Posts tagged software

Chasing Waterfalls

It's long been known that waterfall is the superior model for developing software, and we finally (~12 years ago, but probably didn't hit its schedule) have a conference to discuss these important techniques.

A great post from Ozan Onay on choosing the right solutions for the problem at hand. Distributed systems always seems like an exciting solution to any size of problem.

Facebook Engineering Process

A nice read about facebook's release engineering approach. This should all sound very familiar to Flickr alumni.

29th March, 2:41 pm

the macpaint and quickdraw source is available on the computer history museum site

8th July, 2:05 pm

bookmarking for the future: echoprint is a free open-source music fingerprinting system

12th August, 10:05 am

after effects can be a little unstable

5th June, 11:39 pm

postbox seems interesting. a thunderbird fork with some gmail-like features. anyone using it? [update] it insists on downloading my entire (IMAP) inbox before it lets me look at any mail. my inbox is huge. not going to wait. fail

16th May, 10:54 pm

a little project from last week - iTunesRemote. control iTunes over the web

14th May, 12:14 am

trying out plex in place of boxee for managing media on my tv-mac-mini. looks pretty nice, especially the media server bridge for itunes (no need to reindex 25k mp3s this time). just wish the media server would allow your indexed catalog to be a source for another machine, so that my media server can index everything and my tv-box and laptops just act as thin clients

13th May, 10:19 pm

wrote a little web-based itunes interface for remote controlling my media-server mac from my pc. screenshot on flickr and source code in svn

11th May, 6:29 pm

the new propellerheads software, record, looks really nicely done. reason plus multi-tracking equals win. but i'd rather they just upgraded reason of course...

13th April, 9:46 pm

birdhouse is a little bit whatever but the intro video is pretty awesome. serious business

9th April, 2:39 pm

audiotool is an amazing piece of work - reason redone in flash. very very slick. seems to be the work of andre michelle, whose demo work is also excellent

21st March, 12:05 am

aviary is very very well done. the demo videos are pretty well put together. barrier to doing something slick on the web has gone up a lot lately.

2nd March, 9:19 pm

has anyone played with stainless as a browser for osx?

2nd December, 2:25 pm

songbird finally goes 1.0. congrats guys!

29th October, 3:02 pm

the sysinternals page at microsoft is full of useful utilities for various windows things

29th October, 3:01 pm

JkDefragGUI is a nice front-end to an awesome defragging app for windows. much much better than the built in defragger

29th October, 10:31 am

diskview is a neat windows app that visualizes folder usage. helped me find the 8GB of useless test video files hanging around

22nd September, 6:54 pm

i'm trying out busymac to sync my google calendar to ical so that it gets into mobileme and hence onto my iphone. first few steps seem to have worked - now have to wait for mobileme to sync to the phone to see if it all works. that would be nice [update: it works! at least from gcal to iphone]

20th May, 11:39 am

wakoopa seems kinda cool. does anyone know if it supports multiple machine profiles?

19th May, 9:31 pm

does anyone know of any good software for creating graphs like this? pc, mac or web based - whatever

3rd March, 8:49 am

dockdrop looks kinda cool. anyone using it?

26th June, 12:14 pm

piracy is bad. don't copy that floppy. keep watching - it gets worse

16th January, 8:33 am

this apple technote contains a bunch of interesting information about the threading models used by OSX

28th July, 5:24 pm

last.fm proxy lets you listen to last.fm streams in regular audio players - nice

21st June, 3:13 am

putty is lacking tabs, but wintabber looks promising.

11th April, 7:21 pm

joel's latest article on management abstraction in software companies deserves a read

17th November, 11:48 pm

this guy has written some really nice looking osx software [via messina]

2nd November, 9:49 am

salt pointed out onlife, a freeware pseudoclone of devonthink. it's on the border line between awesome and frighteding. i'm not sure i want to know how much time i spend in notepad. osx only, though

1st November, 8:57 pm

saft looks like a nice set of safari extensions. why hadn't i seen that before?

27th October, 3:10 pm

flock is really doing the rounds at the moment. here's a nice bbc piece by paul mason.

