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August 31st, 2006
Vim 7.0 tabs suck. “Along the way I noticed that everyone is trying to do the same thing. Everyone just wants to open a tab for each buffer automatically and have it just work. It seems fairly obvious that tabs should work this way. It surprises me that the developers missed this.” What s/he said! (Link and profanity via Reddit)
Truth or art? Of course over complicating seems to be a desired trait to some people. 37Signals points to the Ars Electronica 2006 Simplicity: The Art of Complexity. The picture is intriguing in a weird way, the description is anything but simple. Proust is easier to read. Oh, it’s an art thing. Got it. Matt at 37Signals takes it quite literally and suggests an intervention.
Moore’s Law in Reverse: Ryan askes: “If the performance of harware doubles every so many months, why doesn’t the amount of time we spend worrying about the performance of our software get cut in half?”
I’ll trade any RAD for more of this. Tim Bray ends up diving into Ruby code: “’m not sure what the lesson is… but the code spelunking was frighteningly easy. This is not typical of other peoples’ HTTP libraries; I have bitter memories of bashing my head to a bloody pulp against LWP back in the last millennium. Did I mention readability?”
Which camp are you in? It’s time for the annual post-FooCamp bitchfest, but I’m linking to Stowe Boyd’s voice of reason. Google if you want to find the negative reactions. I dropped by BarCamp. It was friendly, full of inspiring people and I went home with a goodie bag full of great ideas.
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August 31st, 2006
Tara correctly points out “like, 3,000 speakers or something ridiculous and only one woman as far as I can tell.”
But that’s only half the story.
I don’t get excited by the idea of porting MS Office to the Web. It’s been done before. I want something better, something that makes me more productive. Like Tracksa by but she’s a girl.
I want to know how to build better productivity apps that help users kick ass. Who am I going to ask? Kathy Sierra, Gina Trapani, Rashmi Sinha.
Those are the first three names I came up with. Tara has more.
Let me ask this. Who’s speaking for all the users?
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August 31st, 2006
I’m a bastard. An oldie but a good one, resurfacing again on the Reddit rediscovery channel. “There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger. Quite frankly, I’d rather weed out the people who don’t start being careful early, rather than late.”
Delight your customers. Michael Gartenberg thinks that Apple is the Nordstorm of high tech. I only dealt with online support, and it was a bad experience, in three acts. I’ll have to try the stores next time. But a lot of people are delighted, and that’s not something Microsoft can ever do. And I know that, like many others, I’d rather pay for a high margin product if I get a gratifying experience.
Saying no to people who want cheap and bland is Apple’s secret sauce.
Buzz words explained. An almost good read from The Register: “What’s really driving SOA 2.0 and grid 2.0 is hollow, buzzword-based marketing by companies trying to stand out in overpopulated and immature markets.” Those who can’t do something new increment version numbers?
Worth repeating. “Working code attracts people who want to code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding.” (Via Raganwald, resurfaced on Reddit)
It works out of the box. Great piece by Russ Olsen. File under: read, memorize, do.
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August 31st, 2006
Office 2.0 conference. Just a reminder, the early bird registration period for the Office 2.0 Conference ends tomorrow, September 1st. Check out the lineup of presenters, make up your mind, you have a few hours to get the discount.
Anything important, is worth repeating. “The AganeAndAgane programming language is a high-level dynamic strongly-typed almost-functional programming language that borrows ideas from Java, Python and Ruby. It is based on an alternative philosophy of “DRYDBERIOK”, or “Don’t Repeat Yourself Differently, But Exact Repetition Is OK”
As are the mistakes of the past. David Chappell talks about the sad reality of SOA: “the “reuse” concept didn’t work too well with object-oriented programming, and isn’t working too well with SOA, either.” It didn’t work well with functions and modules before that. Fundamentally, because “companies need a corporate culture conducive to the sharing of innovation across departments … How many companies are fortunate enough to have such visionary management and corporate culture?” So just a reminder, you can do great things with SOA, and you can dump a lot of money on brand new software, the two are not neccessarily the same.
Frameworks help, but don’t solve. “When the hype-masters claim that their frameworks and languages make coding an application easier, they are absolutely right. But that’s already the easy part.”
Adopt-a-code. Instead of re-inventing the wheel but with your own preference for indenting and line breaks, why not adopt an orphaned project and build on what others have started?
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August 30th, 2006
Distributed horsepower. What happens when you take the processing power and move it from the central unit to the edges? What happens when you distribute the workload across more units? You get a Mini Cooper that does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, stops on a dime and can get 932 miles on one tank of gas.
