November 2005 - Posts
When I registered my own domain some time ago, I set up a POP3 and SMTP server on my own machine at home. I had heard of spam relaying so I decided to look up some security tests on the internet. The results where terrifying and only by using a trial version of a commercial product I was able to get some acceptable results. After this trial period I shut down my mail server.
Bu now Microsoft has set up a cool new service: they will host the e-mail server for your own private domain for free!
All you need to do is goto http://domains.live.com/ and sign up. You do need to be able to change the MX record for your domain, but often this can be done by sending an e-mail to your domain provider.
After this you can set up 20 mail boxes for your domain. The e-mails can be checked with Hotmail and are being virus scanned and cleaned from spam.
Thanks Uncle Bill!
In the latest issue of Times magazine (yes, I'll pass it on when I've finished it ;-), there is a very interesting article about how Steve Jobs is running Apple and why the company is such a great success at the moment. In the article Jobs tells about the (already legendary) Parable of the Concept Car. It's the story about the thrilling concept cars you see on car shows and why the end up looking terrible when they reach production. According to Jobs the car is getting to look worse every time it passes through the different departments of the organization, because they say that some of the neat things are simply impossible. And in the end you have a Crossfire.
Jobs' resulotion to this is that you shouldn't let the designs pass from department to deparment, but let them all work together at the product and make it work. I like this philosophy very much because you can look at software development in a similar way. When using the "good" old waterfall the product usually ends up not being what we wanted when we started. Using agile and iterative methodologies people are working toghether to get the job done. And when looking at Apple, this can be very proffitable.
But, reading through the lines of the article, there are some very interesting other points to be made. Allthough everybody is looking in the same direction and working together, I don't get the impression that this is all "free will". You either think the way Jobs does or you can go somewhere else. And while I realize that commercial companies aren't about democracy, I very much doubt that this will be working out in the long run. When Jobs runs out of great ideas, will the company still know what to do? When Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both die in a plane crash, Microsoft will probably do fine, but I doubt Apple will.
Anyway, if Santa sells his house for a good price this year, this baby will sure be on my Christmas wishing list ;-)
Today I finished the first part of the performance test of our appliction. I've been using VS2005 to create the test set and this worked out very wel. We were able to identify performance problems and deadlock situations and we have resolved most of them.
To create the tests I've been using the recorded webtest and parameterized them so we could re-use them for different testing configurations. I was able to provide sufficient flexibility to the tests wtihout having to convert them to code. You can attach plug-ins to the load and webtest to add some code to the pre- and post-events. There are just a few coded classes mostly to retrieve data for the tests. The main reason I didn't convert the tests to code is that the treeview is easier to maintain by our testing department, who are not experienced .NET developers.
At the moment I'm still using a recent CTP version of VS2005 because this is a Team Suite edition. This versions allows me to both develop and create load-tests. I'm really not amused that when I switch to the released version I will not have the load test functionality anymore.
UML Amigo Ivar Jacobson is working on a "new" software development process called the "Essential Unified Process". This process wil be lighter and easier to understand and learn than the RUP. The remarks he is making about RUP are quite remarkable for one of it's founders:
"RUP is one of my babies. But some [babies] grow up and need correction. RUP, in a way, has grown, and become very large, and hard to train [for], and hard to support." "We need a much more lightweight version," he continued.
Even more remarkable is the fact that the company of Jacobson has joined the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner program. The new process will be based on MSF (!) and will support Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System:
"With the Essential Unified Process connected to Microsoft's framework, Jacobson claims a combination of "good methodology, process and agility" can be achieved. "
The fact that Jacobson is partnering with Microsoft has to be slap in the face for Rational/IBM, but it will be good for the competition. Both IBM and Microsoft have taken notice of the fact that there is a great need for agile development and are supporting this with new processes and tools. This will also help the adoption of agile methodologies in large companies, which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
Read the whole article here: http://searchvb.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid8_gci1145656,00.html