22nd October, 1:43 pm

forget flock - get flocq

2nd October, 1:00 am

gobby is a free, cross platform subetha-edit-alike.

29th September, 2:19 pm

you might not be able to get a good one for windows yet, but at least the psp has an svg viewer. thanks aaron

19th September, 9:49 am

the ie developer toolbar, out 3 days ago, is really really good

13th September, 3:08 pm

salty points out a good apple history articles site.

27th July, 9:09 pm

aha - some instructions for upgrading the psp firmware.

16th May, 5:47 pm

yadis is live journal's new distributed authentication procotol. we're talking about redoing the flickr auth api internally to gel with the yahoo SSO stuff and to allow non-web apps to authenticate, but are still talking design.

4th April, 7:15 pm

this weblog will soon be running on immovable object. embrace the future and join today!

3rd April, 1:43 pm

the microsoft msi building faq seems pretty useful - i need to download the sdk and get to grips with it.

23rd March, 3:21 pm

coates is a mad unstoppable genius.someone needs to give him a bunch of money and a room without windows to make this stuff.

13th March, 2:11 pm

ourtunes is excellent - it allows you to easily browse and download itunes tracks on your local network. works on windows too.

8th March, 9:59 am

nick clark really does hate software.

31st January, 4:45 pm

nyu has a nice win95 download page including the now-old but still useful cosmo vrml plugin.

30th January, 9:29 pm

i'm not sure how i ended up downloading the 60 day trial of microsofts's new one note, but it was a good download test (nice to get over 2 megabits at home). it didn't take long to get totally disillusioned - microsoft have lost the ability to create compelling UIs. i just didn't get it. what's it for?

30th November, 6:51 pm

sergeui found ie http headers - an ie plugin which acts as a proxy to display http request and response headers. very very useful. much easier than fireing up ethereal so often.

4th November, 10:49 am

tom points out blue coconut on osx (10.3 only) which allows you to copy shared itunes tracks to your local machine. somebody needs to write this for windows very soon.

2nd November, 3:15 pm

"caution: it is recommended to use this directive effectively". the squid documentation is lacking a certain something. oh yes, actual documentation.

1st November, 2:03 pm

a new release of lib_filter lets you choose whether or not to strip html comments, and ensures that their contents are escaped to avoid data being mangled.

31st October, 9:31 pm

the VPM looks very cool - a completely portable os and apps which you can stick on your usb drive and carry around with you.

31st October, 6:00 pm

visitors looks pretty good - fast web stats analysis in c, with a single no-images html output. and a streaming text mode for cli junkies. excellent. combine with slurm to watch realtime bandwidth and hits.

21st October, 6:34 pm

saft seems like a cool safari extension. via torrez

20th October, 9:08 pm

yellowtab are picking up where beos left off with zeta. looks very snazzy, and is running firefox (no more crappy be-browser)

20th October, 8:46 pm

leonard pointed out slurm for all good unicies (including os x), which is a neat real-time bandwidth monitor which graphs io on an interface using ncurses. ncurses!

17th October, 3:12 pm

unununium looks like a nice os project. one of the authors is working on adding parrot support. a parrot os would be cool.

6th October, 11:10 am

laszlo have open sourced their product. will this hurt flex? or dojo? hmm

5th October, 3:47 pm

and it seems ian wrote to me because anil blogged my plugin on the six apart pronet blog and it's been talked about on the pronet mailing list. (a sort of) fame at last! maybe ;)

5th October, 3:41 pm

ian fenn points out that he wrote dirifydashes, which is almostly exactly the same as my dashify, in june. but mine has the better name ;)

4th October, 12:50 pm

sam ruby points to a nice metaclasses primer on p6i

4th October, 10:27 am

bookmarked for alter - the sun java coding standard guidelines.

20th September, 9:19 pm

paparazzi is a nice logical extension of hammond's webkit2png (which i could never get working). i should really get it together and try some cocoa objective-c apps.

15th September, 9:52 pm

tortoise merge (part of the tortoise svn distribution) is a really good gui merger.

