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By SD Times News Team
August 15, 2008 —
Oh the conferences you'll go!
I love conferences. They’re fun to go to; as I write this, I’m making my plans for LinuxWorld. To you, of course, LinuxWorld is last week’s news. Conferences are the best place to catch up with colleagues and friends, see the newest technology and unravel the latest buzzwords. Oh, yeah, and also watch a keynote and take some technical classes.
While I attend many conferences each year, a big part of my job is involved with creating new events. On page 32, you can read about our brand-new SharePoint Technology Conference, taking place from Jan. 26 to 28 near San Francisco International Airport. That’s an exciting new project being spearheaded by David Rubinstein, former editor of SD Times, now heading up our sister publication, Systems Management News. We hope you can make it to SPTechCon.
Another of our conferences is EclipseWorld, a conference for Java developers. EclipseWorld will be Oct. 28 to 30 in Reston, Va. We just confirmed the keynote speaker: Ivar Jacobson, the computer scientist perhaps best known for his work in modeling and requirements, and who is one of the Three Amigos behind the Uniform Modeling Language.
Before either of those events, of course, there’s the Software Performance Conference, Sept. 24 to 26 in Boston. STPCon Fall is our biggest conference, and this year it’s kicked off by software testing guru James Bach. Hope to see you there!
Alan Zeichick
Cool it, bloggers
So Kevin Johnson is leaving Microsoft. The blogosphere is atwitter (no pun intended) with speculation that he was made to fall on his sword for failing to consummate a deal with Yahoo. Some bloggers may be too clueless to know that they’re clueless.
Microsoft veterans have been departing the company in a steady succession since Jim Allchin retired in January 2007 after 17 years with the company. Note to the blogosphere: These people have made their millions and are moving on. Maybe Johnson was disappointed that he would not have a larger fiefdom—who knows? I sure don’t, and I doubt the bloggers do.
David Worthington
Rational checks it's grammar
Don’t you hate it when your software program crashes because someone wrote the equivalent of “ain’t” in the code? Or “is” instead of “are”? Or used a noun as a verb?
IBM Rational seems to think it’s enough of a problem that it is working on a debugger that can also check the grammar of code while it’s being written.
The IBM Rational Software Analyzer, launched July 29, works like the grammar-check function in Microsoft Word, explained Dave Locke, director of Rational software marketing. A debugger stops on incorrectly written code just like spell-check stops on a misspelled word. But the Software Analyzer, like more recent versions of Word, stops at a section of code that is ungrammatical.
“A grammar checker in Word helps guide you to communicate more effectively,” Locke continued. “In programming, there are patterns of development that are known to be good, so we test to see if you have applied the pattern correctly.”
For instance, code needs to include an instruction to retrieve data from memory and another when the program is done accessing memory. “A lot of times people forget the ‘I’m done with it’ part,” he said.
Ain’t it about time someone did something about that there problem?
Robert Mullins
How can Windows move users to Midori?
Clean breaks with one’s past aren’t always easy, especially when friends and family are involved. That’s the problem Microsoft faces with Midori as it considers breaking with its Windows past.
It brings to mind what happens when a company that lives and dies by its operating system decides to make a drastic architectural changes; I’m speaking about Apple and the transition from Mac OS to Mac OS X. In providing the Classic environment, the company allowed users to bridge the old and new by running Mac OS 9 in a sandbox, although nobody would call the experience seamless.
What Apple did wasn’t architecturally pretty, but it worked: Within a handful of years, most bread-and-butter applications for Macs had been reworked to run under the Unix-based replacement OS. By the time Apple was working up a release of Tiger that would run on Intel systems, the need to provide the Classic environment had all but disappeared, and Classic was cut from the Intel versions of Mac OS X 10.4.
In five years, Apple had dragged its user base, kicking and screaming, onto its platform of the future. I doubt that I’m the only person who thinks Microsoft might require twice as much time before Midori can shed itself of the Win32 past.
P.J. Connolly
Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, IBM, Linux, software development, Apple, Microsoft
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