Interesting article on why Google engineers think Windows Defender is best antivirus software.
Category: tech
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DHH Rant and is TDD dead?
I watched DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) rant about TDD being overkill sometime ago, and caught up on the chats he had with a couple of it’s creators, Kent Beck & Martin Fowler over the last week.
David had his point: creating multiple lines of test code for one line of real code is overboard, but that’s not what Kent had in mind when he created TDD for himself. It’s a much more nuanced conversation to hear the programmers talk it out.
It’s also interesting to note that I also listened to Kent talk about his time at Facebook, where no one was interested in his TDD method and extreme programming ideas, and he had to learn about Facebook’s different programming environment.
And Uncle Bob (Rob Martin) chimed in with a lot of insight (he’s delightfully intelligent) in another video I was watching over the weekend about being at the conference in Colorado where the Agile Manifesto was created–stating that it was the manifesto was due in part to a reaction to a previous generational event–because the number of programmers was doubling every five years, the waterfall process was invented to give discipline and process to the young guns coming out of college who didn’t know much about programming.
The periodic dip in each chart is end of Dec. every year. Drupal is at 25% of where it started from 5 years ago, but WordPress is about the same. From the simple queries put into Google Trends: drupal & wordpress.
“WordPress is used by 58.5% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 27.1% of all websites.” —from w3techs.com. (Drupal is used by 3% of websites.)
A couple interesting posts from a drupal / wordpress developer:
http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/17-reasons-wordpress-is-a-better-cms-than-drupal/
http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/the-decline-of-drupal-or-how-to-fix-drupal-8/
The second link talks about how the author thinks the Drupal collective is following the pattern of how Microsoft destroyed Visual Basic.
Someone asked me this week to talk tech about the CMS platform landscape so I did a little research about Drupal vs WordPress. About 3 years ago I did a demo, and another developer friend advocated Drupal over WordPress so I started working in Drupal. Unfortunately, the learning curve was way steeper than I thought it would be and I ended up coding the demo from scratch since learning Drupal was taking too long.
There’s something to be said for being able to get something working quickly–you can start working productively in WordPress in minutes, and I think that’s one reason why WordPress is so popular.
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The Symbol of Cutting-Edge Computing
Top image of me sitting in front of my 3 monitors for my main PCs (at home taken by my chromebook). I also have a couple kindle fires and a great Chromebook 15″ that I got refurbed for $150! Wonderful laptop & no maintenance. I work on lots of PCs at work every day doing tech support & network administrivia.
It’s difficult for those of my generation — people who grew up with the beige PC box as a cultish object of desire and the symbol of cutting-edge computing — to understand just how divorced the modern world and population have become from the desktop PC. The desktop today is akin to what mainframes were in the past: an imposing, burring, gargantuan construction that you only resort to when you really need to get some heavy work done.
from an article on The Verge.
Snapshot of linux (xfce) running on my Chromebook
I’m really enjoying working on my new (refurbed) 15″ chromebook I got from Acer for just $150. First thing I did was add the developer version of linux using the Crouton setup.
Google did an excellent job designing a very lightweight OS–and I am running a linux virtual OS with it, and it works fine for my current learning of laravel (a php framework on steroids) and web design.
Another little project: I also just loaded the latest version of linux (16.04, xfce) on an old dual-core system, and it runs using only 300 megs of ram on a base system. I put in an SSD disk to boot off, and it’s ready to run in about 5 seconds–and runs really smooth! SSDs are ideal to boot off, and then you just add an extra hard drive for additional storage look these up.