The Right Development Team for Rails

Glenn Vanderburg has a good post about "The Right Team for Rails". Having no Rails (and almost 0 Ruby experience) I cannot vouch for the article's accuracy. However, I'm betting he's right on the money.

Glenn says:

The wrong Rails team is one that doesn't understand those principles and practices. The fact that Rails makes things easy won't be enough. In my experience, such teams expend amazing effort and ingenuity to do the wrong thing.

I love this paragraph. If you remove the Rails references, there's universal truisms in here. It applies to almost any technology or language. In fact, you could make the statement about something as general as "programming" and it would be applicable.

So, like Glenn, I think we're still saying, "This can make good, well-informed people really efficient. However, the rest will still find it difficult to succeed."

12 Best Practices for Spring Configuration Files

Jason Zhicheng Li has a blog post where he lays out 12 best practices for Spring configuration files. I have only used Spring on 1 project, but I can definitely see the basis for several of them. These are worth keeping in mind as you develop your next project based on the Spring Framework.

LispWorks 4.4.6 Introduction Movie

Rainer Joswig has made a short introductory movie demonstrating the features of LispWorks Personal Edition 4.4.6. The movie just shows off the environment and doesn't give any introductory Common Lisp information. For that, check out:

• ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel
• Successful Lisp by David Lamkins

Also, be sure to subscribe to the Planet Lisp feed to get the latest and greatest information from the Lisp world in one, aggregated place.

Handbook of Software Architecture

Did you know that Grady Booch is working on a new book called "Handbook of Software Architecture"? I just found out today. He's developing the book online. There's also a blog that has information about the book progress and other tasty tidbits.

I really look forward to reading this book. We need more high-quality books on systems architecture. It's one of the hardest things to learn well because our knowledge of it is scattered in so many places. I'm excited because I'm sure if anyone can pull a good overview of the subject together, it's Grady Booch.

LispWorks Personal 4.4.6 Release

LispWorks has released the LispWorks Personal 4.4.6. There are some bug fixes, but perhaps the biggest news is that it now supports a larger image size. Dave Fox of LispWorks explained:

"We often receive requests for a free Edition of LispWorks that can
run larger programs, so here it is. LispWorks Personal Edition can now
grow by more than twice as much as previous versions and so is
suitable for a wide range of academic research and other
non-commercial uses."

Sweet. LispWorks is a fantastic environment. If you've been wanting to see what a professional Common Lisp environment is like, why wait any longer?

Made With Secret Alien Technology

I absolutely love the new Lisp logos that Conrad Barski has developed for use with Lisp projects. It cracks me up.

If you haven't checked out Conrad's "Casting SPELs in Lisp", you really should. It's an intro to Lisp that leads you to build an adventure game. Really good idea.

R&D Making a Comeback - With New Rules

Computerworld reports on an R&D Revival. The article says that R&D is making a come back, but the rules have changed. Companies are now making sure that R&D efforts are more targeted and the potential outcomes mesh with the company's business. The focus is still on rapid innovation because that remains a market differentiator for many companies.

I'm glad that R&D is still valued. It seems like over the past couple of years all we've heard about is R&D cuts, facilities being shut down, and research going overseas. (I guess the last point may still be true as more companies become multinational). It's refreshing to hear something positive about the R&D community.

Hybrid Open Source Business Models

TheServerSide has a reference to Zach Urlocker's blog article on Hybrid Open Source Business Models. Zach points out how a hybrid business model is becoming more popular where companies have some portion of their offering that is Open Source Software. It's an interesting model, and I would imagine that it's hard to pull off in practice. Well, maybe pull it off right.

del.icio.us code?

From Chris Double's Radio Weblog, Snippets is a site where you can post snippets of code and categorize them by tagging them with keywords. You can then share your code snippets. It's very del.icio.us, but even more tasty because it's chocked full of code goodness.

Back To Firefox Again for the Second Time

Well, I've gone back to Firefox from Opera. I gave Opera a solid week. I like the browser and especially the M2 mail and news client. However, the feature set didn't compel me like it used to. Also, I found myself missing the compatibility (that's right, I said compatibility) of Firefox. Go figure.

Interestingly enough, I didn't miss my extensions too much. Hmmm... Maybe I should clean out my extensions in Firefox and only add back the ones I really care about...

Mighty Mouse and Firefox

I have been having a "problem" with my Apple Mighty Mouse in Firefox on my Mac. Instead of scrolling horizontally, moving the ball left and right made Firefox go forward and backward through history. I hated this action, and it's really been a nuisance to me.

Tonight I decided to do something about it. I found this article on macosxhints. The second entry seemed to work for me. I now don't have the forward and back scrolling problem and all is well.