Category Archives: Software Development

Dan Bricklin and Peter Norton

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This morning as I was browsing around I ran into the home page of Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of Visicalc (the first computer spreadsheet program) and Dan Bricklin’s Demo II, a really useful program for creating interactive screen demos of products (a product which I still miss because I used it a lot to get ideas in front of users quickly without having to code anything). Boy, I’d love to have a product like that around again!

As I read through some of the stuff on his site, I started getting a little nostalgic. The early days of the PC was such a cool time. I decided I might do some searching on where the hell Peter Norton ended up, who as goofy as it sounds, was someone I really looked up to as a young 13 year old getting into programming.

In that search, I found this article on denounce.com that made me laugh. For those old enough to remember (I can’t believe I have to say that now), this historic pose was on every book worth anything on computers at the time. The article was funny, and I thought I’d post it up.

I still haven’t found any good information on what happened to Peter Norton except that he apparently collects art or something now. If anyone has any links shoot them over in the comments section.

As a side note, Dan also goes through his current podcasting setup, for those interested.

Zdot Podcast : Why Subversion Rocks

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Surfing around this morning I found a podcast that talks about Subversion. I’m in agreement with all of the points he makes in this podcast. As anyone who reads this site somewhat regularly would know, I am a big Subversion fan since the early pre-release days. It was cool to listen to someone who gets as excited about this product as I do.

An outline of some of the things talked about:

  • Challenges encountered in using CVS with Java
  • Early Adoption – Version 0.18
  • The Subversion Teams’ Process Maturity
  • API and database format compatibility commitment
  • Compatibility between clients and server versions of software
  • Recommendation of the Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion
  • Quick description of TortoiseSVN
  • Subclipse Eclipse Plugin – discussion of features
  • Reasoning behind running Subversion on the Apache Webserver
  • Integration with Apache Authentication Modules (specific example was integration with ActiveDirectory)
  • ViewCVS – Repository Viewer
  • Tool set growing around Subversion

While this podcast focuses explicitly on the Subversion tool and ViewCVS module, there are a number of other tools that you can use in your environment to lower your cost and increase your productivity, such as CruiseControl.

In a recent study I performed on my development groups process improvement over the past 5 years, we found that we had cut the cost of managing our build and release process by approximately 92% by incorporating Subversion and related tools like CruiseControl, ViewCVS, and other custom software (and major process changes that accompany them) to integrate and automate our release management processes. This savings does not include the reduction in licensing costs that come with using Open Source Software in lieu of proprietary software. They are time and people costs only. Now, this has been our experience. Your individual mileage may vary.

If you’re looking for a new version control tool, this podcast could be a source of information that can help you in your decision.

Check it out.

Great Article on Scripting Languages I Found …

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While looking around this evening I found this really great article by Rick Nooner on the advantages of scripting languages over lower level languages. The article gives some really good examples of some complex applications written in languages like Python.

In answering the question “Why use high level languages”, the article points out the following:

Truth of the matter is that we all write about the same number of lines of code with approximately the same error ratio no matter what language we write in. To become more productive, we have to increase the amount of work done per line of code and make errors easier to find.

This is the advantage of Python over other languages and one of the reasons that I got hooked on it as soon as I took the time to play with it. You can do a lot in a small amount of code in Python.

Take some time to check this one out when you have some free time. It was a great read.

Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects Reviewed

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The guy at Musings of a Software Development Manager talks about a recent book he’s reading called Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. Its interesting how Scrum can be related to both The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

The book sounds interesting. I’ll have to pick it up.

TrimPath – Build Rich Web Applications in JavaScript

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Tom the Architect pointed me over to this site which demonstrates and provides a framework for developing rich components for client side java script development. One component, TrimQuery, even implements the SQL language over in-memory arrays, for easy querying of data.

This is an interesting set of components that help to implement an new (at least to me) class of applications currently known as “SPADE” applications (Single Page Application and Development Environments).

What will they think of next?