tola aggregator

James Taylor (hacking): SDKs and what that means

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:15:45 +0100

I’m having a real problem understanding the idea of an SDK. The entire concept is becoming more and more spleurgh (if you don’t mind my making up words). The concept makes sense when tit ties in with a particular IDE. And here’s the problem - why should anything tie into an IDE? The advantage of using something like Ant is that it allows you to build both inside an IDE and outside.

I built a “build bot” a while ago which took its own parameters and called csc.exe from the command line to help do building - because my knowledge was small, it seems that I had missed the point of msbuild. This takes the same project files that Visual Studio produces to do the same builds.

The only problem I have now is that I don’t know if there is a mono alternative to msbuild. If there is, that would be awesome, becuase I can define the build just as I would a java ant build, and know that it would work no matter what kind of system you where going to build for.

So is a SDK actually more then libraries? When it comes to mobile development, they seem to be libraries, maybe some tools which integrate into a particular IDE (for example Eclipse) and maybe also an emulator or test tools of some kind. Perhaps also, with an SDK is just a marketing thing - that you expect with an SDK a higher level of support.

Why am I writing this? Well, I’m currently struggling with the Windows SDK for .Net 3.5 - I’m having massive problems with it and its compatibility with the Visual Studio C# Express. It would be nicer if instead of complex SDK installers (and from my experience, it is the installer which is the problem) they had Library versions or just “unzippable” folders to get the tools out.

Anyways. Windows SDK and Visual Studio do not like to be installed in that order - Visual Studio first, THEN the Windows SDK (or at least, if you’re using Express editions because you’re an indie development like me)

Elliot Smith: Links for 2009-03-31 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:00:00 +0100

Knoodl
Knoodl facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases. It also serves as a semantic technology platform, offering a JAVA service-based interface or a SPARQL-based interface so that communities can build their own semantic applications using their ontologies and knowledgebases.
Catalogablog: eXtensible Catalog NCIP Toolkit
visualvm
Java "troubleshooting" tool
Lambda Probe
Monitoring and management tool for Tomcat
The Rasoi - Restaurant & Bar
somewhere to try for food in Leamington
nexus Maven repo manager
sventon - subversion repository browser

MJ Ray: You’re a Damn Fool

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:49:46 +0100

As usual, the TTLLP office will open noon ’til mid-evening on 1 April. I’ve already noted one thing on identi.ca that might be an April Fool’s joke (surely it’s not real) and we’ve enough to do without double-checking everything we’re told.

Further, timezones and international communications (we work with companies from +1100 to -0900 IIRC) makes April Fool’s jokes really tedious. Unless it’s done really carefully, the joker is probably the fool, either too early (31 March) or too late (afternoon) for some of the targets.

Elliot Smith: Installing Windows on the second hard disk of a Linux machine

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:18:45 +0100

I recently upgraded the hardware of my old desktop PC, with the aim of providing the house with a new-ish Linux machine for watching movies and using the internet, and a Windows machine for writing music and playing (old) games. My plan was to use two hard disks: one for Linux, another for Windows, and choose which to use at boot time.

Normal procedure is to install Windows first, then install Linux into a spare partition on the same hard drive (Windows tends to overwrite any disk you put it on). But it's easier to get a Linux machine up and running, see what hardware you've got, and get a decent system without needing to go and find loads of old drivers. So I decided to install Linux first. I plugged in a drive for it as the Primary IDE drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux onto it.

Then, I unplugged the Linux drive, plugged the other drive in, and installed Windows 2000 onto the second drive (just to make sure Windows couldn't overwrite Linux). Got that working too.

Then I plugged the Linux drive in, as the first drive on the IDE cable; and the Windows disk as the second.

The trick then is to get grub (the Linux bootloader I'm using) to present you with both disks as options as boot time. There's a sample configuration in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that didn't work for me: it looked like it was working, then just hung. I tried a couple of things, but nothing which worked.

Finally, I found this blog entry and used the configuration there. The trick is to make Windows think it's installed on the first disk on the IDE cable. I added this to the bottom of menu.lst:

title Windows 2000
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

which does the trick! Now I get a working Windows 2000 option in my grub boot menu.

Bob Sutor (IBM): Daily Links 03/31/2009 (p.m.)

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:29:22 +0100

Second Thoughts: Blue Moon

“Look out, Lindens, here it comes. One in a blue moon, a virtual world comes along that might really challenge Second Life — and now it’s here, Blue Mars. Sign up for the beta here that is reportedly opening in June — but only if you are a developer who wants a preview of how your content made on professional software like Maya will look in this world. It’s not ready for the proles yet.”

tags: OB, virtual worlds, Second Life, Blue Mars

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: News.
Permalink | No comments
Twitter streams: bob_sutor, bob_sutor_log

Mike Shaver (Mozilla): it’s full of bits

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:00:07 +0100

Deb’s excellent post about Firefox 3’s bookmarking system hit Digg today, on our shared server, which reminded me that I needed to install some WordPress caching software. No sweat; wp-super-cache, I thank you.

MJ Ray: Tools for Group Administration of Debian Systems?

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:19:20 +0100

I’m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn’t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL’d SAG, so I hope it’s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change.

My current solution on that system is to put the message “please record any major system changes with the command dch -f /root/changelog -i 'description of change'” in the /etc/motd file. I’ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there’s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes.

For shared/remote servers, I’d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can’t require them to do it and “pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server” is an awkward sell anyway.)

What do you do?

Bob Sutor (IBM): Daily Links 03/31/2009 (a.m.)

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:29:26 +0100

Netflix To Charge 300% More For Blu-ray Discs — InformationWeek

“Under the new plan, subscribers who were paying $16.99 per month for Netflix’s popular three-discs-at-a-time plan, plus the $1 Blu-ray premium, will now have to pay $20.99 per month in total, representing a 24% overall increase in the cost of the plan.”

First Silverlight, now this.

tags: OB, Netflix

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2009-03-30 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:00:00 +0100

Qimo
Linux distribution aimed at 3+ year olds

Bob Sutor (IBM): Reading update

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:00:42 +0100

I just finished reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon after finishing A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge last week. Now on to Startide Rising by David Brin. I’m working my way through my list of Hugo and Nebula award winners. The first and third books mentioned are good in that way because they each won both awards.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: Books.
Permalink | No comments
Twitter streams: bob_sutor, bob_sutor_log