Posts for April, 2009

Apr 29, 2009

Open Source Benefits Of MySQL

The Oracle-Sun deal seems to be the new weapon in the hands of advocates of proprietary software. It was recently used in a presentation at a friend’s company, to prove that even the open source software was prone to lock-ins. The logic was that, just like proprietary products, MySQL’s future was in danger because of its company. [Continue]

Apr 27, 2009

Principles For Building Frameworks

Jonathan Crossland has a list of important principles for building a framework (via Ralph Johnson). Designing a framework is a tricky business. Through it you impose certain design decisions on its users, but you have to give freedom everywhere else to use it the way they want to. [Continue]

Apr 24, 2009

XML Schemas Should Be More Context Specific

I relived an intense past discussion while reading Uche Ogbuji’s nice introduction to XML elements and attributes design. We had discussed exactly the same issue, with the exact same examples of date and name to justify our decisions. What we ended up with was a lot different than what any of us had devised, because our examples were comletely out of context. [Continue]

Apr 23, 2009

Nate Koechley’s Talk On Front-End Engineering

Make sure you watch Nate Koechley’s excellent talk on Front-End Engineering (via Chris Heilmann). A lot of executives think it is only about the “Look and Feel”. I hope they will watch this and realize the underlying engineering objective. [Continue]

Apr 22, 2009

Fair Syndication Consortium Comes Up To Fight Sploggers

The big publishers are coming together to build the Fair Syndication Consortium to fight sploggers and online plagiarism (via Erick Schonfeld). While solutions in the past have tried to modify the content or syndication to fight sploggers, the consortium aims to eliminate the root cause. The consortium wants to negotiate with the ad networks to pay them for their content being reproduced elsewhere. [Continue]

Apr 21, 2009

Oracle Buys Sun, And Gets A Lot More – Open Source Ecosystems

Oracle buying Sun Microsystems is already stale news. However, this merger news will keep ringing for a while. It is not only products that are changing hands here, they are huge and deep ecosystems which have impacted most of the programming world, across products, corporates and competitions. [Continue]

Apr 20, 2009

Why Estimates Suck

Marcel provides some insights on estimating. It is sound advice, except that estimation is usually done at a time when nothing else in the project is decided, which actually is guesstimation. So when we do this estimation, we define many other dimensions, like the team’s composition, skill-set and process. [Continue]

Apr 18, 2009

Microsoft Open Sources Common Compiler Infrastructure

Microsoft has open sourced the Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) via CCI: Metadata and CCI: Code and AST components. Like other Microsoft’s open source entries, these two are offered under the Microsoft Public License. The metadata and code components together can write CLR assemblies and debug (PDB) files. [Continue]

Apr 17, 2009

Filtering The Idea

It is extremely important to filter an idea to do full justice to it. In the early excitement subsconsciouly we build a lot of cruft around it by adding design and implementation details. At the ideation stage this is nothing less than pollution. [Continue]

Apr 15, 2009

Wikipedia Relicensing

Wikipedia is taking votes to decide on relicensing its content. In fact this applies to all Wikimedia Foundation sites, which have been currently licensed under GFDL, which was primarily intended for software documentation. If approved the content will be dual-licensed under CC-BY-SA along with GFDL. [Continue]