simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with programming

Codeorgan analyses the source of a web site to produce music algorithmically based on the sites contents. Here's what simonb.com sounds like (MP3). Cool. Sounds OK to me. Could this be a new way of reviewing sites - based on what they sound like. This is what microsoft.com sound like. Not so good.

The audio was hijacked from Safari using Audio Hijack Pro.

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Adobe have posted a blog "explaining" why Flash can not be made open source:

"The main reason we can't release Flash Player as open source is because there is technology in the Player that we don't own, such as the industry standard hi-def video codec, H.264."

This is, of course, complete BS. Have they never heard of libraries? Just release the bits you can and let the open source world plug the video decoder hole with ffmpeg. Perhaps the real reason is that, these days, most of the use for Flash on the web is nothing more than a…

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When I wrote about the PsiXpda I made a snarky reference to the long time it was taking for Nokia to release Symbian as open source. Well, what do you know? As soon as I write about it they go open source. Apparently ahead of schedule - though that seems a bit arbitrary since (if I recall correctly) when they started there was no schedule. And the Symbian Source page says... "Not all of the code is yet available under open source licences." Odd that.

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Linux kernel swear counts is a graph of swear words in the Linux kernel. There are step changes in the total number of swear words in the kernel around every major release - presumably because of a large increase in code. Also graphed is the swear words per line which tends to 2e-5 per line i.e. 0.00002 per line. Could this be used as a new measure of software maturity?

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Programming is to engineering as poetry is to writing.

PITE-A-PITW

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Interesting Places I've Written Code: Taking Tea At The Peninsula Hong Kong

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InfoQ is a great site for the practicing programmer and has some very interesting presentations available for free. Here are my current faves.

I'm into CMSs and architecture so these two on the Guardian web site were really interesting:

1. The evolving Guardian.co.uk architecture by Mathew Wall
2. Rebuilding guardian.co.uk With DDD by Phil Wills (DDD = Domain Driven Design)

You can also hear a podcast about the Guardian site which gets into a bit more detail on the platform and how it was arrived at from Software Engineering Radio with Mathew Wall and Erik DoernenBurg (Erik's from Thoughtworks).

Back to InfoQ...…

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Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion... When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

So begins a piece entitled "If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers" Sadly it's very true to life.

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The debugging process explained in the Chronillogical Comic This is what it's like. Oh, the rage. Don't you wish you were a programmer?

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Geek and Poke is an excellent web cartoon. Well worth subscribing to the feed. The above is a good example. We've probably all experienced the dreaded Heisenbug at some point in our careers.

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