Software Configuration Management Blog

Feb 18, 2010, Website Content Management Software

Website Content Management Software is used to create, edit, administrate and publish website content.

Permalink -- click for full blog post "Website Content Management Software"

Feb 18, 2010, Web Content Management Software

Web Content Management Software is a list of the top CMS Tools used to create, edit, administrate and publish website content.

Permalink -- click for full blog post "Web Content Management Software"

Aug 11, 2009, What is Software Configuration Management

By just doing a simple search on "What is Software Configuration Management" you get a rather long list of SCM Tool Vendors.

Some of these Vendors attempt to really talk about what they consider to be Software Configuration Management.

Others however, make no attempt to hide their sales pitch. It is nothing more than sales copy.

SCM has definitely evolved in the last ten years due to the ever expanding SCM Tool Sets.

But, has that really changed "What is Software Configuration Management?"

Not Really. It is still the processes and procedures that ensure software integrity and reproducibility.

For a deeper discussion on What is Software Configuration Management

Permalink -- click for full blog post "What is Software Configuration Management"

Mar 9, 2009, Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

February 26th, 2009

While reading Genius James Gleick - The Life and Science of RichardFeynman, there was a very interesting discussion about genius andthe search for why.

An early theory was that the size of the brain was what determinedif one was a genius.

That theory was put to rest fairly quickly. The size of the brain didnot determine genius.

Other physical attributes were examined such as density of surroundingblood vessels, the percentage of glial cells, and the degree ofneuronal branching...decades passed.

There was not going to be a neat and clean physical explanation ofwhy

Who are Today's Geniuses

Although, the term of genius gets throw out a lot to describe peoples intellect.

People are hard pressed to specifically name any.

It was easier just a few generation ago to identify people as such:Einstein, Edison, Picasso, Mozart.

More Geniuses Now?

Sure, the world now comprises over 5 billion people.

More people are better educated.

Statistically speaking, there must be more geniuses today than before.

Interesting Theory

Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, "Giants have not ceded tomere mortals, rather, the boundries... have been restricted and theedges smoothed."

What Gould was referring to was baseball and the 400 hitter.

People wanted to know why the 400 hitter had disappeared.

What Gould also found was that the 100 hitter had also disappeared.

Basically, without going into the details is that the gap betweenthe best and worst player in professional baseball had narrowed.

It is not real hard to understand why with better training, betternutrition and better coaching.

Genius All Around

Gleick talked about how Mozart had his community in place thatwas almost as if they were waiting for him.

By this, I mean Mozart did not have to choose his audience orhis style.

The question is, are there no more Mozarts?

It appears they are around, but they are fighting each other forsmaller and smaller scraps.

Their stature becoming smaller and smaller.

Feynman's Take

Scientists still ask the what if questions. What if Edison had notinvented the electric light-how much longer would it have taken? Whatif Heisenberg had not invented the S matrix? What if Fleming had notdiscovered penicillin? Or(the king of such questions) what if Einsteinhad not invented general relativity?

"I always find questions like that... odd," Feynman wrote to acorrespondent who posed one. Science tends to be created as itas needed.

"We are not that much smarter than each other," he said.

Links

Genius James Gleick

Permalink -- click for full blog post "Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick"

Nov 26, 2008, Virtualization of Development and Test Environments

Are you being forced to move from dedicated development and test servers to "on-demand" virtual development and test servers?

This seems to be the trend for all development teams.

I realize that management feels they can save a lot of money by not dedicating physical servers to development and testing.

However, we are spending tons of engineer hours and effort in trying to setup and configure these servers.

We are spending way more on engineer hours and lost productivity than we are saving by using dedicated servers.

It would be interesting to know who is doing this successfully and how.

Nov 26, 2008, SDTimes article about Preflight builds

The concept goes like this, the tool will grab the developer's code and their configuration.

These builds include source code, build script modifications and dependencies.

These changes can be built and tested before the developer checks-in their code.

This allows the developers to integrate and test their changes before checking in their changes to source.

This allows for greater stability to the source and smoother projects.

I am looking forward to learning more about this concept.

Preflight builds might be the next break through in software build technology since Continuous Integration.

Click for more info