links for 2010-​​07-​​24

  • “Research pro­grammes, even ones as suc­cess­ful as Newton’s, even­tu­ally degen­er­ate. A pro­gramme “is degen­er­at­ing if … (1) it does not lead to stun­ning new pre­dic­tions (at least occa­sion­ally…); (2) if all its bold pre­dic­tions are fal­si­fied; and (3) if it does not grow in steps which fol­low the spirit of the pro­gramme.” (ibid, p. 106) (This last seems to mean avoid­ing the ad hoc addi­tions men­tioned above. But I think there’s also a less pin-​​down-​​able sense. It would not be in the spirit of an agile method to extend itself by adding more and more exam­ples of writ­ten process documentation.)”
  • “We’ve open sourced Tick­ery in order to show other devel­op­ers the insides of a non-​​trivial appli­ca­tion that uses Flu­idDB. Tick­ery was writ­ten over a three month period (Novem­ber 2009 to Jan­u­ary 2010), and much of it was done at a fairly fast pace. While the code could be cleaner and bet­ter doc­u­mented, it’s not bad. We’re of course inter­ested to help peo­ple under­stand the code, so please feel free to join the Flu­idDB users mail­ing list, or join us in #flu­iddb on irc​.freen​ode​.net. Nat­u­rally we’ll be happy and inter­ested to receive improve­ments or patches, and you can of course run your own instance of Tickery.”

links for 2010-​​07-​​16

links for 2010-​​07-​​14

links for 2010-​​07-​​10

links for 2010-​​07-​​04