Recalling the lambda notation…

Optimization matters only when it matters. When it matters, it matters a lot, but until you know that it matters, don’t waste a lot of time doing it. Even if you know it matters, you need to know where it matters. Without performance data, you won’t know what to optimize, and you’ll probably optimize the wrong thing.

The result will be obscure, hard to write, hard to debug, and hard to maintain code that doesn’t solve your problem. Thus it has the dual disadvantage of (a) increasing software development and software maintenance costs, and (b) having no performance effect at all.

Hard to beat that combination! Now do you understand what I meant in the title?

Complete article here.

The last checkin for known issues in 1.5rc1 completed tonight at around 7PM PDT. Work will now begin on final testing, certification, packaging, and completion of l10n builds. This should take approximately 4 days - putting the 1.5rc1 release date at Tuesday, Nov 1.

From here

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

From this article:

this is our first
development release on our road towards GNOME 2.14.0, which will be
released in March 2006.

Finally the fast user switching is integrated into GNOME!

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

Article from here.

A Flash developer explains the problems porting the player into Linux in this page.

In brief, there are a number of issues: libraries dependecy, different compiler optimization, kernel version, architecture differencies.

You can test a beta version of the famous blog environment, Wordpress 1.6, here!!!

Username: demo
Password: wp16

Edit: the account is disabled

Download OpenOffice.org 2.0

What: Launching “Firefox One”, an Oregon NASA Space Grant Consortium balloon satellite
Where: Memorial Union Quad
When: Saturday, October 22nd at high-noon. Show up around 11:45 (2 hours before the review-fest)
Why: Last time we took back the sidewalk, this time we are going to 100,000ft
Who: Anyone who wants to celebrate 100,000,000 downloads and help launch the weather balloon

(more…)

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first
release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments.
Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However,
it is distinguished by the following features:

• Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems
• Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, all on the single CD, ready for installation
• A slim default installation, occupying just 400 megabytes: add only the software you need, for a clean, maintainable configuration.
• Provides no desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.) by default
• Safe and text-oriented boot mode for better clarity and infinite justice on boot.

(more…)

IronPython is a new Python implementation targeting the .NET and Mono platforms. It is…

• Fast - IronPython-0.6 is up to 1.7x faster than Python-2.3 on the standard pystone benchmark. An early performance report is are contained in this paper for PyCon 2004.
• Integrated with the Common Language Runtime - IronPython code can easily use CLR libraries and Python classes can extend CLR classes.

(more…)

Article:

Ward Cunningham, one of Microsoft’s high-profile hires, is leaving the Redmond software company to join the open-source tool group, The Eclipse Foundation.

Who wants to try the Vista Sidebar on XP, follow the steps described here.

from http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

Working at Google

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I’ve been working to offer all of Google Talk’s features into other clients. Currently, I’m working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk’s voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.

Google Talk is based on open-source Jabber protocol.

Grab it from here!