- Whatever Happened To Programming?
March 6, 2010
Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible…
- How Twitter Is Moving To the Cassandra Database
February 23, 2010
MyNoSQL has up an interview with Ryan King on how Twitter is transitioning to the Cassandra database. Here's some detailed background on Cassandra, which aims to "bring together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model." Before settling on Cassandra, the Twitter team looked into: "...HBase, Voldemort, MongoDB, MemcacheDB,…
- The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
February 18, 2010
Shared by Devo Not surprising to see some of the top items here are specific to web applications. It's worth mentioning that with the right framework in place these can be entirely mitigated. Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that experts from some 30 organizations worldwide have compiled 2010's list…
- Nokia, Intel Merge Maemo, Moblin into Meego
February 15, 2010
AVee writes "Intel and Nokia just announced a new project called MeeGo. MeeGo is supposed to be the result of merging Maemo and Moblin, bringing together the best pieces of those (already quite similar platforms). Interestingly this means that Intel will be sponsoring a mobile Linux distro which will run…
- Learning and Maintaining a Large Inherited Codebase?
February 12, 2010
An anonymous reader writes "A couple of times in my career, I've inherited a fairly large (30-40 thousand lines) collection of code. The original authors knew it because they wrote it; I didn't, and I don't. I spend a huge amount of time finding the right place to make a…
- Facebook Rewrites PHP Runtime For Speed
January 31, 2010
VonGuard writes "Facebook has gotten fed up with the speed of PHP. The company has been working on a skunkworks project to rewrite the PHP runtime, and on Tuesday of this week, they will be announcing the availability of their new PHP runtime as an open source project. The rumor…
- iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward"
January 28, 2010
An anonymous reader writes "FSF's John Sullivan launches the Defective by Design campaign and petition to rain on Steve's parade, barely minutes out of the starting gate. 'This is a huge step backward in the history of computing,' said FSF's Holmes Wilson, 'If the first personal computers required permission from…
- Open-Source JavaScript Flash Player (HTML5/SVG)
January 19, 2010
gbutler69 writes "Someone has gone and done it. Tobias Schneider has created a Flash player written in JavaScript targeting SVG/HTML5-capable browsers. It's not a complete implementation yet, but it shows real promise. A few demos have been posted online. How long before HTML5/SVG next-generation browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari,…
- Apple Seeks To Ban Nokia Imports To US
January 16, 2010
Hugh Pickens writes "Cnet reports that the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia has escalated, with Apple moving to block imports of Nokia cell phones to the US by filing a complaint with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving…
- Google's Nexus One Phone Launches
January 5, 2010
The press conference at the Googleplex is over and Google's Nexus One phone has launched (official Google blog announcement). The NY Times confirms the bare details: manufactured by HTC; $529 unlocked, $179 with 2-year T-Mobile contract; coming to Verizon in the US, and Vodaphone in Europe, in "Spring 2010." The…
