Kev's Development Toolbox

June 12, 2006

PS3 production problems lead to downgraded specs?

Rumours this week are that production yields for the 3.5GHz Cell processor for the PS3 are not high enough, and that the processor speed is likely to be reduced to 2.8GHz for the final shipping PS3s later this year in November. The same article mentions that they may be having cooling issues with the hardware crammed into a case that’s too small, so expect to see an external PSU brick instead of an internal unit.

Sony may also have faced issues ensuring backwards compatibility with PS2 and PS One support running in software emulation, so rumours last week suggested that the initial versions of the PS3 will come including the PS2 chipset in the box. Wow, thats quite amazing and a surprise. The PS2 emulates the original Playstation in software running on the one of it’s chips that’s not even the main CPU (I can’t remember which, but I think it’s the I/O controller chip).

June 12, 2006

Then and now – Vintage 80’s gadgets compared to today

Fosfor Gadgets has a great article comparing gadgets from the late 70’s/early 80’s with what we have today. When you see these side by side you really get an appreciation of how far technology has developed in the last couple of decades.

June 9, 2006

Configuring Grails on Ubuntu Linux

I’ve recently installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, and in order to get Grails running, had to do the following:

Edit /etc/environment and set up environment vars for Groovy, Grails and Java:

<code>
GRAILS_HOME=/INSTALL_DIR/grails-0.2
GROOVY_HOME=/INSTALL_DIR/groovy-1.0-jsr-05
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.06
export GRAILS_HOME GROOVY_HOME JAVA_HOME
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11: /usr/games:$GRAILS_HOME/bin:$GROOVY_HOME/bin"
</code>

This file was new to me on Ubuntu, I’m used to defining env vars in a .profile file. In order to get the new vars setup, source the file – ‘source environment’.

After the previous step, the included script files with Grails needed to be changed to executable in order to run. cd into the grails directory, and then ‘chmod +x’ for both INSTALL_DIR/bin/grails and INSTALL_DIR/ant/bin/ant

June 9, 2006

infoq.com – the ‘new’ serverside.com?

www.infoq.com, a software development news and article site, covering Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA and Agile methodologies, officially launched yesterday, after having been running in beta for a while.

The site was co-founded by Floyd Marinescu, who was the original founder of www.theserverside.com, before they merged with Tech Target.

So far I like what I see on infoq – I hope they keep up the momentum and keep the articles coming. This looks a lot like what www.theserverside.com used to be like 4 or 5 years ago. TheServerSide used to be ‘the’ portal site for all things J2EE, but it lost momentum I think after Floyd left, followed by Ed Roman who was the CEO of The Middleware Company, the company behind TheServerSide.com. Since that point I have gradually lost interest in the content on TheServerSide, they usually don’t have anything that catches my eye – they aggregate news story headlines (which I do myself anyway on this site), but they are missing the articles and interviews that they used to have. Plus they used to be a thriving community with many contributions from people in the community – check the site now and see how few submissions they have from anyone other than those connected with the site.

infoq.com on the otherhand looks like they are off to a good start… I’m this close to replacing my TheServerSide.com link with infoq.com …