The Last Piece

The only thing keeping me from redirecting all the rockerssoft.com blog traffic to rockerssoft.org is a feature I have come to like; but never had for wordpress. That feature is my reading list plugin. Well, that is about to change. Now Reading is exactly what I have been looking for. As soon as I get a free chance to implement it; we will finally be moved in. Much like when we unpacked that last box at our new house…

…a year after we moved in.

Filesystem Synchronization

I have been looking at tools to synchronize my work machine, laptop, and home computer.  There are literally dozens of options for this on Linux but it looks like the best two are rsync and Unison.  Both are command line applications with GUI frontends available to them.  Specifically I have been looking at QSync which implements the rsync protocol internally and uses Qt.

Finally Found

Sometimes it is difficult to find the location of opensource software. It is not always available where you would look for it. I have been looking for the source code location of Adept for a while now (well, I haven’t wanted it so badly that I was willing to install Ubuntu.) Currently the only source copies are in KDE svn. Get adept from anonomous KDE svn this way:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/sysadmin/adept

Software Testing Strategies

Test Smarter, Not Harder is an article by Scott Sehlhorst that covers software testing (the information can actually be applied to all forms of unit testing) and how to reduce the cost of application testing.  The fundamental idea is that if testing costs are greater than not testing then you are better off NOT doing the testing.   Therefor emphasis should be spent in reducing the cost of testing so it become practical to test more often.  Topics covered include automated testing, random sampling, pairwise testing, and N-wise testing.

The Climate of FUD

The Wall Street Journal is running on opinion piece by Richard Lindzen of the MIT school of Atmospheric Science. In it he answers some commonly misunderstood preceptions about the effects and causes of global warming.

While we are on global climate check out “What if all the ice melts
and “Faqs vs Global Warming.” Non of these articles are suprising to climatologists and meteorologist (trust me, I live with one) but to the vast majority of the population is comes as a total suprise because of the ignorance of the general population on this subject.