Developages - Development and Technology Blog

An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world’s first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction.

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Original post by kdawson

covertbadger notes a developer’s blog entry on a novel way of judging progress in refactoring code. “Software quality tools can never completely replace the gut instinct of a developer — you might have massive test coverage, but that won’t help with subjective measures such as code smells. With Wodehouse-style refactoring, we can now easily keep track of which code we are happy with, and which code we remain deeply suspicious of.”

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Original post by kdawson

Jeremy Martin writes “Well I suppose it’s an undeniable fact about us programmer-types — every now and then we just can’t help but get excited about something really nerdy. For me right now, that is definitely JavaScript 2.0. I was just taking a look at the proposed specifications and I am really, truly excited about what we have coming.”

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Original post by ScuttleMonkey

eldavojohn writes “If you’re a Web developer, you should check out a quick post about the number of types, methods, & fields in the .NET framework. This was done using NDepend. The numbers are quite large — e.g. 39,509 types. The blogger went on to generate tree maps and a dependency matrix.”

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Original post by kdawson

simoniker writes “Over at Dobbs Code Talk, Chris Diggins has been discussing programming languages beyond C++ or Java, suggesting options such as Ruby (’does a great job of showing how powerful a dynamic language can be, and leverages powerful ideas from Smalltalk, Perl, and Lisp’) but suggesting Scala as a first choice (’Very accessible to programmers from different backgrounds.’) What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?”

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Original post by Zonk

schliz notes a development out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where researchers have successfully created an artificially intelligent four-year-old capable of reasoning about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age. The technology, which runs on the institute’s supercomputing clusters, will be put to use in immersive training and education scenarios. Researchers envision futuristic applications like those seen in Star Trek’s holodeck.”

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Original post by kdawson

christo writes “In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman with coding skills. Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. Foster is a physicist who worked at Fermilab for 22 years designing data analysis software for the lab’s high energy particle collision detector. In an interview with CNET today, Foster’s campaign manager confirmed that the Congressman can write assembly, Fortran and Visual Basic. Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all? Can we expect more rational tech-policy? Already on his first day, Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill.”

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Original post by Zonk

MOBE2001 writes “There is widespread disagreement among experts on how best to design and program multicore processors, according to the EE Times. Some, like senior AMD fellow, Chuck Moore, believe that the industry should move to a new model based on a multiplicity of cores optimized for various tasks. Others disagree on the ground that heterogeneous processors would be too hard to program. The only emerging consensus seems to be that multicore computing is facing a major crisis. In a recent EE Times article titled ‘Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models’, AMD’s Chuck Moore is reported to have said that ‘the industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially heterogeneous ones.’”

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Original post by Zonk

chrisd writes “Just wanted to drop a line reminding open source projects that they only have until March 12th (Pacific time) to apply for Google’s Summer of Code. We are accepting more organizations this year than last because we want to add a couple hundred more students to the program. If you are part of a great project or know someone who is, we’d love to see an application. Please note that this is for organizations and not for prospective students, that’s not for a few more weeks (see the program timeline)!”

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Original post by Zonk

MBCook sends us to the blog of one Landon Dyer, who posted an entry the other day entitled Donkey Kong and Me. It describes how he was offered at job at Atari after writing a Centipede clone and ended up programming Donkey Kong for the Atari 800. It’s full of detail that will be fascinating to anyone who ever programmed assembly language that had to fit into 16K, as well as portents of what was to come at Atari. “My first officemate didn’t know how to set up his computer. He didn’t know anything, it appeared. He’d been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad.”

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Digging the 32GB of NAND, but not so hot about the $499 pricetag on Apple’s latest iPod touch? Creative would like to remind you that it got there first, for less, with the Zen, and has slashed the price to $299 from the original $349 to keep that margin healthy. Sure, the 2.5-inch screen is a bit smaller, and we’ve given Creative a bit of a hard time over the years for an occasional failure to innovate, but reviewers seemed to love on the Zen, and it’s hard to argue with this deal.

[Via DailyTech]

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Original post by Paul Miller

Filed under: Portable Video

var digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/NBC_s_Zucker_hints_at_return_to_iTunes’; After a very public cat-fight resulting in the discontinuation of NBC content on iTunes, the relationship between NBC and Apple seems to be on the mend. Perhaps you recall NBC Universal’s CEO, Jeff Zucker, saying that Steve Jobs and iTunes had “destroyed the music business.” This in retaliation to Apple’s damning press release in which it chided NBC for wanting to more than double the retail price for its per episode downloads, something NBC flatly denied. This morning, the Financial Times is reporting on a kinder and gentler kinship between the media giants. According to the FT, Zucker says, “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple.” He then unexpectedly adds, “We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.” No telling what has caused the turnabout. Perhaps the writers strike gave both parties time to reflect on their mounting lost revenue. Or maybe it’s residual goodwill on the heels of Universal inking an iTunes rental deal. Whatever the case, it will be good to see NBC’s content return to iTunes whenever the strike might end.

[Thanks, Bart L.]

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

With CES in the books, banners flying up and rumors running rampant, only one thing could be on the horizon: Steve’s Macworld 2008 keynote. Unfortunately, it seems he’s a bit short on time, and needs you to access a totally awesome web-based game to help round up garb, VIPs and top-secret gear before taking the stage. Okay, so all of that is complete rubbish, but if you’ve got a moment to kill and can’t stop obsessing over next Tuesday, hit the read link and have a laugh.

[Thanks, Mikkel]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Gaming

Right on cue, the Xbox Live Video Marketplace has indeed launched in Europe today, and our neighbors to the north are being treated, too. Effectively immediately, Xbox Live users in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom can dip into features made available to Americans last year. More specifically, gamers will be able to rent downloadable flicks in HD and SD forms, and while the former will run folks “as little as 250 Microsoft Points (£2; $4.06),” high-definition versions will cost upwards of 380 Points (£3.20; $6.49). Also of note is the inclusion of additional Warner Bros. films such as Batman Forever, Batman Returns and Analyze That — all of which will be available by the year’s end. Lastly, Microsoft will be offering up a “mystery HD [Warner Bros.] title” to UK users for just £0.99 ($2.00) on December 28th, but we can’t say we’re brimming with excitement over it.

[Via Pocket-Lint]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Desktops

While all-in-one PCs come in many flavors from many brands, the one thing most of them have in common is nearly a total lack of customization. Not so with the Ion V2000, which is just a chassis with a built-in display, speakers and media card reader. The rest is up to you, and with all these fancy chips and graphics cards hitting the market of late, there’s never been a better time to stick it to the man and go it alone. Hopefully the next time around Ion can do this up with a little more sexy, and a price tag and release info really wouldn’t hurt, but we hate to be pushy.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Paul Miller