HMK's Spurious Thoughts

...a great story: Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story (Via Studio Log.)

New version of Ambrai Smalltalk for MacOS X.

christopher baus.net: "You might know everything about strong exception safety, but if you haven't actually shipped anything, what good is it?"

Christopher Baus:

A few years ago there was a lot of discussion in the C/C++ community regarding the advantages of inlining of fuctions. The debate has been settled. The inline keyword exists as a hint to the complier. There are cases when inlining makes sense, but according to Mark Lacey of the Microsoft compiler team, the compiler ignores your advice. It decides what to inline and what to outline for you (ok it is possible to override this with a Microsoft specific keyword, but it isn't recommended). And the larger the program, the LESS chance that code it will be inlined.

Video webcast of Kent Beck's presentation on Developer testing. There's also a 1h mp3 at IT conversations.

Required listening.

Ron Jeffries on Frequent Releases.

Exactly the challenge we're facing right now.

Anyway, if you're a software engineer and you're not reading Ron's blog on a regular basis, you're missing out on something big time.

Grounded Proofs: "Last weekend, I shared some interesting properties of numbers with my kids.

Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope : How Not To Request A Feature:

1. Be aware that you don't represent all of our users.
2. Don't browbeat us.
3. Our job isn't as easy as it looks.

Admittedly, upgrading the memory on a Swiss Army knife is pretty cool (Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed).

However, the Victorinox folks have to integrate the USB-stick into the CyberTool knife. This would be the perfect christmas present for yours truly.