Thom Holwerda Archive

IBM Rational Team API is a unified, client-side Java API for ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Requisite Pro. In order to use this Eclipse based API, customers must have installed Version 7.0.0 of Rational ClearQuest client, ClearCase Web server, or RequistePro client.

Paul Thurrot, Microsoft Apple Microsoft supporter, reviews the new Vista build: "Little more than a month after issuing a bug-laden Windows Vista Beta 2, Microsoft has shipped its first post-Beta 2 interim build of the next Windows and it makes up a lot of lost ground. Indeed, it's hard not to view this build and not believe that Microsoft is absolutely back on track." Another reviewer also states that performance has increased since the previous build.

Server makers are lining up a host of new and enhanced systems armed with Intel's new 'Woodcrest' Xeon processor, a chip built on a new architecture that promises better performance coupled with greater energy efficiency. Intel initially said the Xeon 5100 family - based on Intel's new Core microarchitecture - would be released in the third quarter. However, earlier this month the giant chip maker pushed up the date to June 26 in an attempt to take back momentum from rival AMD. Ars' Hannibal gives his view on the new processors.

Sun today released Solaris 10 6/06, which provides a host of improvements; most notably, this is the first release to support ZFS. Download it from Sun's Solaris website. A short summary of the new features is also available. Other new features besides ZFS: UDP and TCP/IP improvements, PCI Express support on x86 (including hotplugging), predictive self healing for x64 systems, and much more.

30 student development teams from seven countries converged on Microsoft's campus June 23-25, to compete in the third annual Windows Embedded Student ChallengE based on the theme, "Preserving, protecting, and enhancing the environment." Five winning teams collectively were awarded $24000 in cash. The entries included some clever ideas (listed in the article).

"Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework causing a lot of excitement among Web developers. By supporting agile development techniques and a philosophy of "convention over configuration," it has enabled many developers to radically reduce the time and pain involved in creating Web applications. Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment. This article highlights some of the things that makes Rails exceptional, explains how to get going with Rails and DB2, and leads you through your first Web application in Rails."

"If you are a Cocoa developer, you already know that the dynamic nature of Objective-C and Cocoa is what makes them so flexible and powerful. In terms of development tools, the power of a dynamic object-oriented environment like Cocoa translates into original tools like Interface Builder or F-Script, an open source project that is presented in this article. F-Script is an integrated set of tools that makes it possible to interactively explore and manipulate Cocoa objects as well as script them using new high-level programming techniques. This article shows you how to use some of its most impressive features and demonstrates how it can be a useful addition to your developer toolkit."

User are realizing that applications such as business intelligence, specialized workflow systems and even traditional customer relationship management applications will not be necessary in the future as organizations tie into 'people-ready' business solutions, according to Microsoft.

Slowly, I step out of the Intercity train to Amsterdam, en route to university; I'm tired, I need some coffee. I check my watch and realise my metro leaves in 3 minutes, so I need to hurry in order to and buy me a coffee-to-go, and make it on time to the metro platform. I pick up my pace to run, as Mike Skinner would say.

" can easily enjoy the best of both the Mac and Windows XP worlds on a single system--as long as that system is an Intel Mac. Apple's own Boot Camp Public Beta allows you to install Windows XP SP2 onto an Intel Mac, giving you a dual-boot system. Parallels takes a slightly different approach with its Parallels Desktop for Mac, a virtual machine application. CNET Labs ran a few of its home-brewed benchmarks on a MacBook Pro with the Mac OS, Boot Camp, and Parallels Desktop to see how application performance stacks up between the three."

"WinFS has been officially pulled out of Microsoft's road map for products and services - permanently. People all around the web are shocked and complaining. But the thing is: who didn't expect this? Although no one came out and said it directly, no one spoke of WinFS except as a distant memory, it was quite obvious that people didn't buy Microsoft's story of it shipping separately. If people believed, the shock and outrage today would be ten times as big as it was when the LH project was rebooted and WinFS torn out with the strings still hanging. But the question many people are asking these long years later is: what is WinFS anyway? And what's the big deal if everyone already knew it wasn't coming?"

AndandTech, in its usual in-depth fashion (14 pages), reviewed Windows Vista Beta 2. Their conclusions are grouped per competitor-- the MacOS and XP. On Tiger: "However, even with the massive improvements Microsoft has shown with Vista, we still feel they aren't quite ready to beat Tiger in a fight." When comparing to XP: "Feature for feature, Vista is superior to XP, and its only real costs are memory usage, hard drive usage, and price." In the meantime, Microsoft has released a new build of Vista. Update: Screencast of Beta 2.

"This HowTo is about creating a user-session-safe directory which offers security on- and offline. This is done with PAM, a module named pam_script and Encfs ('Encrypted Filesystem'). This safe directory is used to store credentials and other sensitive information during a session. When a usersession is ended, in the worst case an encrypted directory remains on the harddrive. In the best case everything is removed. This construction is only meant to store information during a session, not for documents or any other valid information."

"The inventor of the WWW has a short, to-the-point post that explains exactly why supporting real, bona fide net neutrality is the Right Thing to Do. I absolutely encourage you to read the entire post, but really he sums up the whole argument for net neutrality in his opening sentence: 'When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.' If you think about it in terms of start-ups having to ask the permission of AT&T to innovate, then the whole net neutrality issue becomes less complicated."