December 21, 2010 by Tom Malaher.

• Software Engineering Doesn't work - Glenn Vanderburg
  "What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this talk, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being "anti-engineering" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development."
  (tags: software engineering development practice agile)
• About - App Inventor for Android
  Interestingly, it uses a metaphor similar to lego mindstorms programming and scratch.mit.edu.
  (tags: google development programming mobile android tools)
• appMobi.com-Create Native Apps for iOS and Android Devices Using Web Technologies
  Another cross-platform development environment for mobile.
  (tags: mobile development iphone framework)

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December 19, 2010 by Tom Malaher.

• ruidlopes/nanotemplatejs - GitHub
  Nice and small. I like the syntax.
  (tags: javascript software library opensource api development)

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December 18, 2010 by Tom Malaher.

Cleaning up the office a bit, came across a box full of Mac floppies, left over from my original Mac.

It was a “Fat Mac” Business Bundle, 512K RAM, 2 400K (single sided!) floppy drives, keyboard with numeric keypad (default keyboard had no numeric keypad). At the same time I got Macintosh Pascal and the Macintosh Programming Guidelines book (which was the size of a phone book and printed on similar low-grade thin paper).

Total cost: $3,512.25 in about 1986 (and that was the student discount price!) purchased from the University of Manitoba bookstore.

Here are some of the floppies.

Five of them likely came with the original machine.

The one labelled “Macintosh Plus System Tools” is from later (note that it says “double sided”) after I had upgraded the machine to a Mac Plus (swap out the system board and upgrade the floppies to double sided: 800K!).

Note the handwritten version numbers: Finder 5.1, System 3.0, and DAM 3.0, whatever the heck that was. Some disks were bootable (i.e. they had System and Finder on them) while others were not, so it was important to know which were which (”System and Macwrite Macpaint”) and what version they were (cf. my “NotUpd” notation on the Macwrite/paint disk and my “Upd” notation faintly visible on the Mac Pascal disk).

I wrote my thesis on this machine, using Word 3.0 for the Mac. I have the floppies somewhere, and was able to get the files off them, but I’ve been unable to reconstruct the text of the document, let alone the formatting. Luckily I have a nice hardcover version on the bookshelf.

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December 2, 2010 by Tom Malaher.

• GeoScript — Multi-language geometry library
  Not sure exactly what I'm going to do with this, but it seems cool. Now with plotting.
  (tags: api development geometry java python jython javascript scala groovy graphics)
• Head JS :: The only script in your HEAD
  This looks really useful. Speeds page loading AND adds cool cross-browser functionality.
  (tags: css css3 browser stylesheet javascript html5 html website design code)

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