Fall is being coy this year in the Northeast. We've been having on and off spells of very mild, almost summer-like weather over the last few weeks. That trend seems to be finally ending, alas, as there is possible snow forecasted for the weekend in New Hampshire. As the old joke goes, if you don't like the weather here, just wait five minutes.

The fall also brings hunting to the area. The annual moose season just concluded (you need to enter a special lottery to get a moose permit), but deer season is just about to open. My son and I won't be participating this year, but we recently purchased the appropriate tools of the trade, a shotgun to hunt in southern NH (where you can't hunt deer with a rifle) and a Mosin Nagant 91/30 for the rest of the state. The later is probably overkill, but my son saved up his pennies to buy it, being a student of both WWII and all things …

A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are …

Another week of industry hijinks has passed, which means it must be time for another edition of the Developer Week in Review.

Apple offers some cover

After developer complaints that Apple was leaving them out to dry, in regards to the Lodsys patent threats being aimed their way, the House of Jobs stepped up to the plate and announced that they considered iOS developers to be covered by the existing licenses granted to Apple by Lodsys for in-game purchases.

This is a bit of a good-news, bad-news story from an intellectual property perspective, as it doesn't offer any relief to non-Apple developers from the patents themselves. Apple paid off Lodsys, which in a sense increases the perceived validity of the patents. Other non-Apple-based developers (such as Valve's Steam), could find …

Lesson for the week: If you really want to stir up an anthill, attack the conventional wisdom of code development best practices.

In other news ...

Another piece of Sun falls off the good ship Oracle

At this point, I could almost follow the practice of Gregg Easterbrook 's Tuesday Morning Quarterback and put this text on Autotext, but in the past week, Oracle cast off another piece of their acquired Sun technology. In this case, it was the integrated build platform "Hudson." Either fed up with the infighting that had led to the spin-off "Jenkins" project, or simply …

Welcome to this week's edition of Developer Week in Review. Sorry we're running a little late. We assure you it has nothing to do with the release of "Portal 2."

The wide world of litigation

Another busy week for the court system, courtesy of the software industry. Software patents are back at the Supreme Court, this time courtesy of Microsoft and i4i. Meanwhile, Apple is suing Samsung over look and feel issues related to the Galaxy Tab, while at the same time ordering $7.8 billion USD of iPad 2 components from Samsung this year. This is …

Spring came in like a lion here in the Northeast, with an April Fools' Day mini-blizzard, even though Lion itself isn't due to be released until summer at the earliest. While I waited for more hospitable weather to emerge, I've been huddled indoors working on a Kickstarter project with my son, and I will now shamelessly plug it: It's a high-powered replacement for the Wii sensor bar, designed to let you sit comfortably at the other end of a room while you use your Wii. You can read more about it here if you're interested.

Meanwhile, there were the usual interesting developments in the developer world.

Google: Now promoting gray as a moral choice

Like most major technology companies, it can sometimes …

This is your Developer Week in Review, I'm Casey Kasem. Our first letter comes from a software developer in New England who writes, "Dear Casey. My wife just got accepted into the Experimental Psych doctoral program at UNH, and I'd like you to play something appropriate for the occasion." Well, going out especially for you, here's "I'll be Proofreading Your Papers for the Next Five Years, 'Cause I'll Never Split (Our Infinitive)" (Seriously, congratulations Bonnie!)

And you thought that Justin Bieber tickets were hard to score ...

What's the matter, pal? You say you had your heart set on going to Google I/O, but the tickets sold out in 59 minutes? Well, cheer up, because tickets went on sale this week for the Apple …

Netflix went down over three hours ago, and everyone is on edge here. My son just started reciting the script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in an attempt to keep our courage up. This may be the last thing I ever write, so — Oh, never mind, it's back up again ... Crisis averted, and on to this week's developer news.

We have an App Store Appstore for that!

Amazon this week unleashed their own Appstore for Android devices. Apple took umbrage at the use of the (evidently trademarked) term "App Store" and fired a salvo of …

Coming to you from 24 hours in the future, it's this week's Developer Week in Review.

All your news cycles are belong to us

We're using the O'Reilly Tempro-Spatial Distorter to send you back news of Today's's iPad 2 launch before it's even happened. Who could have predicted that the iPad 2 would have both a 3D Retina display and Smell-o-vision? But the real shocker had to be the announcement that the iTunes store was finally going to have the long-missing catalog of Up With People available for sale.

Ok, so we don't have a time machine, and deadlines dictate that this will be going to edit before the Big Announcement today. I'm sure one or two other news outlets will be covering the event, so you can probably find out what happened sometime later this week. For those keeping score, this is something like the 3rd or 4th Big Announcement so far this year, and we're only through February. It must be truly depressing to be …

If you live in the U.S., this is the week to gorge on turkey. I wondered out loud last night to my wife if Thanksgiving is the day of the year when the most people eat the same meal. Can any of our overseas readers add to the conversation? Is there a holiday in your country where everyone eats pretty much the same thing? Anyway, before American brains shut down from an overdose of stuffing, here's some developer news you can use.

Oracle announces Plan B for Java

The Java language has continued to evolve over the years, adding features such as Generics. There's an ambitious wishlist of things that developers would like to see in Java 7, but apparently not enough time to do it all and still get a timely release out. As a result, the JCP has decided to forego some of the goodies until Java 8, which is not expected to grace the world until late 2012.

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