What am I reading

I started reading The Mythical Man-Month by Fredrick Brooks, a book that investigates the relationship between man hours and months and the level of their sustitutionality. The book seeks to address the reasons why most major scale software development efforts fail; that is they are over budget, delivered late and half the time the functionality is not what was promised.

Besides that Ann and I are reading the seven habits of effective people. So far an interesting read.

I will share my view of both books when I am done reading them in a few weeks.

Summer of research

Coming up this summer is a new set of responsibilities after securing a publication spot in two Journals. The IEEE and TADA workshop journals. In the next day or so I need to go over the preliminary draft for the research papers that the MinneTAC team, I included submitted for review a few weeks ago. Of significance too will be amount of RoR and Java work that I will have to do to prepare all the elements of my research. I am looking forward to a busy summer.

Mozilla Bespin

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Bespin

Ever wondered if you would write code using the browser as your IDE? Well wonder no more for Mozilla has made it a reality. My tiny brain can think of a few interesting applications of this kind of an IDE but for now this is just an amazing idea. I ran into this a few months ago but it has been real labor getting to mention it leave alone remembering the name of the project.

Enjoy.. but don't delete my code.

Interactive Heuristic Evaluation toolking

Great site that helps identify heuristics that are worth considering when designing for different types of presentation.

http://www.id-book.com/catherb/

This was a suggestion from one of the classmates.

Setting up the Lamp Stack

"As of the 7.04 release, the Ubuntu base system includes Tasksel. You can either install LAMP using tasksel or install the LAMP packages."

Here are the instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

On windows you can use the Wamp stack: http://www.wampserver.com/en/

omaha - Google Code

Update your way with google update.

Apparently people were starting to become worried that Google is collecting more information than they are revealing. How do they solve such an integrity question? Open Source.

omaha - Google Code

A weekend With Jetty

Jetty is a pretty good HTTP server for purposes of embedding. This weekend I have been working on an application (existing in Java) that will be publishing web services for consumption by a client application that I am developing (in RoR).

First things first I tempted to set up authentication on my server because lets face it this thing will be living on the scary internet. The documentation on the jetty website shows you how to set up your real from a configuration file on the system. In my case I have the username and password set up in a different configuration and I did not want my users to set this up again in yet another configuration. In simple terms here is what I ended up using for my real setup.




server = new Server();
Connector connector=new SocketConnector();
connector.setPort(SERVER_PORT);
server.setConnectors(new Connector[]{connector});

Constraint constraint = new Constraint();
constraint.setName(Constraint.__BASIC_AUTH);;
constraint.setRoles(new String[]{"admin"});
constraint.setAuthenticate(true);

ConstraintMapping cm = new ConstraintMapping();
cm.setConstraint(constraint);
cm.setPathSpec("/*");

SecurityHandler sh = new SecurityHandler();
//read username and password from non jetty conf source
HashUserRealm realm = new HashUserRealm("admin");
realm.put("admin", "test");
realm.addUserToRole("admin", "admin");
sh.setUserRealm(realm);
sh.setConstraintMappings(new ConstraintMapping[]{cm});

server.setHandlers(new Handler[]{sh, new MyHTTPHandler()});
server.start();
server.join();



In ruby all I had to do in my model is:


self.site = "http://admin:test@localhost:8080/"