Joel Spolsky is editing a Book about software, he had collected a lot of popular Software essays over the web, Nominations for the Best Software Essays of 2004. See full List here.
Skype (aka: P2P voice-based communication tool) released the Linux version about 2 months agao. After long-time waiting from mac world, finally, Now Skype is ready to deliver their mac version. Actually the beta version of Skype for mac OSX is under developing, we may not find any download link in their website, but some guys leaked out this beta version and distributed via Bittorrent. You could find out a bittorrent feed from suprnova or just direct click here to download it via bittorrent client.
It's work pretty good in my Powerbook, the voice quanlity was better than iChat. but, some features like conference call didn't implement yet, however, skype for mac OSX is under way.
Part of Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 source code leaked out and published on the internet since last Friday. The leaked code with a mix of assembler, C and C++ programming languages, the leaked code of windows 2000 contained 30915 files and 13.5 million lines of code. And Windows NT breach had 95103 files and 28 million lines. Holy cow, that's a lot!
Microsoft had a announcement on Feb 13 and said:
Subsequent investigation has shown this was not the result of any breach of Microsoft's corporate network or internal security, nor is it related to Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative or its Government Security Program, which enable our customers, partners and governments to legally access Microsoft source code
Is it means Windows 2000 becomes to an "open source" operating system? NO, like Microsoft announced that all source code are Shared Source initiative which Microsoft lunched last year in part to combat competition from Linux. We can't expect Microsoft to be an Open source developer but more concern about source code will bring us a lot of security problem since hackers and virus writers begin to find out leaks from these source code packages.
Relative reading:
Profanity, partner's name hidden in leaked Microsoft code - CNN
Microsoft probes Windows code leak - ZDNet
Mozilla released a new version of Firefox 0.8 which renamed from previous Firebird. Steven Grarrity, the guy is in charge of Mozilla Visual identity Team creat a new branding logo and icon for new version of Firefox. In this team, three of key person come from silverorange. Steven Grarrity, Daniel Burka, Stephem DesRoches. Steven has a post on his blog talked about team work with new design and interface of Firefox, and Jon Hicks who is a excellent UI designer has made a great post about the design process.
See Firefox promo graphic page to put some logo in your webpage if you like this browser.
What is FAVICON.ICO? And How to Personalise Your Site's Bookmark in Visitor's Browsers via Gadgetopia
Update: FavIcon offered a easy tools to create your own favorite ico.
A very nice extension for mozilla from CHRISPEDERICK.COM
Best Practices for Software Development Projects, (via Lifelong Learning)
1. Recruit skilled and experienced people.
2. Use "leading-edge," not "bleeding-edge," technology.
3. Use the appropriate development process.
4. Provide the right tools.
5. Use source-control management.
6. Apply sound estimating techniques.
7. Break effort into mini-milestone tasks.
8. Track all project hours.
9. Understand the only constant is change.
10.Provide project leadership.
Darrell Norton show us a way to make acrobat reader 6 load faster. I have to remove 3 plug-in progams.
Here's How to:
1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace the C if you installed on another drive, like I did).
2. Create a new folder called plug_ins_disabled.
3. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to the plug_ins_disabled folder except EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api. There should only be these 3 files in the plug_ins folder.
A new version 8 of Adobe photoshop is now called "Adobe photoshop CS". Adobe was announcing a new Adobe Creative Suite which include 6 Adobe amazing products. Cool!
Adobe photoshop CS in-depth review from dpreview.com