SG Dev Corner

SG Dev Corner

On programming, erlang, science, web design, business and politics.
 
 

8 July 2007 - Another Palio di Siena website

Here is another website (in italian) about the Palio di Siena.

http://ilpaliodisiena.splinder.com

The site contains news, links, video, ecc...

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2 July 2007 - How to use Yatsy

This article explains how to use Yatsy.

Yatsy (Yet Another Test Server + Yaws) is a test framework for erlang applications that collects results of test cases and presents them either via a web interface or as HTML files on disk.

This is the first part of the article explaining how to setup all the required packages and how to write a simple test case.
In the second part of the article more advanced features will be explained.

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1 July 2007 - An Haskell Web Store

Braintree Hemp is s web store completely written in Haskell.
Source code is available from:
darcs get http://braintreehemp.com.au/www.braintreehemp.com.au-WASH/
Here some of the features of the site.
  • Written in Haskell, using WASH
  • Shopping basket and checkout
  • Google Maps
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Webmaster tools
  • Template Haskell for HaskellDB description (describe a table or a field in one line)
  • GPL, execpt where stated otherwise.
  • Heavyweight Content Management System (CMS)
  • Froogle RSS generator
  • Configurable help for each page
  • Concept of inventory levels
  • Concept of users and permissions
  • Naive-user management of products, users, and page content
  • XML import tool and wizard for inventory level reconciliation
    between warehouse and site database

All of these with 4200 lines of Haskell code. See the announcement for more details.


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30 June 2007 - Foto Palio Siena

My friend Filippo published the site:
www.fotopaliosiena.it

containing a photo reportage of Palio di Siena.
Photos can be bought online.

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31 May 2007 - Google Gears

Google released a new interesting technology to enable Offline Web Applications called Google Gears
Google Gears consists of three modules:
  • LocalServer: Cache and Serve application resources locally
  • Database: store data locally in a relationable database
  • WorkerPool: make your application more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously
This combined with a server answering json requests makes a great development platform


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30 May 2007 - ''The shape of your mind''

Eric Merrit wrote an interesting post on his blog "The shape of your mind" on how knowing different programming languages shapes your mind and the way you think to problems.

This reminded me of the Sapir-Whorf hypotesis taken from linguistic.
This hypotesis has many formulations, some weak and some strong. The strong formulation, stating that language determines thought, is thought to be incorrect in linguistic.
I think a lot of programmers would instead agree with the strong formulation.


And now I know I have to add Forth to the list of languages to learn :-).


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30 May 2007 - The Art of 'Ware

Bruce Webster in the early '90s wrote a book titled "The Art of 'Ware". A reinterpretation of Sun Tzu "The Art of War".

The original book is out of print, but author has published an updated version on his blog.

Read  The Art of 'Ware online
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19 April 2007 - Wedding-Siena.com

Wedding-Siena.com is a newly published website of Filippo Galluzzi.

Filippo recently started his new adventure as a photographer.
So if you are planning a wedding in Tuscany, or if you are looking for great photos of Tuscany countryside, take a look at his websites and contact him.
He is a great photographer as well as a friend.

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11 March 2007 - sgte Google project

I created a Google project for sgte development and a Google group for discussion.

I uploaded the files to the project:
source code and a test module.

The tests use a small library (sgeunit) I wrote when I started learning Erlang. The source of the library is included.

Here are the links:
sgte project home page
sgte google group


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10 January 2007 - Building an OTP Application

In this article Martin J Logan guides you in the creation of an Erlang/OTP application.
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8 January 2007 - Haskell, bondage-and-discipline and separation-of-concerns programming

"This is a long, involved defense of purity, both in terms of what it affords us
 in terms of power and in how it enforces "good" programming practices."

Read the complete article on Data.Syntaxfree


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7 December 2006 - ''No Silver Bullet'' and Functional Programming

''No Silver Bullet'' and Functional Programming
Interesting blog article.

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9 October 2006 - What is LaTeX and Why You Should Care

On defmacro.org there's an article on LaTeX. I've used it in the past and it's really the best tool to write and mantain large documents.
Recently I've tryed DocBook to write documentation for applications, but I feel more confortable using LaTeX. Next time I have to write more than a few pages I'll definitely use LaTeX.

A quote from the article.
Now that the old days are long gone and word processors 
come preinstalled with every machine, why should we care
about this remnant of history?  The answer is that
remarkably LaTeX is much better suited for composing and
distributing most types of documents than any other modern
word processor on the market that I am aware of. Just like
programming languages tend to converge towards Lisp because
it got things right the first time around, so do the Word
Processors tend to converge towards LaTeX.

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25 September 2006 - Math for programmers

Recently on reddit I found an iteresting article on math.
Math Every Day
Some links in the article are broken.
The author says he wants to start studying some math every day.
Math for Programmers is the sequel: after 15 months the author reports the results of his studies.

Here's a quote from the article:
"The right way to learn math is breadth-first, not depth-first.
You need to survey the space, learn the names of things, figure out what's what."




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22 September 2006 - S.G. Domus online

S.G. Domus is a new project developed by S.G. Consulting
It's a web application for estate agencies to help agencies in their daily work. The application will manage real estates, customer requests, a calendar etc.

