Archive Page 2
in my rare spare time in real life i like to take photos. after transfering the photos to my macbook they need some “tuning”. therefor i use an older version of adobe photoshop, which i bought some years ago.
but since i am not a graphic designer i am always on the run to get tips and tutorials, how to modify a picture in a digitaly way ..
last year i found a magazin called psdmag, published by software.com.pl. the magazin is available in polish, english, czech, french, german and hungarian.
you will find interesting tutorials for adobe photoshop, 3dsmax and other graphic tools. the magazin comes with a cd/dvd which holds free photos and video tutorials.
current german issue: .psd Magazin 2007/03 Geheimnisvolle Liebe
» Geheimnisvolle Liebe
» Fremdkörper
» Waldfee
» Fantasiebild
» 3D-Visualisierung
» Workflow B&W
» Seelengarten
» Selfillumination
Filed under: design | Leave a Comment
Ruby vs Python
So, how do Python and Ruby compare? They look more similar to each other than either does to Perl. What are the differences?
Points of comparison:
- Overview
- Heritage and Philosophy
- Popularity
- Readability
- Ease for Beginners
- Ruby Blocks and Python Lambdas
- Development Environments
- Community and Documentation
- Libraries, Platforms and Applications
- Performance
- Opinions : Leaving Python for Ruby / Leaving Ruby for Python (anybody?)
- Misc.
Read the complete Story here.
Filed under: implement | Leave a Comment
PHP in contrast to Perl
These days, where a lot of php security issues are in the news, i found a site called “PHP in contrast to Perl“.
Its amazing how perl people indeep examine php paradigms and internals ..
Filed under: implement | Leave a Comment
Codegear launches Delphi for PHP
Codegear, formed by Borland last year, announced in their latest press release 20.02.2007 the launch of a new product called “Delphi for PHP“.
I dont know, why Codegear enters the “WEB IDE market”, where companies like Zend, ActiveState, Maguma and NuSphere are on the run since years.
There is one interesting thing. Codegear integrates VCL4PHP into their IDE .. Do you know what VCL is ? It is a Visual Component Framework for developing Windows Applications and was introduced in Delphi 1.0 1994. CodeGear releases VCL4PHP at SourceForge.net seperatly as an Open-Source-Project. Currently there are no packages available.
But since there is no Demo-Version available, we will have to wait.
Other Sources: CM Crossroads, The Oracle at Delphi, TMCnet
Filed under: deploy, evaluate | Leave a Comment
Evaluate Ruby GUI Toolkits
If you develop a cross-platform GUI Application you have to evaluate a GUI Toolkit, which gives you some nice Widgets.
Chapter 2 of the Book “Ruby Develeper’s Guide” from Michael Naumann evaluates some Toolkits you can use in Ruby.
Perhaps some Informations are outdated, but it is a good start to go on. I prefer GTK+, because I used this Toolkit in C++ since a long time. In conjunction with GladeXML it is verry easy to create good looking GUI’s. With GLADE you get a handy tool for GUI creation.
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these days are hard days for software consultants. the customer wants a quick launch of his new web 2.0 app, which mostly consists of badly defined business requirements. you can tell the customer over and over again, that well defined requirements are the keys for success ..
in my opinion the most important missing defined processes are offline processes in after-sales and marketing.
but their investors are yelling .. “profit” .. “product launch” .. “benefits” ..
i am yelling “requirements” .. “requirements” .. “requirements” ..
these days the customer says, that he knows, how much time your team needs to implement a feature. but he isnt aware of all backend issues .. what requests and systems are necessary to implement the feature ..
as consultant you get a requirement that sounds like “handle 2000 current users” .. this requirement will trace an explosion of testing and refactoring .. you need to simulate the load and make sure, that all works fine and all services are up and running .. you need to handel a huge amount of refactoring and testing .. but this takes time and MONEY ..
you tell the customer, that you need xxx days to implement the features .. the customer says to you “i know that it only take you xx days, so i only will pay xx days” .. ok ..
you tell the customer, that you can implement the feature in xx days, but you are not aware, that it scales .. it will works, but you can not make sure, that it will also work with the load, he wants to serve ..
the customer says “ok, do it, i chancel this requirement”, because he does not believe, that thats what you say is the truth .. but who has more experiences in development ? the “3 years ago graduated Master of Business Administration”-guy or the “having 15 years of consulting/development experiences in multi-user/tier-systems working for IBM, SIEMENS, PwC”-guy .. ???
so the teams starts to implemented the features .. all worked well .. but after 14 months of runtime the customer comes back and he told me, that the system does not work .. user requests are slow .. they lose sales ..
mh .. i am little bit frustrated about that .. here are some other opinions about scaling and stuff i collect over the years ..
The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture.
However, the lack of planning for scale is a clear sign that we are living in a “built to flip” age. No one, is thinking (or planning) about long term business models!
During a bubble, attention to boring details like capacity planning, infrastructure management, security, etc… sometimes take a back seat to new feature introduction. Those, however, are a substantial portion of what makes a company survive.
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Guide to Select a new SCM
Somewhen you are in need of selecting a new software configuration management system. your current system doesnt fit your need and you have invest time to find a new one ..
Perhaps the Articles from Pat Burma and Michael Sayko might help you a little bit doing it the right way ..
- Review the SCM fundamentals
- Determine the scope of your SCM needs
- Product Comparisons
- Product Evaluations
- Buying Decisions
Here is the most important quote, you should always have in mind:
You could select an SCM tool by asking others, “What are the top tools available today?” Experienced SCM tool users will probably answer, “It depends.”
There are a lot of Tools available in the market. I can tell you, that it really depends on your development workflow in your team. Over the years I used Tools like MKS Integrity, Surround SCM, Perforce, Subversion, CVS ..
Filed under: design | Leave a Comment
Web 2.0 how-to design guide
In this tutorial from Ben Hunt your inhouse web-design dude will find anything he needs to know about Internet Web 2.0 Design Technology and how it should looks like.
The following topics are mentioned ..
- Simplicity
- Central Layout
- Fewer Columns
- Separate top section
- Solid area of screen real-estate
- Simple nav
- Bold logos
- Bigger text
- Bold text introductions
- Strong colours
- Rich surfaces
- Gradients
- Reflections
- Cute icons
- Star flashes
Go on and click here to read the full story …
Filed under: evaluate | Leave a Comment
Nova Spivack wrote in his article “The Third-Generation web is coming” some interesting facts about whats maybe coming in 2007. Which Technology on the internet will be hot ? Is Blogging and YouTube out ?
In my opionion more “simple” things like OpenID and Microformats will be the successors in 2007.
Ubiquitous Connectivity
- Broadband adoption
- Mobile Internet access
- Mobile devices
Network Computing
- Software-as-a-service business models
- Web services interoperability
- Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted “cloud computing” server farms such as Amazon S3)
Open Technologies
- Open APIs and protocols
- Open data formats
- Open-source software platforms
- Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)
Open Identity
- Open identity (OpenID)
- Open reputation
- Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)
The Intelligent Web
- Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)
- Distributed databases—or what I call “The World Wide Database” (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
- Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)
Filed under: design | Leave a Comment
Scale-Up means scaling to a more powerful server, e.g. from a dual-processor server to a 8-processor server or bigger.
Scale-Out means expanding to multiple servers rather than a single, bigger server.
You have to check the licensing and maintenance costs of a Scale-Out solution in comparsion to a Scale-Up solution. Do not forget the avaibility of your solution.
Here is a list of interesting articles, covering such problems with different RDBM’s
Filed under: deploy | Leave a Comment
