The BCS SPA Cambridge talks are about to start again running monthly from November through to June. These are computing talks that are free to attend with a light buffet. The talks are also moving back to Microsoft Research Cambridge.
On November 12th at 7pm Mark Dalgarno is doing his talk “When Good Architectures Go Bad”.
As software evolves its architecture ‘as-is’ deviates from its architecture ‘as-hoped-for’ – the software is said to erode.
Software Erosion can be a problem because:
- the time, effort and risk in implementing further changes increases
- the effect of further changes becomes harder to predict
- further changes typically cause the ‘as-is’ architecture to deviate further from the ‘as-hoped-for’ architecture – the situation becomes worse.
This session looks at examples of software erosion and explores practices to prevent or slow such decay. Participants should come prepared with architectural ‘war stories’. There will be a couple of group exercises but no test at the end.
This will be a good session to meet other attendees and to tell your war stories and stories of hope (although I think the bad ones are always more entertaining).
Sign up for free here.
This month Boost 1.37 has been released. It’s the latest version of the extremely useful peer reviewed C++ libraries that a large portion of has fed into the latest C++ standards.
There is only one new library this time out which is Boost.Proto:
Proto is a framework for building Domain Specific Embedded Languages in C++. It provides tools for constructing, type-checking, transforming and executing expression templates. More specifically, Proto provides:
- An expression tree data structure.
- A mechanism for giving expressions additional behaviors and members.
- Operator overloads for building the tree from an expression.
- Utilities for defining the grammar to which an expression must conform.
- An extensible mechanism for immediately executing an expression template.
- An extensible set of tree transformations to apply to expression trees.
There are the usual myriad of bug fixes with the other libraries. They are still following their regular release cycles which is a good thing.
Art and random web junk
Turn Your Name Into A Face
Does exactly what it says in the title.
Comic Book Tropes
Comic books formulaic? No…
100 Illustrated Horror Film Posters: Part 1
Before the days of computer hackery…
6 MORE Creepy Urban Legends (That Happen to be True)
Only for the strong of stomach.
9 Foreign Rip-Offs Cooler Than The Hollywood Originals
Turkish Batman? Bollywood Superman? Japanese Spider-Man? Chinese Popeye? Entertaining madness.
Death and Taxes Shows Fascinating, Terrible View on Military Tech Spending
A beautiful rendition of scary data.
Technical
September 2008 ISO C++ Standards Meeting: The Draft Has Landed, and a New Convener
The C++0x draft is now feature complete which I am sad enough to find exciting.
PyCon 2008 Videos
Videos of thetalks from PyCon 2008.
Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design
Tips and tricks to make better CSS.
HP netbook boasts homegrown Linux distro
It will be interesting to see what HP have done for their netbook UI.
Cruz - Yet Another Web Browser Project
Another web browser based on the Webkit platform geared up for social networking and open plug-ins.
How to Sync Google Services With Your Mobile Device
How to use your Google services through those handy little devices.
Open source “Game Boy” has five awesome parts, zero games
More hardware hackery out there on the Internet.
Linux applications gain new developers on Windows and OS X
More cross-platform programming.
Write a Cocoa application, create a new target and compile it for Windows. Easy as that. The Cocotron project gives the opportunity for developers to do just that.
There is a good in-depth blog post here. The developers of FileMagnet decided they wanted a Windows version and it took them two months with Cocotron and no Visual Studio at all.
What with Objective-J and Cocotron you could program for the web or Windows or Linux and never get too far away from the frameworks of Apple.
It has been a while since I have said anything about upcoming talks in Cambridge.
The original Apprentice is coming to town - Cambridge Business Lectures
10th November 2008 5.30pm
Tim Campbell, the winner of the first series of The Apprentice, is coming to Cambridge. Tim will talking on “Much sugar is a good thing: the power of mentoring”.
Tim stands out from other Apprentice contestants - and winners - as being a man of substance and depth as well as charisma. Since leaving Amstrad, he’s set up two ventures. Most recently, his Bright Ideas Trust gives advice and funding to young people to help them get their ideas off the ground.
Tim will be talking at Robinson College, Cambridge at 5:30pm on Monday November 10th. The event is free, but you need to book a place.
I’m really interested to see what life after what essentially amounts to a “reaity” TV programme is like, because it sounds like he has accomplished some really good things. Unfortunately his era at Amstrad was recent so I guess no questions about the CPC464…
Software East
20th November 2008 7pm
There are two speakers for this event:
- Steven Kelly - Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development
- Danilo Beuche - Get started with Software Product Lines - Key success factors and what to avoid
The cost of this event is £15 which includes light buffet.
Visiting Thanko’s Tokyo Mecca of USB Weirdness
Because you can never have too much USB powered junk laying all over your house and workplace.
Movie Posters with brand integration
Alternate movie posters with brand integration. I guess the James Bond one was probably too big for the Internet.
Four Feet From a Twit
The Boris Johnson comic book by Roger Langridge.
7 Terrible Early Versions of Great Movies
The beautiful flowers that have flourished from manure.
A Closer Look at Fennec, the Mobile Firefox Browser
A closer look at the mobile Fireox browser. The AwesomeBar definitely looks like a plus point.
AppLoop Transforms Blogs Into Native iPhone Applications
Basically it converts RSS feeds into swish looking iPhone apps. Anyone who has ever seen RSS parsing code knows this is a bloody nightmare to get right.
Mocha VNC and G.ho.st: Mobile Access to Your Desktop
Remote control your desktop with an iPhone.
Watch This: MACs vs. PCs
This is getting violent now.
Shrink Wrapped
A lengthy article about the history of PC game packaging.
The History Of Bullfrog - Alex Trowers and Part 2
The history of Bulfrog games from someone who lived it. It’s easy to forget how many great games they made (and also some of the ones that never made it out).
Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #965 - The Elder Gods seem to like hobos.
Background Pattern Generators and Resources
Links to cool programs that can generate seamless background textures.
Top 10 IKEA Furniture Mods
Even furniture isn’t left out of the hackery.
Procedural Generation Competition
Very cool competition for games with generated procedural content.
Commando Interview with Keith Page
Proper old school-style British artist.
Old School B-Movie Posters
I think I am just a grumpy old man now because they really knew how to make fantastic posters back in the day.
mimo 7-inch lcd monitor perfect for extra menus
This looks like a DisplayLink minimon to me. These are cool little additions to your array of displays.
E17 adapted to Linux devices, demo’d on Treo650
Enlightenment E17 on a low power mobile phone. It looks good and has very low requirements for those features (32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz).
How-to: Make an e-paper clock from Esquire magazine
The hacking of the Esquire e-paper displays has got us a clock now.
SoHo NAS devices run EMC Linux
NAS with 1Tb at $300 - hardware is cheap.
I have been running a VM of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex for a few days now. I am not overly enamoured by the default theme, mainly the blandness and the window padding which since using my Mac I know is an unnecessary luxury (also to make Vista more manageable make sure you get rid of the crazy 4 pixel window padding).
I decided to use the Dust theme because it is understated, looks clean and by default using no window padding. The main bonus is that there is a Firefox theme as well, and as I spend most of my life with open web browsers it deals with that minor niggle of consistency. The screenshots that you will see by following the above link will show you it is well thought out.
As Lifehacker have posted today there is a new theme called DarkRoom with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. It’s basically a dark (brown) theme. From the screenshots it looks nice and leathery but nowhere near as nice as the Dust theme. I can’t seem to find if it skins Firefox but since it is an official skin I imagine it must.
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