The application is written mainly in erlang using mnesia as database and yaws as application server.
I'll post details on the development of the application as well as what I learn on erlang.

We also have a blog for the application development. At the moment the site and the application as well as the blog are in italian. An english version is planned when the application will be completly functional.

A demo will be online on November 16th. A first working version on November 31st.

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22 September 2006 - SG Consulting new site

We at S.G. Consulting published our new site.
The site has been improved with news, offers for our clients, products, etc...

Case studies will be published periodically on the most interesting works, the technologies used, etc.

The site is still only in italian.

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1 September 2006 - How Hitler Became a Dictator

 How Hitler Became a Dictator
Interesting read. I also find here, a lot of similarities with recent politics (after 11th September).

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1 September 2006 - Godel and the limits of logic

An article on Godel's life and work.
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29 August 2006 - Concurrency is easy

After a long pause due to my holidays :-), here's a link to an article on Concurrency by Joe Armstrong.
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19 July 2006 - Francesco Facchinetti

A lot of time since the last entry in the blog. In this time I was quite engaged working on the new site of Francesco Facchinetti (dj francesco).
I developed the dynamic pages of the site using python as usual. In the site there's also a forum (phpbb) and soon a chat.

For the chat I'm planning to use the jabber protocol. I have a ejabberd server  and I'm planning to use jwchat (a client written in html and javascript) to connect to the server.

Soon updates on the chat.

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22 June 2006 - Functional Programming For The Rest of Us | defmacro.org

"If you're looking at the right places you'll find at least one of these [challenging article]  every couple of days. These articles are hard to get through and take some time, so they start piling up. Before you know it, you have a list of links and a folder full of PDF files and you wish you had a year in a small hut in the middle of the forest with nobody around for miles so you could catch up."

This is one of these challenging articles. At least for those who are new to functional programming

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16 June 2006 - Joel Spolsky: "My First BillG Review"

Interesting item by Joel Spolsky on his experience from the time he was Program Manager in the Microsoft Excel team.

Some quotes from the article:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood
Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is
different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He
worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he
trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit
him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual,
programmer.

Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf.

"It's ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling mewhat to do!" they say, and then fall off the board, again and again.The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a genericfunction. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly droveApple into extinction because the board of directors thought thatselling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? Thecult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that dothings that you don't understand.


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15 June 2006 - The Semicolon Wars

Good reading from American Scientist
An introduction to the programming languages' world with some history, an overview of the different paradigms, and some critics to zealotry.

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6 June 2006 - If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq

George Monbiot on the Guardian:
"Why should we be surprised by these events? 
This is what happens when one country occupies another. 
When troops are far away from home, exercising power over people 
that they don't understand, knowing that the population harbours 
those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and 
frustration turns into a hatred of all "micks" or "gooks" or "hajjis". 
Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. 
It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial 
adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion 
of Iraq might never have happened."

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1 June 2006 - Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Released June 1st 2006 the new Ubuntu 6.06 code name Dapper Drake.
You can download it from the official site or one of the mirrors.

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31 May 2006 - Narrative JavaScript

From lambda-the-ultimate:

Narrative JavaScript is a small extension to the JavaScript language that enables blocking capabilities for asynchronous operations. This makes writing asynchronous code sequences easier and increases code readability.

It provides on the client side what continuation based web frameworksdo on the server side. Instead of manually splitting up your code intocallbacks and handlers for events, setTimeout, XMLHttpRequestcallbacks, etc you write your code in a sequential manner.

The code is CPS transformed and the continuations at the point of useof the new operator are used for the callbacks - allowing continuationof the function when done.

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23 May 2006 - Sahi Web automation and testing tool tutorial [flash]

Sahi is an automation and testing tool for web applications, with the facility to record and playback scripts.
Developed in java and javascript, this tool uses simple javascript to execute events on the browser.
View the Flash tutorial.


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10 May 2006 - Scheme Implementation in Javascript

A scheme implementation written in javascript.
Read the article in the Bluish Coder blog.
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4 May 2006 - Sito Ascione Associati

Pubblicato il sito Ascione Associati. Sito di consulenza di direzione, strategica, commerciale e marketing.

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3 May 2006 - The Lonely Planet guide to My apartment

Funny reading
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8 March 2006 - Atheistic Evangelism

Funny reading
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1 March 2006 - Erlang: The movie

Erlang: The Movie


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21 February 2006 - Epigrams in Programming

Epigrams in Programming by Alan J. Perlis. Funny article from ACM's SIGPLAN publication, (September, 1982).
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10 November 2005 - Don Knuth: Musings and More

Musings, lectures and selected classes given by Donald E. Knuth, Stanford University's Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming. Look here

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11 October 2005 - Filippo Galluzzi Photograper - Climbing, landscape, mountaineering photos and more

This is a friend's site. If you like photos take a look at it.
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21 September 2005 - Lambda the Ultimate

Lambda the Ultimate deals with issues directly related to programming languages, and programming language research.
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23 February 2005 - A Conversation with Alan Kay

Interview with Alan Kay, creator of Smalltalk and 2004 Turing Award winner.
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10 November 2003 - The Demand for Software Quality

Bertrand Meyer talks with Bill Venners about the increasing importance of software quality, the commercial forces on quality, and the challenges of complexity.
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