Category: General Computing

  • OSCON 2006 — Presentations I attended

    There are still a couple that are not posted yet — I’ll update this post as they are added. –TR  Test-driven Development meets design-by-contract Jim Weirich, Compuware URL: http://onestepback.org/articles/TddMeetsDbc Google Ajax Search API Mark Lucovsky URL: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2006/lucovsky_mark.ppt Driving Rails Deep into the back office Obie Fernandez URL: (URL hasn’t been posted yet — but should be…

  • OSCON Day 3

    Just a note — The presentation notes have been posted for all the presentations now (at least as far as I can tell). I’ll post another post with direct links to all the sessions I attended after this one. KeyNotes The first few keynotes really weren’t that interesting (I thought) and I’ll admit that I…

  • OSCON Presentation notes

    For those interested in seeing all the presentation notes from OSCON 2006, you can find all the sessions currently posted at: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/46/presentations.html For sessions that I’ve attended and written about, I’ve placed them below.  As more sessions become available, I’ll post additional links. Building Internet Applications with Mozilla XULRunner Benjamin Smedberg URL: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2006/smedberg_benjamin.odp (Open Office files) Google…

  • OSCON 2006: Day 2

    Keynotes: The Zen of Free Simon Phipps, Sun “Opening” the Possibilities: APIs and Open Source Gary Lang, AutoDesk, Inc. Ugh — As good as the first day’s keynotes were — these were not.  I was nearly ready to bag the keynotes when… 5 a day Robert “rOml” Lefkowitz, Root Markets This was a fantastic keynote. …

  • OSCON: Day 1 sessions

    Test-driven development meets design-by-contract Jim Weirich, Compuware Slides: http://www.onestepback.org/articles/TddMeetsDbc I enjoyed this session partly because I’m not a big fan of Ruby’s Unit Testing and liked the idea of a contract testing method.  The session discussed a separate testing packed called rSpec (http://rspec.rubyforge.org/).  I’ve included a link to the presentation which includes sample code on…

  • OSCON 2006 Wed. Keynotes (Tim O’Reilly)

    In the openning keynote, Tim O’Reilly presented what he calls his 5 big ideas about open source.  Some I thought were fairly interesting.  Architectures of participation beyond software development (Web 2.0) The idea here is that in this new world of Web 2.0, successful companies are looking to architectures where people build systems simply by…

  • OSCON 2006

    I’m going to be away from the office for a few days while attending the OSCON 2006 conference here in Portland, Oregon.  I’ll be periodically blogging about the sessions throughout the conference — so stay tuned.  BTW, if anyone is here at OSCON, give me a hollar. –TR

  • Character conversion in .NET

    I had someone who uses UniMARC ask me about some problems that they were having with the conversion between Unimarc to Dublin Core.  Some of the characters where being skewed when the translation occurred.  The problem of course relates to the characterset that the Unimarc records are encoded in.  Because a number of MARC formats…

  • Has anyone ever used Saxon.NET?

    Within MarcEdit, the MarcEngine makes use of the .NET System.xml libraries.  This has been a very good thing in that Microsoft has a very special class setup specifically for XSLT translations — and by adding some additional code and extending the class, I’ve been able to create a very fast XSLT processor.  The downer however…

  • Coding block?

    I’ve heard of writers block, but coders block?  Who knows.  All I know is that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately.  After pushing out the first version of our metasearch tool, our group sat back and looked at retooling the program in Ruby.  Partly to make it easier to do R&D prototyping…