The Science of Blogging

Links for 2009-07-17

Automated Web Services Composition with the Event Calculus - As the web services proliferate and complicate it is becoming an overwhelming job to manually prepare the web service compositions which describe the communication and integration between web services. This paper analyzes the usage of the Event Calculus, which is one of the logical action-effect definition languages, for the automated preparation and execution of web service compositions. In this context, abductive planning capabilities of the Event Calculus are utilized. It is shown that composite process definitions in OWL-S can be translated into Event Calculus axioms so that planning with generic process definitions is possible within this framework.
The problem with using hardware to compensate for slow software | Royal Pingdom - HOWEVER, it is all too common that companies don’t take code optimization seriously enough and never go beyond step 3 above. The solution will more or less always be to throw more hardware at the problem. In addition to this, a lot of programmers simply assume that it’s ok to demand more powerful hardware for their software to run well and don’t put much effort into doing more with the same resources.
Don Eyles, a 23-year-old self-described "beatnik" who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing. : programming - A few years ago I watched a Dutch documentary about Edsger Dijkstra. He tells several anecdotes about his experience with software quality. One in particular stuck in my mind: shortly after the first successful moon landing, Dijkstra spoke to the head of development for the module software: "How did you produce so many lines of perfect code?" "Huh? We had a bug a few days before launch, it accidentally calculated the moon as repelling rather than attracting." "Wow! Those guys were lucky to make it alive, then!" "Yes, lucky..."
YouTube - AsiaBSDCon 2009:The OpenBSD Release Process: A Success Story - Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule -- 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Developer and testing laziness is mostly circumvented and leader frustration is kept to a minimum. The reasons, mechanics and social workings of our process have never been detailed outside the project, but now will be, hopefully providing some insight to others who face delays and quality issues with their own product lines.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-17