Developing Upwards

Adult Swim fan? Thought to myself "would be nice to converse with fellow fans during the block". Especially during Sunday nights. Interested? Join ##adultswim over at irc.freenode.net, the next time you're watching [as]. PS - The double #'s is due to an oft-critisized policy at freenode for "non-official" channels to be moved to such a name, signifying it as an "about channel", and allocating the single # channels as "official".

Is it just me or does it seem like a bad weekend for blogging? I don't want to say I expect huge traffic, but I'm definately seeing a huge decrease in hits since friday night. Massive, even. Is a two-console launch weekend too much drain on the blogosphere to make much blogging worth it?

The web forum. Mailing lists. Newsgroups. They all boil down to the same thing: digital forums of discussion. We have relied on these mediums to carry the Internet from prototype to fad to craze to necessary base of our culture. The discussions we enable through the web (and its friends) drive everything we do in the digital world. How can we pay tribute to this with an upgrade? We have migrated from discussing to just broadcasting our opinions. Maybe we'll tune in to some other opinions on similar topics. Maybe some of them will have read ours, who knows. We are deviating from the formula that has driven us to everything we think models the technology we desire. We need to move back to real discussions, bringing what we've learned from feeds, blogging, and content subscriptions. Forums, beloved as they are, have lost their way. Unfortunately the number of Internet users has risen so high that no forum can carry nearly the percentage of knowledgeable users they once could. This...

I don't even use the software from the JMRI project, but I had to donate a little to help their potentially important case. The violators are claimer that by being free (as in beer), all copyright is waived and thus any GPL restrictions are not even the project's own to claim. Wow, that is an evil claim. Do what you can, even ajust five or ten bucks.

I am trying to improve and promote my media (reviews and such) and arts (writing and painting) blogs, so here is a bit of shameless self promotion. Spilt Mind has some ramblings about my attempts at rejuvenating my creative side. Mental Outlash just got a review to the amazing Stranger Than Fiction . Interested? Check them out. Otherwise, sorry to bother you. I want to keep these minimum. I should probably append some cross references to the end of the next post I write here.

Through persistance systems, notably Divmod's Axiom project, i have been experimenting with the idea of asyncronous request of items which may or may not exist for some time. The idea is an abstraction of a terrible first idea for "persistant deferreds," which my very suggestion of lead to horrible responses over in #twisted, but well deserved, I now believe. The concept is similar but perhaps simplified for the limitations and complications involved. Operations may return an "asyncronous item," which in my implementation is done by an Item implementing the IAsyncronousOperation ("operation" may be replaced with "Item") interface. This is akin to returning a deferred. The item allows the caller to control the response to the availability of the item, but in a way that can survive server crashes and reboots, and is otherwise a persistant record, and not an emphemeral object. Borrowing additionally from Twisted, the asyncronous results can sup...

Good testing influences your design. Too many developers (and managers) are stuck in the waterfall mentality of design, code, test, and deploy. Forces across the industry are pushing to move the testing phase to the beginning of this line, and many just don't understand how that works. Testing should be the first consideration, and thus is influential to all other aspects of the development process. The problem with testing as a secondary consideration is the design and architecture of the software never lends itself to proper testing when you don't plan way ahead. The consideration of testing can drive your design to be easier to test, but also can encourage generally good programming practices and well-made designs in the architecture. We can use a persisted class as a good example, because this is a use-case where testing is very important, but we have to consider the burden of a full database tied into the class we are testing. When we develop our database item class befor...