Supercommunicator: Explaining the Complicated So Anyone Can Understand by Frank J. Pietrucha

Summary: Gives a small handful of advices on how to communicate

This is one of these books where you get good advice on how to perform well when communicating things. I fully agree with Frank on how much important is the message. I fully agree on choosing right tools, right way of approaching the audience, but I missed that in the book itself. All these ideas are rather presented than discussed. There are statements but with not too much of critique. And that’s what I have missed most.

For people who are really new to the topic this is a nice starter. For people who are in the subject, most of the concept are already known.

This book has rather light approach and will not require full attention from you all the time.

Product page: Product link

O’Reilly (print): Supercommunicator
Safari Books Online: Supercommunicator

And Now for Something Completely Different – Chorus is too loud ;) ?

2:51 – that look. Is it bassist or chorus?

If you wanted to buy something from Packt, that’s about a right time

Validate XML against schema using xmllint

xmllint --noout --schema schema.xsd file.xml 

Python Network Programming Cookbook by M. O. Faruque Sarker

Summary: Whether you need it depends on your tasks

Python Network Cookbook provides you with the samples related to the range of networking topics. Whether you will benefit from it depends heavily on your tasks. The point here is that the range of samples is really huge. Starting with data manipulation required for network based transfer, through socket based networking, interfaces related samples, IPv6, to topics covering HTTP, IMAP, and web services.

Now, don’t get me wrong, but the percentage of the book you will benefit from heavily depends on your day to day work. If you deal with http stuff all the time, you will find half of the book entertaining. On the other hand, if you do some low level development and you want to design your own means of transportation based on sockets, first half of the book will be of your interest.

What I have found particularly useful for me were the http related samples, web service handling, and port forwarding. But these are things that I can benefit from directly.

For sure, this book will be really interesting for the students who have to deal with networking related lectures. You will be able to jump directly into virtually any network related topic.

The book has one drawback. Some of the samples are Linux based. I am pretty sure you can use them anyway by using MacPorts or Cygwin, but still, it might be slightly frustrating for Windows and Mac users that some samples are marked as “Linux only”.

Before you buy the book, make a simple calculation how much you can benefit from it. If you decide that more than half of the book is useful for you – go ahead.

O’Reilly (print): Python Network Programming Cookbook

Nasty trick with PATH

If you want to prevent people from accidentally changing PATH variable try this one:

set PATH="$PATH:\0"
set PATH="$PATH:some_additional_path"
echo $PATH

_JAVA_OPTIONS – special JVM environment variable that we tend to forget about

If you experience really strange behaviour of your Java app, and you want to play with settings try using _JAVA_OPTIONS

setenv _JAVA_OPTIONS "-Xmx2G -Xms1G -Xcheck:jni"

You can set any settings as you would while calling java.

Running Swift from Sublime Text 3

If you just want to play with Swift’s basics try following:

Inside Sublime Text 3 choose

Tools -> Build System -> New Build System

and replace default entry with (NOTE! make sure everything is a single line)

{
	"shell_cmd": "/Applications/Xcode6-
Beta.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/
XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift 
\"${file}\" -o \"${file_path}/${file_base_name}\" 
&& \"${file_path}/${file_base_name}\""
}

Then, type in simple Swift code and press Command-B

println("Hello")

// This is sample array

var stringArray = ["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]

println(stringArray)

Agile Software Architecture by Muhammad Ali Babar, Alan W. Brown, Ivan Mistrik

Summary: Academic style

If you like academic approach to the topic, that’s something you are looking for – definitely. The book is a collection of articles from various authors. This is slightly misleading, because you don’t expect that by cover. The point here is that book itself will not provide you with some solid, single minded idea of how to join architecture and agile based approaches. It’s rather composition of ideas that circle around the topic. And you can tell that basing on writing style. Practically each chapter has different way of expressing topic.

Plus for the references. As we deal here with articles, you will find loots of references to various sources. If you are really into the topic, this will help you find the information in other places.

O’Reilly (print): Agile Software Architecture

OS X 10.10 virtualisation

So far, so good. I was able to get OS X 10.10 working with VM Fusion. So, I can at least try some new stuff. The same goes for Xcode 6. I had no time to check it’s features, yet, but at least it installs :)

Just one remark – be prepared for “snail mode” while working with OS X 10.10 inside Fusion. It is terribly slow!!

As for Parallels – no luck here :( It simply freezes on boot screen.