Free Soft
Oct 28
Listen to radio, TV or NOAA Weather Radio. Keep abreast of road conditions through the media. Wait until an area is declared safe before entering. Do not attempt to drive across flowing water. As little as 6Â? of water may cause you to lose control of your vehicleÂ?2 feet of water will carry most cars away. If you see water flowing across a roadway, TURN AROUND AND GO ANOTHER WAY.Many people have been killed or injured driving through flooded roadways or around barricades. Roads are closed for your protection. Stay away from moving water.Moving water even 6Â? deep can sweep you away. Do not allow children, especially under age 13, to play in flooded areas. They often drown or are injured in areas appearing safe. If someone needs to be rescued, call professionals with the right equipment to help. Many people have been killed or injured trying to rescue others in flooded areas. Stay away from standing water. It may be electrically charged from underground or downed power lines. Have professionals check gas, water and electrical lines and appliances for damage. Use a flashlight for emergency lighting. Never use candles and other open flames indoors. Use tap water for drinking and cooking only when local officials say it is safe to do so. Use the telephone only for emergency calls.

Tagi: weather radio, open flames, emergency lighting, electrical lines, moving water, flowing water, gas water, barricades, roadways, radio tv, roadway, flashlight, peoe, candles, cars

Oct 28
Bamboo Flooring As environmental pollution and global warming become a daily reality, people are becoming more concerned about their impact on the environment. Beginning with the home, people are seeking new ways to beautify their house without damaging the environment. The first great place to begin is with your floors. Bamboo flooring can [...]

Tagi: bamboo flooring, global warming, new ways, ace, peoe

Oct 28

If you'd like the backstory on the April Fool's video making its way around Sun (below)... it goes like this.

My normally trustworthy administrator let me know I had a lunch appointment with my normally trustworthy friend, Ted. So I went to a normally trustworthy restaurant, where the normally trustworthy host walked me to my table - and past a series of video cameras I foolishly didn't notice. Ted lets me know he's managed to connect with Dan, a normally trustworthy colleague, who's put him in touch with a technical expert I might be interested in meeting.

Ted lets me know the guest is flying up from Los Angeles. And that he's been in an accident that might impair his ability to speak. Pay special attention at minute five, marking the first time I've seen anyone make a chicken out of a dinner napkin.

Let me be the first to point out that the video shown was highly edited. The good (and, notwithstanding this prank, normally trustworthy) people who edited the footage exercised appropriate restraint for a global audience unaccustomed to diluvian drooling. How uncomfortable was it at the table? Having watched the unedited version with a Sun colleague before it was posted externally, she remarked, "Look how well your Mother raised you, you didn't even stare."

On a far more civil note, Sun's headquarters were also attacked by a herd of squeaky dolphins yesterday, swimming in formation from right to left... rumor has it they were on their way to meet with a representative of their community who now leads our database business.

Oh, and Bill Macgowan is still at Sun.

I hold him personally responsible for my designation as the real poisson d'avril (dolphins aren't fish, after all, they're mammals), and I'll forever view him with a lingering suspicion... but he's still here.


Tagi: poisson d avril, friend ted, dinner napkin, global audience, trustworthy friend, april fool, database business, video cameras, technical expert, backstory, mammals, dolphins, colleague, fh, herd, appointment, peoe, lunch, sun

Oct 28

Before T-Mobile customers start cheering for the long-awaited 3G services which began rolling out earlier this year, they might want to stop and think twice as rumors surface that T-Mobile plans to increase their data packages as early as the beginning of November. The cost of supporting the 3G network is now being passed on to consumers.

Some people will not be affected, such as Blackberry users who want unlimited data and unlimited messaging. Included among some of the changes is a data cap for T-Mobile Shadow users, at 50 MB and 100 MB respectively. Current T-Mobile customers who are planning to add data to their existing plans might want to do so now to grandfather the price. [TmoNews]



Tagi: budget increases, mobile customers, 3g network, 3g services, t mobile, blackberry, peoe

Oct 28

I consider this the golden rule of source control:

Check in early, check in often.

Developers who work for long periods -- and by long I mean more than a day -- without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line. Damon Poole concurs:

Developers often put off checking in. They put it off because they don't want to affect other people too early and they don't want to get blamed for breaking the build. But this leads to other problems such as losing work or not being able to go back to previous versions.

My rule of thumb is "check-in early and often", but with the caveat that you have access to private versioning. If a check-in is immediately visible to other users, then you run the risk of introducing immature changes and/or breaking the build.

I'd much rather have small fragments checked in periodically than to go long periods with no idea whatsoever what my coworkers are writing. As far as I'm concerned, if the code isn't checked into source control, it doesn't exist. I suppose this is yet another form of Don't Go Dark; the code is invisible until it exists in the repository in some form.

I'm not proposing developers check in broken code -- but I also argue that there's a big difference between broken code and incomplete code. Isn't it possible, perhaps even desirable, to write your code and structure your source control tree in such a way that you can check your code in periodically as you're building it? I'd much rather have empty stubs and basic API skeletons in place than nothing at all. I can integrate my code against stubs. I can do code review on stubs. I can even help you build out the stubs!

But when there's nothing in source control for days or weeks, and then a giant dollop of code is suddenly dropped on the team's doorstep -- none of that is possible.

Developers that wouldn't even consider adopting the old-school waterfall method of software development somehow have no problem adopting essentially the very same model when it comes to their source control habits.

Perhaps what we need is a model of software accretion. Start with a tiny fragment of code that does almost nothing. Look on the bright side -- code that does nothing can't have many bugs! Test it, and check it in. Add one more small feature. Test that feature, and check it in. Add another small feature. Test that, and check it in. Daily. Hourly, even. You always have functional software. It may not do much, but it runs. And with every checkin it becomes infinitesimally more functional.

oyster

If you learn to check in early and check in often, you'll have ample time for feedback, integration, and review along the way. And who knows -- you might even manage to accrete that pearl of final code that you were looking for, too.

[advertisement] Peer Code Review. No meetings. No busy-work. Customizable workflows and reports. Try Jolt Award-winning Code Collaborator.


Tagi: rule of thumb, dollop, golden rule, stubs, coworkers, caveat, doorstep, rk, waterfall, poole, fragments, headaches, old school, repository, software development, ace, periods, developers, peoe, broken code

next >