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April 27, 2003

SimPy for Simulating Real-World Systems

OnLAMP takes a look at SimPy, a Python toolkit for simulating real-world systems (call center, highway, bank customer service desk). Interesting stuff.

Posted by Brian at 10:32 PM |

Ribosome Build System

Ribosome is a Python-based cross-platfrom build system, originally developed by Real Networks and now released as open source.

Posted by Brian at 10:29 PM |

April 25, 2003

Snort Enterprise Implementation

There's a new version of the Snort Enterprise Implementation guide, a complete step-by-step manual for building a Snort IDS infrastructure on Linux. The new version is updated for Redhat 9 and the latest versions of Snort and SnortCenter.

Posted by Brian at 6:13 PM |

Common Struts Difficulties

JavaWorld takes a look at some common difficulties when developing with Struts and possible solutions.

Posted by Brian at 6:11 PM |

Cocoa Snippets

Karelia Software (the guys that make the terrific Watson search application for Mac OS X have made avaliable a collection of useful Cocoa classes and other bits of code. Lots of good stuff here if I ever end up getting back into Mac OS X hacking.

Posted by Brian at 6:09 PM |

April 11, 2003

TiBook WiFi Antennae

Now this is cool: two different external WiFi antenna kits for the Apple Powerbook G4. The wireless reception on the Titanium Powerbooks is really, really bad compared to most other laptops. These add-ons are supposed to significantly improve the reception. I'll definitely be getting one for mine.

Posted by Brian at 2:58 PM |

April 8, 2003

History of VisiCalc

Bob Frankston, co-inventor (along with Dan Bricklin) of the spreadsheet while lead programmer on VisiCalc, has written a long and detailed history of the project on his web site.

Posted by Brian at 11:12 AM |

April 7, 2003

SQL4X Manager J

SQL4X Manager J is a nifty JDBC-based tool for managing databases from MacOS X. Looks similar to the MySQL Control Center, but generalized for multiple database engines.

Posted by Brian at 1:05 PM |

April 6, 2003

httpcache.py

Joe Gregorio has written a wrapper around Python's httplib library to handle things like ETags, caching, and compressed contents. It's called httpcache.py and looks solid.

Posted by Brian at 1:02 PM |

April 5, 2003

Acts of the Apostles

The first 13 chapters of John Sundman's hacker novel Acts of the Apostles are available online. I found this while reading Cory Doctorow's excellent Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is fully-available online in a variety of formats.

Posted by Brian at 6:43 PM |

April 3, 2003

Floppy Drive RAID on OS X

This is a terrific example of "because I can" geek fun: some guy build a RAID array using USB floppy drives under OS X. Nothing like having a whopping 4.2mb RAID drive where you can go have a beer while it's opening a file.

Posted by Brian at 1:29 PM |

Tomcat Authentication Best Practices

Interesting post on the tomcat-user mailing list detailing some Best Practices for implementing form-based user authentication under Tomcat.

Posted by Brian at 10:49 AM |

EJB Tutorial

IBM has posted a tutorial (free registration required) entitled Getting started with Enterprise JavaBeans technology. Looks to be a pretty good introduction to the various components (heh) of EJB.

Posted by Brian at 10:03 AM |

"Pragmatic Programmer" Authors Interviewed

Part five (of eight) of artima.com's interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer") is now online. I'm a huge fan of the book, and the interview has definitely had some interesting material so far. I'm looking forward to reading the remaining parts.

Posted by Brian at 9:36 AM |

April 2, 2003

Making Emacs Stand Up to Visual Studio 7

There's a great article on kuro5hin entitled Making Emacs Stand Up To Visual Studio 7, giving a number of tweaks and add-ons to emacs/xemacs to make it a development environment more comparable to (and competitve with) Microsoft Visual Studio.

Posted by Brian at 9:29 AM |

April 1, 2003

Tomcat JDBCStore Session Persistence

This is a very interesting article describing how to use Tomcat's JDBCStore module to store session information in a JDBC-compliant database, rather than in memory or on disk. Probably most useful for large, high-traffic, sites running a lot of sessions at once.

Posted by Brian at 3:36 PM |