27th August, 1:03 pm

and talking of weblog software - wordpress is shit. i entered two patches into their tracker 4 days ago, and not a single developer has seen them. and this is supposedly during their push to get v1.3 out. a sorry state of affairs.

27th August, 1:01 pm

spoke to anil about the mt installer today. looks like there's a good chance we'll be able to roll it into v3.2. that would be nice.

23rd August, 7:42 pm

xpad 1.1 is now out. the site is a beautiful osx-style work. the software itself is beautifully simple. lovely.

18th August, 5:25 pm

osx desktopers take note: xpad 1.0.1 is slated for release this week.

21st July, 12:45 pm

what's up with ie lately? it's clutterbar has always been picky about showing favicons, but now it's showing no fav icons and a mix of the ie5 and 6 logos for each favourite. why is the ie5 version even still in the resources for it?

19th July, 5:02 pm

pulp fiction looks like a good osx newsreader, but i've been advised to wait a couple of days for the 1.0.1 release.

28th March, 9:51 pm

lunch today with robert scoble (microsoft), tim bray (w3c/xml) and some other geeks in vancouver. after scoble mentioned that he'd given bill a demo of flickr (woo!), he spoke about how he searches weblogs (via technorati) for microsoft product mentions, then in the case of somebody complaining about a feature, forwards a link to the person in charge of the product. i mean, wow. if you post on your weblog about some missing feature in outlook, the outlook project manager might well end up reading that. who would have thought that ms was such a responsive company?

7th March, 5:46 pm

salling clicking. best. software. ever.

4th March, 7:45 pm

you know what's really dumb? livejournal's atom implementation. rather than use easy auth (http basic) or the atom spec'd auth that's annoying but possible (wsse) they use fucking http digest auth - the least documented thing on the web. does anyone know any decent explanation of how to implement http digest auth on the client side? the rfc is a maze of tiny rooms, all alike.

3rd March, 8:33 pm

finally got atom wsse auth working. turns out i was doing everything right, except i was using an sha1 hex string output instead of the raw binary output. it would have been nice to actually specify this in the fucking spec, since most sha1 libraries output the hex string version. urgh.

3rd March, 8:32 pm

i'm not sure if there's anything that makes me madder than xml-rpc (maybe atom's wsse auth, but i'll get to that). the idea is sound, but it's very badly designed. very badly. to return a single hash of data, you end up with a tree six elements deep. why have <value><string>bob</string></value> when you could just do <value type="string">bob</value> ? It's almost as if the designer didn't want to use a full xml parser, so avoided anything that couldn't be parsed with a regexp. yuck.

3rd March, 6:26 pm

possible missing feature in typepad - the ability to easily delete 500 identical posts you accidentally made while playing around with the atom api. oops.

24th February, 1:19 pm

i wish trillian knew how to merge the logs for a meta contact. say, for instance, i was talking to some hot chick on icq about the finer points of xml-rpc. now icq goes down so i switch over to talking to them on aim. trillian lets me group contacts into "meta contacts", so hot chick is a meta contact with her icq, aim, msn, yahoo and jabber profiles (or possibly more than one of each) bundled into one. the only problem is that now when i go back to look up that conversation in my logs, it's split across the two log files. urgh. fix this please.

22nd February, 7:22 am

codeville sounds interesting (and will be demoed at codecon if you want to know more). the only trick they seem to have missed is making a cvs compatibility layer - i'd love to just drop the server inplace of cvs and give it a whirl, but learning a new client syntax (and thus building new client side tools) is too much effort for a non-proven system.

17th February, 9:26 am

the atom feed validator is borked, which has made me loath atom before i've even created a single feed. luckily (for me or for atom?) the alternative at feedvalidator.org (which appears to be the same validator, in style at least) works fine. the scripting news validator does atom validation too.

my initial atom thoughts: too many required attributes. entries wont necessarily have titles (these don't). annoying date format - it might be a standard, but it doesn't mean i have to like it. really just like rss with the tag names changed. again.

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This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.

I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.

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