Merry Bag Of Links

Political:

• Support Creative Commons "We are down to the last $100,000, and really need your support — both for the very cool projects we’re launching (see, e.g., the license interoperability project, discussed recently in Technology Review, and the two new projects announced this week), and for the very uncool pressure we’re under from IRS regulations to demonstrate “public support” as a condition for keeping our (absolutely essential as in we can’t live with out it) tax exempt status." Via We've got 10 days, and we need $100,000. Please help


• Passion of the Spaghetti Monster and Intelligent Design


• Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal "...the Bush administration and its conservative allies in the media have defended the secret spying operation with false and misleading claims that have subsequently been reported without challenge across the media."


• The Curious Section 126 of the Patriot Act "Congress is seeking assurances that "the privacy and due process rights of individuals" is protected in the course of the government using massive databases of non-publicly available data; both proprietary databases and its own compiled intelligence and law enforcement databases to "search" for terrorists and terrorist connections."

Agile:

• Client vs. Developer Wars "This, to me, is another indictment of dysfunctional specifications. I learned long ago that clients won't listen to what you say, and they certainly won't read what you write. You're much better off putting that wasted effort into a working model and setting it in front of the client. Let them play with it for a while. Refine the working model based on that feedback, then keep turning the crank on this cycle until you run out of resources."


• Continuous Testing - in spirals "I want tests to run ‘inside out’ Imagine a spiral, with the unit test for the bit of code you’re currently editing to be the focal point. Ideally, I’d want a test to run first for the method I changed last, then for the whole class, then for the suite the class is in, then further out to other dependencies. Tests run outward only when green bars are encountered. If there is a red bar somewhere, the spiraling stops, so we can examine the failure, fix it, and see again from the inside which tests run."


• Essential Advice for Agile Coaches

Programming:

• Ruby Off the Rails "Ruby's syntax is quite different from that of the Java language, but it's amazingly easy to pick up. Moreover, some things are just plain easier to do in Ruby than they are in the Java language."


• Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers "Sorry, there's no shortcut - you have to learn and practice and make some mistakes."


• Networking Libraries using NIO: EJOE, Coconut AIO and MINA. MINA's features include: "unit testability using mock objects".


• ONJava: 2005 Year in Review "Java is still by far the most widely used programming language, if book sales are any indication, about 2x C#, 2.5x PHP, 4x Perl, and 9x Ruby/Python."
  


• Automate acceptance tests with Selenium.
  

General Technical:

• What is Songbird? "Songbird is built atop the Mozilla Foundation's XULRunner platform also used by the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client and other desktop applications." The user preview has been delayed


• Mac Mini - Big Ideas


• Lack of focus and death march at Google


• Mac IE's Death: A Case for Microsoft Disbanding or Transfering the Windows IE Team ""Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that the DOJ would sue us?""


• The Bubble Cycle is Replacing the Business Cycle Housing, bond, etc bubbles.