Saturday, October 28, 2006
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Django First Impressions
I've been playing with Django recently to see if it's suitable for a project I'm looking at taking on, and all I can say is: wow.
What a fantastically clean and simple way to put together a web application. The majority of Django is well documented (except some of the bits I need most!), simple to use and extremely natural.
So, if you do work on any kind of web-based technology, head over the the Django project and take a look. You'll probably like it.
What a fantastically clean and simple way to put together a web application. The majority of Django is well documented (except some of the bits I need most!), simple to use and extremely natural.
So, if you do work on any kind of web-based technology, head over the the Django project and take a look. You'll probably like it.
Friday, June 30, 2006
More Express
If you're a (C, C++ or Fortran) developer, you may be interested to know that Sun is now running an Express program for Sun Studio. This appears to work pretty much the same way as the Solaris Express program, which lets you try out, and give feedback on, the next version of Solaris.
Registration is pretty simple (you need a Sun online account), and requires you to enter your e-mail address so that you can be kept up to date as new builds of the express program come available. I found it a little confusing that I had to enter my e-mail address, since that's in my SDN profile already.
I've got it all downloaded now, and I'll give it a go with the Boost 1.34.0 release candidate over the weekend.
Registration is pretty simple (you need a Sun online account), and requires you to enter your e-mail address so that you can be kept up to date as new builds of the express program come available. I found it a little confusing that I had to enter my e-mail address, since that's in my SDN profile already.
I've got it all downloaded now, and I'll give it a go with the Boost 1.34.0 release candidate over the weekend.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Sun Studio vs. Boost
I've been tracking Simon's Blog recently in addition to my regular reading of the Boost developers list. Of course, we're (luckily) using Boost 1.32.0 at work, which just happens to be the version of Boost that works best with Sun Studio.
I've also noticed that people on the Boost list are starting to take notice of Sun Studio, so I decided to port Simon's Boost 1.33.1 patch to the RC_1_34_0 branch and see how Studio 11 fares on the updated Boost.
In a word: horribly.
Hopefully Vijay prioritises a bit of Simon's time and puts some focus on Boost. It's really embarrasingly bad at the moment. Everything from core dumps (which look like stack smashing from the stack trace) to failed assertions to just plain getting things wrong.
My alterior motive here (of course I have one) is that I want to get lock-reduced shared pointer support in Boost on Solaris 9 and 10 (using Studio 11), and any work I do will have to be done against a rapidly aging Boost release if this situation does not get any better.
Update: Would you believe it, Simon has just been put onto development only! This just goes to show that good work does get you somewhere.
I've also noticed that people on the Boost list are starting to take notice of Sun Studio, so I decided to port Simon's Boost 1.33.1 patch to the RC_1_34_0 branch and see how Studio 11 fares on the updated Boost.
In a word: horribly.
Hopefully Vijay prioritises a bit of Simon's time and puts some focus on Boost. It's really embarrasingly bad at the moment. Everything from core dumps (which look like stack smashing from the stack trace) to failed assertions to just plain getting things wrong.
My alterior motive here (of course I have one) is that I want to get lock-reduced shared pointer support in Boost on Solaris 9 and 10 (using Studio 11), and any work I do will have to be done against a rapidly aging Boost release if this situation does not get any better.
Update: Would you believe it, Simon has just been put onto development only! This just goes to show that good work does get you somewhere.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Solaris 10 - an alternative
I've been spending a lot of time with Solaris lately, specifically with Solaris 10 on x86 and x64 machines.
Aside from a few patching nightmares which I would not wish on my worst enemy (well, ok, maybe I would), as a whole I'd say the experience has been good. It's worth bearing in mind that I'm normally an OpenBSD user and administrator, so I'm not exactly scared of the command-line (I actually prefer it!). I'd suppose that even basic UNIX administration would be pretty scary for most, but on the whole, Solaris 10 keeps you away from the command-line, which is pretty cool.
I've also spent quite a lot of time with the various Solaris development tools lately, mostly the Sun Studio 11 C++ compiler, mdb debugger and libumem memory allocator. These are some of the more impressive tools I've worked with, and although the C++ compiler still struggles with the more modern aspects of C++ (support gets better with every patch), just this subset the development suite gives a developer some very powerful tools which just don't exist on other platforms.
All for free.
Yep, free. Solaris 10 is free for download, as is Sun Studio 11. Solaris itself (post Solaris 10) is now Open Source, so it's free-as-in-speech as well, which means that you get full access to some really well written code (if that's your sort of thing).
So now I have an alternative to OpenBSD and Windows on my desktop, and most importantly, since Solaris runs Oracle I can campaign to use Solaris on my work computer as well (my PowerBook can handle that Microsoft Exchange problem quite nicely).
Aside from a few patching nightmares which I would not wish on my worst enemy (well, ok, maybe I would), as a whole I'd say the experience has been good. It's worth bearing in mind that I'm normally an OpenBSD user and administrator, so I'm not exactly scared of the command-line (I actually prefer it!). I'd suppose that even basic UNIX administration would be pretty scary for most, but on the whole, Solaris 10 keeps you away from the command-line, which is pretty cool.
I've also spent quite a lot of time with the various Solaris development tools lately, mostly the Sun Studio 11 C++ compiler, mdb debugger and libumem memory allocator. These are some of the more impressive tools I've worked with, and although the C++ compiler still struggles with the more modern aspects of C++ (support gets better with every patch), just this subset the development suite gives a developer some very powerful tools which just don't exist on other platforms.
All for free.
Yep, free. Solaris 10 is free for download, as is Sun Studio 11. Solaris itself (post Solaris 10) is now Open Source, so it's free-as-in-speech as well, which means that you get full access to some really well written code (if that's your sort of thing).
So now I have an alternative to OpenBSD and Windows on my desktop, and most importantly, since Solaris runs Oracle I can campaign to use Solaris on my work computer as well (my PowerBook can handle that Microsoft Exchange problem quite nicely).
So I've Moved...
I finally decided I'd had enough of trying to keep my own web server up to date, so I've moved my blog to blogger.com.
Hopefully this means I'll post a little more often :-)
Hopefully this means I'll post a little more often :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)