Software Product Lines

However, the real-world development of software product lines is hampered by the real-world limitations of maintaining a stable center as the product-line offerings spin off in a widening gyre...

Going Over the Software Product Line is the title of my latest SD Times column.

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I, Hacked

So one of my servers is totally compromised by a rootkit called Hacker Defender. I've spent the day trying to clean it off, and I think I just pronged it for good (cross my fingers). It's funny how I discovered the problem (and by funny, I mean, there's nothing funny …

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2: The Prequel To 300

The weekend box office receipts aren't yet published, but if Makalapua Cinemas in Kailua Kona are any benchmark of the American viewing population (and they aren't), I predict that 300 will either set or approach record revenues.

We actually saw Zodiac, which was excellent (it's ending challenges you to consider …

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Pragmatic Programmers To Publish Erlang Book

The Pragmatic Programmers have a very good sense of software developmet trends -- they're doing today what O'Reilly did in the early 90s. Coming in July from them is Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang. Erlang is seen by programming language mavens as one of the real contenders for the crown of "most …

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α Geek Trend: PowerShell

I don't know if I missed an epochal MSDN article or what, but all of a sudden, PowerShell scripts are everywhere. There are too many to point to, but when it gets to the point of posting World of Warcraft utilities, something's afoot.

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Assert(LOC(Test) ~= LOC(App))

Andrew Binstock discusses a talk with Agitar about "how many unit tests are enough?" The upshot is that if the amount of test code is roughly equal to the amount of application code, that generally translates into code coverage of around 70% and is generally "pretty good shape."

I think …

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Wii Controls SAP via Ruby On Rails Mashup

I know that sounds like a some kind of Bayesian spam-evader, but apparently Edward Herrmann, a programmer at Colgate-Palmolive, and colleagues hacked their Wii controller to send messages to their Ruby On Rails application, which drove their SAP system (film after the jump). What a geek-tastic transcendance of normal categories …

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Jolt Book Finalists: Incredibly Strong

Normally, I don't have a lot of problems making decisions like this, but I've changed my mind 3 times about which book will get my top vote in this year's Jolt Awards for Technical Books. This is a very, very good set of books:

Books (Technical)

Code Quality (Addison-Wesley) by …

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Perhaps We Need Something Other Than Silver Bullets

Of course, debates on the theoretical effectiveness of programming paradigms may be missing the point entirely, given the too-horrifying-to-be-true assertion that many programmer applicants cannot:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the …

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I, Werewolf?

My dispute with Wesner Moise continues...

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/IWerewolf_716D/image02.png"" atomicselection="true"> I'm going to take this post with good humor -- the "werewolf" being a reference to the question of a silver bullet and an image in one of my responses. And the …

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