Moblog

Sikuli gets around this by using picture based computing. Instead of needing intimate knowledge of a particular API or language you simply use Sikuli script to take an action on an area of the screen it finds by you giving it a picture.

DownloadSquad: Sikuli uses screen shots to run scripts

There are quite a few online diagram editors, but yUML.com is not a painting tool: It generates UML class and use case diagrams on the fly from image URLs. The samples page lists a few examples, here's a more complex one:

(via codinghorror.com)

Review Board is an open source tool developed by the VMware team to help with code reviews and pending code changes. Somewhat similar to an issue tracker, but worth a look.
From the same team: Parasite, a live debugger for GTK+ applications ("sort of like Firebug").

Continue reading "Burton Analyst Manes: SOA is Dead"

I regularly browse through the list of new acquisitions of our university's library. Turns out there are a few interesting new books to read! Continue reading "Five New IT books: A To-Do List"

Auszüge aus dem Artikel Projekte, Strukturen und Herzblutenergie von Gunter Dueck, IBM Distinguished Engineer, aus der aktuellen "Informatik Spektrum" Dezember 2008:

Continue reading "Projekte, Strukturen und Herzblutenergie"

Continue reading "Five Good Programming Habits in PHP"

uTest, a new startup, pays users for harvesting bugs in products.

Martin Fowler suggests to gather (new) requirements by analyzing user behavior within the application/web site.

Crowdsourcing seems to be the new future. The Microsoft internationalization team is currently testing "collaborative translation", where visitors aid to improve machine translated content. They're also working on CLIP, a small utility that shows a local translation within the tooltip of a caption. Continue reading "Croudsourcing for Localization"

Tools

I've noticed that IrfanView now includes a third-party "save to web" component called RIOT with preview and tweaking options similar to Photoshop. Don't forget to download the extended, more recent version of the plugin directly from their website.

TeamDrive NXT 2.0 looks promising. So does PowerFolder. While both transparently synchronize files on multiple PCs (see previous blog post), each has its own strengths. TeamDrive is server-centric, aiming towards supporting WebDAV and Amazon S3 as storage backends besides their own online storage (unfortunately, not in the current beta), teamwork on shared folders (and the resulting conflict management) and unlimited file revisions, whereas PowerFolder has the advantage of being Java (available for Mac, Win and Linux, TeamDrive: Win only), and the disadvantage of being Java (in my first limited tests, it seems to take a lot of resources to scan the files on every startup). Peer-to-peer oriented, there's no need for a central server - all clients are equal. Partner clients in the LAN are instantly discovered, and you can use different profiles for different folders (ranging from one-way manual download to automatic sync). It's a pity that they turned away from releasing the program under GPL, but I understand that after years of development, they finally want to earn some money.

Websites

"wePapers helps students and others share and expand their knowledge. You can find and download the papers and documents you need in a matter of seconds, discuss them with others, or just mess around."

Any germans, willing to sell their lecture notes? Or buy some? Try Unidog. On a related note: Another german student job platform, JobMensa, keeps track of all your side jobs.

RefSeek is a search engine that "aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone".

(Among others,) GoGrid offers cloud hosting services similar to Amazon EC2. Finally, after grid computing has been promised in the last century, the world seems to be ready. If you're interested, also read the Windows Live announcements from September in case you've missed them.

Tarpipe offers workflows to publish to existing social media platforms easily. They are also supporting OAuth, an open protocol for desktop and web authorization that, in contrast to OpenID, is supposed to work transparently ("While OpenID is all about using a single identity to sign into many sites, OAuth is about giving access to your stuff without sharing your identity at all (or its secret parts).")

Dex wants to be the new "Web 2.0" social CRM that "keeps customer relationships vital and prosperous".

Seittest.de analyzes and ranks German websites using "human critera" like readability. Very basic; for example, they do not judge accessibility.

Software Development

I am currently working on a web project based on the Joomla CMS. Many components are being released under GPL, while the developers charge for the download of the sources itself. Provoking thought: If I modify the component, even slightly, and publish it somewhere else without charging for it, does this break the license? Isn't that the basic idea of GPL?



Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, gave a basic talk on Web technologies and emerging standards in HTML5 at the TU Dresden today.

Books: New editions of Artificial Intelligence and Windows Internals are expected for December/January.

IBM DeveloperWorks series: 30 game scripts you can write in PHP

Grails is growing up and looks stable now. 1.04 released.

Via "Fabulous Adventures of Coding".

Knowledge for free, in no particular order. Continue reading "Software Engineering Blogs; a Personal Selection"