295113
submission
Qbertino writes:
I'm proud owner of an older 12" G4 iBook (1,0 Ghz) from a few years ago, the one many geeks have and liked to use because of it's price/performance ratio for a subnotebook. Many people I met use it to run Debian Linux PPC or some other OSS operating system and do their programming on it. However I mostly do web developement where the OS hardly matter and I've come to like the benefits of running the native OS and the neat and frictionless hardware integration that comes with it. I do quite a lot of Flash developement aswell and need to be able to use the official Flash IDE from Adobe.
The downside is that the desktop bogs down the systems performance which I'd like to use for other things by running a replacement of the Aqua Workplace Shell & desktop enviroment. There are quite a few wps replacements for windows — I've use Litestep with Windows 2000 — but I'm looking for one for OS X. What lightweigth WPS replacements are there for OS X and what other strategies are there to take some weight off an OS X desktop?
85492
submission
Qbertino writes:
The high-end open-source 3D engine Crystalspace has reached Version 1.0. From the website: "After almost 10 years of development we finally release Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer 1.0!"
Crytalspace has several sub-projects: A game engine called CEL, a scripting exstension for that game engine called Cellstart, and CrystalCore, a single-player FPS Demo-Game built to show off Crystalspaces features. Crystalspace is generally considered a modern and extremely powerfull 3D engine and allready is in use in commercial products.
73030
submission
Qbertino writes:
A company called Applied Business Technologies Inc. has recently released an open source web RAD system and application server based on Java and Java EE. It's called jVantage and seems to do away with the usual 1995ish grind Java developers have to put up with before having a decent web application ready. The developement enviroment is completely web based and somewhat reminiscent of the way the Python web application server Zope handles things. The screencast demonstrations (front page, bottom right) — in django/rails/cake/yourFavoriteWebFramework style — display an impressive set of features and a developement speed that is nearly breathtaking and faster even than with the aforementioned code-generating frameworks. It's nice to see now that Java has completely joined the OSS world it also is quickly catching up with the goodies other enviroments have to offer. And even picking up the Zope concept. With projects like these and the mature OSS developement pipeline Java has it may even be able to step back into the ring with PHP in the everyday web developement game. They've got me (Python, Zope & PHP Fanboy) curious anyway.
70148
submission
Qbertino writes:
Apple introduces the iPhone. The Specs go as following: Touchscreen controlled with a patended gesture system, OS X, 61x12x115 mm, 480by320 Screen resoltution, 4 or 8GB storage, 4-Band GSM, Edge Bluetooth, WiFi, 2 Megapixels Camera, Battery Time for Talk, Video, browsing: 5 hrs, Audio Playback 16 hrs., Weight: 135 grams. Looks: Sweeet. ... I want one.
37892
submission
Qbertino writes:
I'm currently working myself into a large web application project (Flash / Ajax / PHP 4 / MySQL 4) for which I'm supposed to become the lead maintainance programmer. Currently I'm trying to wrap my head around an admin area where each user interaction triggers roughly around 10 actions that range from Ajax calling variables from special PHP files, flash components loading subcomponents and those yet again loading stuff from other PHP files — data passing to and fro via GET *and* POST — and all of the server side stuff doing roughly 5 to 10 DB actions via individual class related custom SQL statements, each of which are stored in seperate, class related PHP files (neatly named though, I have to admit). Allthough naming is somewhat consitent and PHP Documentor did a good job at listing APIs, there is no written documetation about which component is supposed to do what and how they relate to one another. [sarcasm]"Gee, thanks a bunch. Yeah, I believe the manager though you were doing a good job at the documentation, since it looks soo neat with the right stylesheet."[/sarcasm]
Needless to say, the thing is living hell to work through and is a prime example of the big downside of web-developement. I'm starting to miss a solid callstack debugger, and web-call-tracer or whatever you call it, to keep track of what's going on if I load template X with Master Flash Component Y.
We use Eclipse with no success so far in getting the debugger to work correctly (still working at it), but that won't be enough anyway. I need to keep track of what's going on between client(browser) and server, what's going on *in* the server (that's the classic debugger, I know) and what's going on between serverapp and DB. And all of that *at the same time*.
Since PHP is the most commonly used server enviroment I expect a measurable set of tools available to tackle this problem, some well-configured Unix CLI "scope-tracker" or watchamacallit or something and maybe a sophisticated logfile-reader or so. Any suggestions on how I can approach this problem? Note: The original programmer is long gone, so whooping his lazy ass for not documenting properly is not an option.
