Koders Acquired

Koders is a handy search engine of open source code.

Linux.com :: Black Duck acquires Koders.com

Black Duck Software, a company best known for its services and software for the procurement and re-use of open source software, has acquired Koders, and with it the popular Koders.com search engine for free and open source software code (FOSS). Black Duck plans to integrate Koders’ search technology into its own product line, while promising to enhance the Koders search engine while leaving its basic nature unchanged.

Sage Feed Reader for FireFox 3 beta 5

Here’s the blog of the extremely nice guy that picked up Sage development for Firefox 3.0. The Scotsman prefers Sage over WizzRSS due to its minimalist, lightweight design which allows you to fly though the news quickly while you get other stuff done. You can pick up the latest patch (which works pretty well) by clicking on links in the posts.

Now if someone would patch up Google Browser Sync ….

Social Programming

So its all true. This is how it works. So if this site ever takes off, everyone will be better off and the world will be a better place. Its even possible that Vista SP2 will arrive on time.

stackoverflow.com - Joel on Software

Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.

Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it’s going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it’s a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

Save the Developers

This “Save the Developers” site urges users to upgrade to something other than the IE6 browser. It has a clever little javascript warning that you can download for your site that bugs your visitors to upgrade their browser for a better surfing experience. Perfect for the Scotsman who refuses to maintain a parallel set of CSS just to support IE6.

Bill of Rights

An oldie, but one that has not really made any noticeable difference that I can see around here, today.

Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights

It’s unbelievable to me that a company would pay a developer $60-$100k in salary, yet cripple him or her with terrible working conditions and crusty hand-me-down hardware. This makes no business sense whatsoever. And yet I see it all the time. It’s shocking how many companies still don’t provide software developers with the essential things they need to succeed.

MySQL File System Trick

This seems like it could come in handy. 

Linux.com :: Using MySQL as a filesystem

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

OpenSocial API at Google?

About the Social Graph - Social Graph API - Google Code

Java 7 Features?

Well here is a post from James Gosling that puts to rest the speculation about where he stands on Closures.  Closures may not be as controversial as multi-line strings but the Scotsman, for one, would not miss inner classes.

James Gosling: on the Java Road

There has been a lot of chatter about the closures proposal penned by Neal Gafter. And, in particular, whether or not I support it. I absolutely do. My “Feel of Java” talk of many years ago got rather infamously twisted at JavaPolis a couple of months ago.

A good review of Java EE 5 servers

Glassfish.

Why are we not using Java EE 5? | Java Zone

Today the application server race is completely different from few years ago.Websphere is the number one for big projects and, as usual, is late and is still not Java EE 5 compatible. On the other hand, just when companies had started to use open source with JBoss, JBoss has left the race and version 5 is still in beta.Weblogic, the very innovative company (you should look at Weblogic Virtual Edition) has been bought by Oracle. God knows what will happen. GlassFish is by far the best open source Java EE 5 app server. But people still don’t know it well. And if some do, they immediately remember the previous reference implementations made by Sun (the ones used to play with the Java Petstore) that were not usable for real life project. GlassFish is.

Why no mod_ruby?

Interesting article asks why you can’t drop Ruby apps into your LAMP stack ala php?  Don’t miss the comments.

No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web

Since PHP, Python (including Django apps), and even Java apps (via Tomcat) can be deployed reasonably easily on an Apache stack with the relevant modules installed, shouldn’t we be able to get mod_ruby doing the same thing?