EVOL.reverse

VD, I’d love to know more about what led you to write this. I would think Sun is definitely on the bandwagon of grid computing and powering many companies and startups that together make the “Computer is the network” thing true. Sometimes by providing hardware but also by being behind the curtains of software that is used by them: MySQL, Java, Netbeans, VirtualBox, etc… and OpenOffice for which you seem to contribute.

This is a cool poster illustrating the use of Agile methodologies in software development.

I’ve just finished a training on Agile Software Development methodologies. Here are just some of the things I’ve found:

• There is a set of methodologies for software development which are considered to be Agile of which ‘Scrum’ and ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP) are most commonly used.
• Scrum defines an iterative-incremental process for the development at the management level. XP defines best practices at the team level (Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Pair-Programming, etc.). Scrum and XP can be used together and most of the times that’s what happens.
• With Scrum there is a new role called ‘Scrum Master’ (not to be confused with Scum Master) which replaces the project manager. He is there to serve the team and help resolve the problems that may arise in a coaching style.
• Emphasis is on the team being happy, willing, self-organized and self-managed. Scrum provides tools to help.
• Task effort estimation is done based on a unit-less measure ‘points’ that is assigned in relation with the other tasks (rather than a time measure like days, etc.)

Via xkcd, Youtube has added a new feature allowing people to preview their comments by having them read aloud, that’s pretty neat I would say

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize given out by the EFF.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was then verified by a different computer system.

What is the importance of finding a new prime number?

Finding new Mersenne primes is not likely to be of any immediate practical value. This search is primarily a recreational pursuit. However, the search for Mersenne primes has proved useful in development of new algorithms, testing computer hardware, and interesting young students in math.

Does this affect RSA cryptography?

The security of the RSA algorithm is founded on the mathematical difficulty of finding two prime factors of a very large number. Essentially, a RSA public key is the product of two randomly selected large prime numbers, and the secret key is the two primes themselves. This algorithm is secure because of the great mathematical difficulty of finding the two prime factors of a large number, and of finding the private key from the public key. This is difficult because the only known method of finding the two prime factors of a large number is to check all the possibilities one by one, which isn’t practical because there are so many prime numbers. This means the discovery of a new prime number doesn’t affect the security of RSA. The promised development of quantum computers over the next several decades that can effectively perform many calculations simultaneously may be able to break the RSA algorithm relatively quickly.

Why does the EFF pay $100,000 for this finding?

The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.

Now you can finally spy on what your neighbour is working..

http://www.mikrokopter.com/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter

• Learning: You learn a lot by working on the system and working with some bright developers.
• Fun: It’s rewarding when you can get something done in such a project, it takes skills and organization on your part.
• Travelling: You get to travel to conferences and hackatons to hack and meet with the other developers, that’s nice as well.
• Doing it the right way: Sometimes work doesn’t permit things to be done the right way by one reason or the other. In such projects you have time to study things and really get them done right.
• You get a lot of exposure but is it something you really want?

• I guess you shouldn’t be involved in the development of something unless you are very interested in knowing how it works and you want to hack on it and make it better.
• You shouldn’t be involved in the development of something unless you’re a savy user of the software.

‘Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.’ - Richard Feynman

‘Be inspired, enjoy your job, keep learning and never forget to play.’ – gskinner

Why not be great? [..] Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice. - Seth Godin

“We’re building a badass team. Honestly, we’re bringing together the best developers, no question about it.” - dougmccune

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

It’s funny to see people using these really old tools (IDEs, compilers, etc.) and not miss anything..

Well, I miss Eclipse with the memory profiler, the debugger, the Ctrl-Click go to function, the Ctrl-space auto-complete, the integrated documentation, etc.