Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards

Sourceforge.net has released its 2008 Community Choice Award winners.

Not surprisingly, Openoffice.org took quite a few awards. I personally use Openoffice at home, Videolan (VLC) and Notepad++, an incredibly handy notepad-like uber text editor.

Also, Sourceforge is a great place to find many varieties of open source testing tools including OpenSTA, JUnit and many, many others.

-William

The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander

I caught this neat interview with Peter Gluck who is a NASA (JPL) engineer who discusses the software used on the Phoenix lander. He discusses some pretty interesting facts around how they develop, test and update the software used on something that is built in earth and then sent hurtling millions of miles away to make a perfect landing on Mars.

Here's an interesting snip from the article about the development process:

"...we have a lifecycle that we use at JPL where we go through a requirements definition and then we go into our preliminary design phase and then we go into a detail design phase. And then at the end of detail design, you actually have most of the components ready to be assembled and you start to assemble and integrate and test the vehicle. And so roughly speaking, you spend something like nine months in your requirements definition and then another year in your design phase, maybe a year and a half. And then you spend a year to a year and a half in your test phase. And then you launch it."

Its a great read and highly recommended.

-William