Mac OS X Leopard - fom a Developers Perspective

A couple of interesting links for information about Mac OS 10.5 Leopard for developers:

• Ars Technica
• Matt Gemmell's Overview

/tech/mac | 30 Oct 2007 | #

Ubuntu 7.10 on a Mac Book Pro using Parallels

If you're attempting to get Ubuntu 7.10 running via Parallels on a Mac Book Pro, don't specify more than 512MB RAM for your VM. Unless of course you like modprobe failing on boot with mysterious hangs while CUPS tries to start.

/tech/mac | 22 Oct 2007 | #

LinuxSA November 2007 - Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX)

  Hi all,

  Time for the November meeting announcement (it's over a month
  away!)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 20th November, 2007
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Peter Hutterer will be talking about his research with the
   Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX).  MPX is a modification of the X server
   to support multiple mice and keyboards in X. It provides users with
   one cursor per device and one keyboard focus per keyboard. Each
   cursor can operate independently. MPX is the first multicursor
   windowing system and allows two-handed interaction with legacy
   applications, but also the creation of innovative applications and
   user interfaces.

   Peter is a PhD student at the Wearable Computer Lab at the
   University of South Australia.

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

   For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

/tech/LinuxSA | 18 Oct 2007 | #

The Future of Software Development

Nice summary article on The Future of Software Development. Worth a read.

In summary, the article suggests that the future holds:

• Modern programming languages, with better abstraction,
• Awesome libraries allowing us to build systems quickly,
• Agile development methodologies, enabling quick development with certainty, while bringing the fun back for the developers.

Of course the thing that the article doesn't mention is open-source. That really adds to the libraries point well, but at a higher abstraction level. Building systems where dependable open-source components can be used for your infrastructure - allowing you to concentrate on your value-add - is a huge win for our industry. Commoditisation is allowing open-source systems to leap-frog proprietary offerings, and is better from an integration perpspective - tailor or fix to meet your requirements.

My new day job is far more about this than it has been previously - using open-source where it makes sense and building upon it. It's more than fresh air - it's a personal revolution!

/tech/sweng | 18 Oct 2007 | #

Shell redirection

The standard idiom of redirecting stdout and stderr to /dev/null is of course:

          frobnicate 1>/dev/null 2>&1

What is lesser known is that this can be short-cutted to:

          frobnicate &>/dev/null

/tech/code/shell | 09 Oct 2007 | #

Living in the 70's

Today's song of the day: I'm living in the 70's :-)

/exercise | 08 Oct 2007 | #

Random Acts of Kindness

This morning a package arrived from Germany which contained the following:

It's a firewire/USB iPod dock connector (so no custom cable is required) + a case for my ear buds. Nice. The problem is that I don't know where it came from. There's no indication on the package, and I certainly didn't order it. So thank you to the Fairy-of-Random-Acts-Of-Kindness for giving me a nice surprise this Monday morning.

I'll have to Pay It Forward.

/tech/misc | 08 Oct 2007 | #

LinuxSA October 2007 - Linux at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service

  Hi all,

  Time for the October meeting announcement (it's 12 days away)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 16th October, 2007
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Ashleigh Kennett-Smith will be doing a presentation about how and
   why the Australian Red Cross Blood Service uses Linux servers and
   clients for its mobile blood collection units.  The system is based
   entirely on Fedora 7 (servers and clients), with a standard
   operating environment automatically set up through kickstart.
   Ashleigh will go through various aspects of the system:
   - hands-off install with kickstart
   - hostapd, FreeRADIUS and SSL
   - MadWifi and wpa_supplicant
   - LUKS/dm_crypt for disk encryption
   - repackaging Fedora with Pungi

   Ashleigh has been using Unix-like systems for 14 years (including
   Solaris, Tru64, SCO, Linux, HPUX, AIX) and is currently working with
   the Australian Red Cross Blood Service.  His role includes
   developing systems for their mobile blood collection units.  He was
   the sole developer of their previous system which used Red Hat 9
   servers and Windows 2000 clients.

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

  For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

/tech/LinuxSA | 04 Oct 2007 | #

Maven Trick #257

The project I'm looking at right now uses Maven to do dependency management - and trust me, the project has so many dependencies it _needs_ Maven :-)

So the question begs, when integrating the large working source tree with external-to-maven tools, how do you get the CLASSPATH out of Maven for use elsewhere.

Many googles and reading bits of Maven: The Definitive Guide later the solution is a semi-obvious:

mvn dependency:build-classpath

/tech/code/Java | 04 Oct 2007 | #