Archive for the General category
Unit Testing: Is There Really Any Debate Any Longer?
Posted on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 at 2:00 AM by Malcolm
On a panel several years ago, Dr. Dobbs's editor-in-chief Andrew Binstock was asked what was the greatest benefit that Agile had delivered to him personally. It took him no time to respond “unit testing.”
While this answer is not historically accurate — unit testing precedes the Agile movement — it’s clear that the Agile exponents made it a widespread practice. In large part, because of Kent Beck’s lapidary JUnit implementation, which has been widely copied to most major languages.
The specific benefit Andrew — and many other developers — have enjoyed is quite simply less time spent in the debugger. Today he writes code and then he writes unit tests that exercise the edge cases and one or two main cases. Right away, Andrew can tell if he missed something obvious or if his implementation has a slight burble that mishandles cases he expected to flow through easily.
Read the rest of this artcile here.
Dead Sea Scroll Online by Google
Posted on Saturday, October 01, 2011 at 7:10 PM by Malcolm
Edited on: Saturday, October 01, 2011 7:18 PM
Posted in General (RSS), Science (RSS)
Microsoft opens Windows 8 preview to all
Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 10:07 PM by Malcolm
Microsoft has made a preview of Windows 8 available to anyone who takes the time to download it.
Windows 8 Developer Preview, as Microsoft called the pre-beta build, was posted to a company website shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.
The downloads, which range from 2.8GB to 4.8GB in size, come with no restrictions, a company spokeswoman confirmed earlier in the day.
The links to download Win8 torrents are here:
Windows 8 Developer Preview 64-bit + Developer tools
Windows 8 Developer Preview 64 bit
For the torrent for 32bit version, check out this whopping 11.3GB of download. Use selective downloading (unselect the 64bit ISOs in the file list of your torrent client).
The direct download links:
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) with Developer Tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) without the developer tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (32-bit)
Edited on: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 9:21 AMPosted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Forget Brainstorming
Posted on Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 5:51 PM by Malcolm
According to this article from newsweek, brainstorming has been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together.
The State and Future of JavaScript
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:07 AM by Malcolm
Douglas Crockford talks on the history of JavaScript unveiling some of the struggles the Ecma Technical Committee has had in advancing the language over the years, concluding with lessons learned: if one has a great idea he should not tell it to a standardization body but rather do it, a change to a widely used standard is an act of violence, standards are hard, and one cannot please everyonePosted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Happy New Year 2010
Posted on Friday, January 01, 2010 at 12:03 PM by Malcolm
What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? - CACM article by Bjarne Stroustrup
Posted on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 11:58 PM by Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS), Teaching (RSS)
Software Engineering Method and Theory: Call for Action Statement
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 8:12 AM by Malcolm
- The prevalence of fads more typical of fashion industry than of an engineering discipline.
- The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis.
- The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified.
- The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation.
- The split between industry practice and academic research.
- Includes a kernel of widely-agreed elements, extensible for specific uses.
- Addresses both technology and people issues.
- Is supported by industry, academia, researchers and users.
- Supports extension in the face of changing requirements and technology.
You can become a supporter of the community by signing up at the site: www.semat.org.
Edited on: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:01 AM
A System-based Approach to Spares Management
Posted on Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 4:06 PM by Malcolm
The traditional approach to inventory provisioning sets all spares requirements to a level that meets an item’s performance measure, such as a stock-out protection level, a fill rate, a mission critical rate, or a confidence level. Such an approach cannot explicitly consider the overall performance of the system, nor can it be constrained to a set total cost for the spares mix.
However, a spares' benefit should be measured in terms of the projected increase in system availability by adding that spare to the inventory. The system-based inventory provisioning approach is significantly different from the traditional item approach for generating spares requirements, which treats all items the same. In system-based inventory provisioning, spares can then be ranked in terms of benefit, then divided by cost as a measure of the desirability of adding them to the inventory. The problem then is to answer the question "What mix of spare parts is required to keep the system at some level of operational performance for a specific scenario?". An optimal solution in this case means a solution in which no other mix of spares can provide a greater system availability for the same cost, or the same system availability for less cost (within the scope of the model assumptions and data). Thus, there exists not just one solution, but a set of solutions that represent different trade-off between system availability and cost.
An example of system-based inventory provisioning is the work on the Aircraft Sustainability Model from the Logistics Management Institute which is a mathematical statistical model used by the United States Air Force to computes optimal spares mixed to support a wide range of possible scenarios. Another example is the D-SIMSPAIR product from D-SIMLAB Technologies which uses simulation-based optimization to compute optimal mix of aerospace rotables for maintenance contracts.
Related Links:
- A systems approach to spares management
- The Aircraft Sustainability Model
- Aircraft Sustainability Model®
- D-SIMLAB Technologies
Posted in General (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Ebook: HPC for Dummies
Posted on Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 12:37 AM by Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS)
Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
Posted on Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:35 AM by Malcolm
The Read Green Initiative
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 5:26 PM by Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS), Research (RSS)
NTU supports Earth Hour
Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 3:45 PM by Malcolm
Edited on: Monday, March 30, 2009 9:25 AMFree Wireless Broadband Access to NTU Wifi Network via SMS Registration
Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 9:07 AM by Malcolm
(Source) Visitors to NTU campus with mobile phone can now enjoy free, campus-wide seamless wireless broadband access with speed of up to 54Mbps.To register for the free wireless access day account, simply SMS the keyword 'register' to the phone number 98635582. The visitor will receive via SMS the account username in the format ASSOC\
Edited on: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:19 AM
Leap Year Bug in Microsoft Zune Player
Posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 12:45 PM by Malcolm
On December 31, 2008, every Zune 30 device freezes due to a leap year bug in a driver from Freescale Semiconductor in a "while loop". Obviously a leap year test case is not carried out on the driver. See this article for details. Edited on: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:20 PMPosted in General (RSS), Teaching (RSS)
Google Code University - Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce
Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 12:40 AM by Malcolm
This tutorial from the Google Code University covers the basics of parallel programming and the MapReduce programming model. The pre-requisites are significant programming experience with a language such as C++ or Java, and data structures & algorithms.
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS), Research (RSS)
Obama Wins Historic US Election
Posted on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 11:09 PM by Malcolm
Edited on: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:31 PM
Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing
Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2008 at 7:50 PM by Malcolm
This article from the July issue of IEEE Spectrum describes a state-of-the-art agent-based robotic warehousing system. Unlike traditional warehouse where operators go around the warehouse picking orders, in this system, swarms of robots controlled by an agent-based scheduling, dispatching and traffic control system, worked in parallel to bring shelves to the operators for picking. The system has already been deployed by Staples, Walgreens and Zappos.
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Posted on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 12:59 PM by Malcolm
Links to Programming Languages
6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Edited on: Friday, September 09, 2016 1:04 PMPosted in General (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
10 Great Tech Books
Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 6:59 PM by Malcolm
From the July issue of IEEE Spectrum, below are 10 great general-interest books about technology.- The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
- Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean by David Gelernter
- A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
- The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
