I'm sure many of you know the Joel on Software blog, an excellent ressource about software development, technology and life. Yesterday I've read the 2004 article "How Microsoft Lost the API War", which is quite fascinating, although the mentioned problems didn't appear as predicted, since Vista basically didn't ship with all the promised "Longhorn"-features.
At the end of the article he talks about the advantages of web-based apps and says:
Patrick McKenzie wrote an excellent post on kalzumeus.com titled "How to successfully compete with open source".
It contains numerous valid and thorough points on how commercial / proprietary software can successfully compete with open source software. In the post, these points are basically:
Professor James Duane’s now famous 5th Amendment lecture - popularly known as “Don’t talk to the police!” - has amassed a considerable internet following. The lecture, given as part of Regent Law School’s spring preview weekend.
Recently friends and I have played around with the Android operating system, more specific the T-Mobile G1 which I got a couple of weeks ago. It's quite easy to get started writing software for it; out latest project is Iconic Memory, a fast paced puzzle/memory game. In the first 48 hours, it was already downloaded over 2000 times and people seem to actually enjoy it! :D
Gestern präsentierte ich meine Robotik-Bachelorarbeit über die "Entwicklung einer Steuerungseinheit zur konstanten Luftstromregulierung" und kann sie deshalb nun veröffentlichen.
Der Inhalt umfasst wesentliche Grundlagen über die Arduino Plattform und den gesamten Konzeptions- und Entwicklungsprozess dieser Steuerungseinheit, für deren Ansprüche sich die Arduino-Plattform als eierlegende Wollmilchsau erwiesen hat :-)
Hey everyone!
Over the weekend I've been working on a little firefox extension called BackendInfo. This plugin adds a small icon to the statusbar and tries to detect numerous backends behind the current websites (such as Drupal 5.x, 6.x, Wordpress 1.x, phpBB 2.x, 3.x, etc). For a full list of supported backends, please visit this site.
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I've finished my thesis about "Open Source Software for Product Tracking", containing a short analysis of 22 free software projects about their usability for product tracking, and the fitness of the codebases for developing new software with the purpose of product tracking with it.
If you are interested, you can download the paper as .pdf (and please keep in mind that I'm not a native speaker :-)
Firefox made web development a lot more fun! Especially with the vast amount of useful extensions, built and shared by the community... Here are our favorite plugins and extensions for everyday web-development:
Last post was about browser detection (aka browser sniffing) with javascript and included an example class I thought was quite minimalistic. Being out of town for a few days, it suddenly came to me that this code was not as thorough as I thought, and I want to share the new, more simple code...
Today's post is about detecting different browsers with javascript in a smart, practical and minimalistic way. All major javascript frameworks support browser detection, but often these frameworks are too large to include just for this simple task. Such a really simple browser sniffing script was needed for intensitymaps.com, a project that requires one or two special tweaks for IE6, and I thought I'd share the solution we've come up with.
