Are you a generalist or a specialist?

Aaron Held writes a great post on specialization and the issues it raises in a development organization.

The Heinlein quote he shares is a keeper, and so is the podcast he linked to: Escape Pod: EP179: Arties Aren’t Stupid. I’m new to Escape Pod, which, apparently is a podcast where a sci-fi story is read and then discussed. The comments thread on this one is hot and heavy with folks arguing the effect of the narrator’s accent and slang – I think they transport you deep into the story’s universe. It’s an awesome fun recording. I typically don’t find the time for podcasts, but in this case, I’m subscribing.

Software Architecture Links: Documenting Architecture

IBM developerWorks: Documenting software architecture, Part 1: What software architecture is, and why it’s important to document it

IBM developerWorks: The architecture of Web applications

W3C: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One

w3.org: Web Architecture from 50,000 feet

Social Software Links: The Future of the Web Edition

Gabor Cselle: “The Future of Email” Talk in Sydney

Identity Management Manifesto: via robert_francis

Burningbird: This Week’s Semantic Web, Burningbird style

Waxy.org: Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey

slacktivist: They need help: Information — facts, reality, the rebuttal and debunking of lies — is one kind of help that the captives of unreality need. That information is necessary, but not sufficient, for those who have chosen their own captivity. What else is necessary, and what might be sufficient to help them choose not to make that choice, is something I want to continue exploring.

Planet RDF

Open Source Rich Internet Application Framework at CIM: OpenPyro

Check it out: OpenPyro: OpenPyro is a pure AS3 framework for creating RIA’s. Open Pyro draws a lot of inspiration from Flex but aims to be more expressive as well as have a smaller filesize and memory footprint.

Arpit Mathur, one of the most brilliant developers I know and a straight up Flash guru is leading the Open Pyro project. He recently posted about OpenPyro on his personal blog and includes a screencast of him using the framework to develop an app.

Kevin Fitzpatrick another CIM Flash master, and lead developer of another open source project at CIM, LogBook, comments about OpenPyro.

Upgrading SVN on Leopard

If you’ve been keeping your Subclipse Eclipse plugin up to date on Leopard, sooner or later you will be met with a situation where your svn cli client will report an incompatibility and lead you to upgrading it.

The problem starts when you download and install the universal binary at CollabNet.

Installation goes well, but it doesn’t upgrade the original installation you have on your machine.

The simplest solution found in the comments in this post was to override path so that /usr/local/bin/ takes precedence over /usr/bin/ . In addition, I took the additional step of moving the original svn binaries from /usr/bin to a backup folder, to avoid any possible conflicts.