The World of a Penguin

I think this talk is one of the best talk I have found in Googles Engineering series. Google talks are generally very good, but this is even better and has a good speaker. Joshua Bloch talk "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters" presents a lot of good information what to think about when creates API:s. Even if you aren't writing another framework it is important. I think people seems to believe today that reuse can only be done using frameworks. Joshua points out the importance of good API:s inside your program and for different modules. I would also like to add that this is important when designing new XML-DTD:s, which is a kind of API. For instance, I have seen XML file formats that says the address-tag includes space separated e-mail addresses. Why not use multiple address-tags, one for each address. In this way I can solely use my XML-parser to parse the file and do not need add extra code to separate the sting at spaces. If you do not have an hour at the mo...

Hans asked a while ago about packaging software for Ubuntu/Debian. Here are some hints and good pointers, I hope. I have for a long time build RPM-packages for various distributions. When I began to create .debs this was booth good and bad to have a good knowledge about RPMs. Debian has a lot of utilities that makes things very smoothly, there are a lot of these tools I miss when creating RPM:s now days. On the other hand when you are used to describe your package in one .spec-file you may be a bit scared of all files you got in your debian-directory. Briefly described, the debian directory and .spec file has the same goal. They describe how to build the package from the source. I would say that if you are building a very simple package RPM:s are easier but as soon as you want to do more complex things deb:s are easier. for instance one thing you get help with creating debs is restarting daemons correct after upgrades etc, this is a mes for RPMs. I will not describe exactly what to ...

This morning I got a mail from Kees Cook that told me that the AppArmor packages now is a part of Ubuntus Universe repository for Feisty. I hope we will make it to a really good packages including all the AppArmor functionality for Feisty+1.

The small amount of time I have spent on Apparmor to day have been to merge my and Kees Cooks work. Then I updated to the latest subversion revision. Now I run into problems with dpatch , which I never have used before. I have to spend some time to look into more details, but it have to be another day. I have not released any new packages to day, but Kees uploaded his packages to revu a few days ago. I will soon watch on Jamie Oliver on TV.