fuzzylizard

Apparently the Mac is about to make a big comeback according to Paul Graham in his article Return of the Mac. In the article he states that all the best hackers are making the switch from PC’s to Macs. The reason for this switch is OS X.

Tim O’Reilly wrote a similar article entitled Lessons from the Future — What are the Alpha Geeks Telling us Right Now?.

There have been an amazing number of iBooks at recent O’Reilly conferences. The adoption by key OSS communities and leaders is also striking. For example: most of the Perl core team is now on OS X; James Gosling, Duncan Davidson, and a lot of other key Java developers; P2P developers; many of the key developers in bioinformatics (a very important new field involving the application of computer power to gene research and related areas). All are heavily into OS X.

I am not sure I totally agree with their observation that the adoption of Macs by hackers and CS departments signals the rebirth of the Mac, but as soon as I can afford a Mac, I am definitely ditching my x86 computers.

Hacknot: The Art of Flame War contains tip and tricks about how to affectively argue a flame war, or any other heated online discussion. It provides tips for staying dispassionate during the exchange along with ways to draw conclusions out of your opponent as well as recognize some of the false arguments that they may make. This article uses a number of the fallacies listed in the Nizkor website. This is an excellent read for anyone who discusses things in an online community.

This is an interesting website that outlines all the different fallacies that people use to try and win arguments. The site does an excellent job of outlining the fallacy and how it is used in an debate. Once this is done, it then goes on and provides real world examples to help illustrate the fallacy being discussed. Some of the ones covered include:

• Ad Hominem
• Appeal to Authority
• Appeal to Belief
• Appeal to Emotion
• and many others

This is an excellent site for those who wish to better understand how arguments are won and for those who want to improve their debating skills.

The Nizkor Project: Fallacies

Tabtastic is a

simple way to implement tabs on your page using CSS, a little JS, and semantic markup which degrades gracefully on browsers with CSS unavailable or disabled.

Not only is it easy to use and accessible for screen-readers, but it supports multiple (nested, even) tabsets on the same page and allows users to bookmark the page loading to a specific tab.

Brian McCallister has written an article describing why Ruby is causing such a stir in the Java community. His thesis is that Rails is the leading edge of the disruptive technologies available today (LAMP) and as such is the technology that is biting into and going the furthest into the lower end of the Java market. It is an interesting idea.

It is amazing how much of a commotion one little framework can cause.

Well, yet another big name Java person has tried and like Ruby on Rails. This time it is Craig Walls, author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action.

Honestly, I’m quite impressed. I found that the productivity claims surrounding Rails to be quite accurate. After writing only a single line of code, I had a reasonably functional application. Adding a couple of more lines, I had a one-to-many relationship between two model objects…I can see how Rails eliminates a lot of repetitive grunt work and can likely have a positive impact on productivity even with larger projects.

And the names just keep on coming. It is amazing how many people from the Java world are making the jump to Ruby on Rails. At first they are skeptical, then they are interested and finally they are sold on it.

This is an article that I found on the ONJava.com website entitled Java Component Development: A Conceptual Framework. It is a short tutorial on designing code that will work as a Java component.

In object-oriented programming and distributed object technology, a component is a set of classes and interfaces to fulfill requirements (functional and non-functional) with a reusable external API. Components should be able to run in a distributed network environment to form a network application. Component-based design and development is not a new topic at all to professionals who are following Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) methodology.