This move is intended to slow things down, giving the larger Python community a chance to catch up with the latest Python 3.x releases.

I recently survived a massive lay-off at work. The experience marked me so I decided to write about it for the cathartic effect. When I graduated from Software Engineering, I was ready to take on the world. I noticed a job posting for a Python job and was intrigued by it. I like playing around with dynamic interpreted languages and thought this might be a good place for me to work. The interview went extremely well and we had a pleasant discussion about software architecture. The team lead and senior programmer who interviewed me were enthusiastic, friendly and had a compelling vision of their software system. One detail they revealed was that they had built it to load all objects into memory. This sounded like a horrible idea to me, I told them they might have trouble scaling this architecture. They reassured me that this wasn't a problem as the system ran smoothly. The interview went so well that I was offered a position the following morning.

Say goodbye to WinForms, WPF, and maybe even AJAX. Today Scott “The Gu” Guthrie took the stage and blew everyone away with the extensive desktop-app replacing features of Silverlight 4. This occurred directly after the exciting announcement of free Microsoft branded PDC touchscreen Windows 7 laptops for attendees. This one-two punch had an unprecedented shock and awe effect.