Steve's personal weblog

Catalyst Systems - Managing the risk of developing Enterprise and eBusiness applications. Openmake eliminates the use of makefiles and improves change and configuration management by automating the build management process. Build Java C++ Unix and Mai: "Openmake is an evolutionary build management tool designed to eliminate the need for XML scripting and makefiles while empowering developers with the robust functionality of ANT. Openmake supports a collaborative engineering process that allows developers to contribute to the build while ensuring standardization and consistency across all platforms. Openmake delivers a single build process for enterprise applications regardless of IDE, language or operating system. Openmake ensures that executables are created the same way every time."

Japan.com - Technology - Magnetic Fan in Japan - Japanese Magnetic Fan: "When we first got the call from an excited colleague that he'd just seen the most amazing invention -- a magnetic motor that consumed almost no electricity -- we were so skeptical that we declined an invitation to go see it. If the technology was so good, we thought, how come they didn't have any customers yet? "

He has customers now. Hard to believe, but he claims effeciency of 330%. I'm going to buy a few, plus a few generators, and run my whole house for the cost of a single lightbulb. 100 watts in - 330 watts out - 330 watts in - 1089 watts out - 1089 watts in - 3593 watts out...

distcc optimizations: "If you don't already know about distcc I recommend that you check it out. Distcc is a tool that sits between make and gcc sending compile jobs to other computers when free, thus distributing compiles and dramatically decreasing build times. Best of all it is very easy to set up. "

Kasei: The Importance of Fudgability: "Part of the problem was how arrogant we were. We believed that we could spend a couple of days watching trained lawyers perform a highly-skilled job, talk briefly to them, and then make their jobs completely obsolete.
Worse, we made the job completely non-fudgable. In any human process there's always a degree to which the outcome can be fudged by the person performing the task. Even when the rules are simple or well-understood, there are always cases when someone will have a compelling reason to do things differently. In this case we didn't even know all the rules, and discovered to our horror that there were many more edge-cases than we'd imagined. "

Simon Willison: Pydoc: "Pydoc
Pydoc is awesome; I don't know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
pydoc -p 8888
Then point a browser at http://localhost:8888/ to browse interactive documentation for every Python module available on your system. This includes moduldes installed in your site-packages directory. If you keep code you've written yourself in site-packages you'll be able to browse the documentation for that too. If you're even remotely consistent about writing docstrings you'll be amazed at how useful the resulting documentation is. I can't believe I only just discovered this!"

cvs2cl.pl: "Here's an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Joseph Walton (joe at kafsemo dot org) that generates RSS output from changelogs in XML mode (requires 2.51 for the isoDate patch)."

distcc: a fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler: "distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is often two or more times faster than a local compile. "