We had a small meeting tonight. Hasan gave a short presentation on his Really Really Simple Rss browser (45 minute 80 line hack). Details found here.

Previous speakers were awarded their choice of various python books, whick led into a bit of discussion about python books. It seemed that people …

Calling all testers (and developers). In an effort to boost testing among open source components, my employer is offering $20,000 in awards (as well as O'Reilly books) to Open Source projects who compete in the SpikeSource Open Testing Contest.

Good luck squashing those bugs!

One of the biggest shockers for me at OSCON happened during the first day. I was sitting in the second row of the Rails session and I looked behind me to see what type of laptops people were using. I would guess that 80% were PowerBooks. Of the x86 laptops …

Up above Silicon Valley, IBM has a big research facility. One of the big projects they are working on over there at Almaden is called Web Fountain. Think of it as Google on steroids. A search engine that can determine sentiment (can determine what ambiguous terms on pages actually mean …

Having Ruby on Rails pounded into me for 5 straight days (it seemed to be a theme of OSCON) caused me to try out Django tonight.

I've only finished the 2nd tutorial but it's pretty impressive what's in there. The only thing that seems a little wierd is that you …

I'm going through my OSCON notes and compiling my notes and a list of interesting websites. The websites will be found here (using my oscon2005 delicious tag):

Yaml

This is the markup language that the Ruby on Rails is using (rather than xml). There are bindings for various languages. The …

I'm back from OSCON and had a great time. It was fun to meet and talk with so many interesting people. One of the most interesting I met after the conference en route home.

While in the airport standing in the queue to get on the plane Rob Kaye was …

I'm up at OSCON and have attended 4 sessions in the past two days. My favorite so far was the Rails talk.

David Hainemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) did a great job presenting, and I was very impressed by the framework he has implemented. The main gist of Rails …

Argghh, Windows keeps coming back to bite me. (Or rather me being a "nerd" means I give free support to my friends, who sadly all run some variant of windows)

While having dinner with some friends tonight (who happen to be another uninformed computer user that I blogged about while …

From my experience commercial testing of software consists of manual qa (grunt labor). Little is automated. I personally feel that even with a slight investment by developers to create unit tests, that effort would pay off later (especially in the crunch time before a big release where fixing a bug …