Digging with Dabble. Amazing presentation of what DabbleDB can do. It reminds me of MS Access, except Access had a problem with slightly big databases, while DabbleDB can slurp the Web like nobody’s business.
Indeed? I found this link on DZone today. It’s an Indeed job trend chart indicating there’s clearly no interest in Ruby programmers. Java and C++ are far more popular (Java ahead of C++). Curiously, I tried searching for J2EE, .Net and Rails, and ended up with a quite different graph. Ruby apparently, is not nearly as popular as Rails, and nowhere near Perl. (Salaries, however, are dictated by demand and by supply, so they tell a different story)
The best programming language ever.
This just in. Half of IT managers admit to hating their users. The other half were in the pub. But that’s OK, because users don’t like IT managers either.
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August 30th, 2006
Slapping the 2.0 suffix makes good PowerPoint slides that look innovative and don’t have to say anything new. Web technologies went through a slump during the post .com nuclear winter, only to make a very strong and noticeable comeback. Yes, it’s a small circle even within the tech industry, but when every player in this field is paying attention and delivering, in one condensed release cycle, there’s something significant going on.
Can this happen where release cycles and adoption are painfully slow? I’m not convinced Enterprise 2.0 is anything but Web 2.0 technologies for customers with deep pockets. Pure buzz. But still, you can walk into a meeting, drop the term, and people will know what you’re talking about. Not quite Google the verb, but definitely an industry term in the making.
So isn’t this ironic. Enterprise 2.0 proponents are working hard and fast to make corporations more dynamic, help them adapt to new technologies. Yet, the term itself falls prey to the Wikipedia process? (Zoli has full coverage)
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August 30th, 2006
Spun like a frog. I really like choice, but I have to remember that some people don’t. SpiralFrog is a “choice”, an alternative to P2P and iTunes, although not an interesting one. It’s already spun as a success story, focusing on the 60m of non-iPod devices (in other news, a declining 20% of the market), and the line of advertisers (all two of them). A year from now, it will be portrayed the way Napster 2.0 and Microsoft put a smiley face on their failures. Meanwhile, there goes another year of record labels not giving consumers the choices they want, and harassing everyone they can find. Sigh. They’re just buying up time, but we’re paying the price.
The floodgates are open. Recently I started seeing more and more links and posts to, let’s just call them, off mainstream languages. It started with Lisp (we were first and we will prevail), followed by the return of Smalltalk (check out Seaside), some Haskell (monads are a great idiom), Erlang (can this be a usable pi-c?), IO, today I’m reading about Oz. I’m wondering if it’s the result of the cracks in the Java hegemony that’s bringing us back to one language per person? Or the sudden rise to fame of Ruby that’s igniting the competition? Languages are vested interests, after all. Or maybe I’m just reading too much reddit?
First dead 3.0? YapTA (say that three times with a straight face) is just the app we’ve all been waiting for, and better than most. Details are still sketchy, but we do know it’s Web 3.0. And we do know people will be using YapTA like a verb. The future is here, it’s just that YapTA got the lion’s share. “A job description asks prospective software engineers if they ever wished they were on the development teams of Skype, RealNetworks or iTunes.” Ok. If you have to define yourself by the success of others …
… you’re obviously not reading this.
Kickboxing. Paul Brown adds another one to his Devil’s dictionary: kickboxing, n. A programming language idiom whereby a kick is converted to a Kick.
Proxyscale. Jason Hoffman over at joyeur is putting proxy engines and load balancers to the test to see how much traffic he can pipe with a Rails app. This will be interesting to watch.
And interesting to read, Jason knows his stuff and knows how to explain it to others. Thanks Ludo for the link. (This blog is hosted by TextDrive, I live backup to StrongSpace, all three part of Joynet).
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August 29th, 2006
Who Took Away My Static Typing? Apparently the next SF Ruby meetup is titled “Remembering Java”. The wake will be held at Microsoft’s SF office, and will start with David Pollak’s eulogy “Who Took Away My Static Typing?”. Developer humor aside, I’m interested in the second presentation, Chris Wanstrath’s “Scaling Rails with Memcache”. Details here.
Distribute this. Bill de hÓra lists 8 fallacies of distributed information systems. And inbetween putting the title and post together, sneaks in a ninth one. There’s a few more good ones in the comments.
Free to what? Universal is starting a free music download service. Watch the ad, download and find something else to do, because it won’t play on your iPod. Not to worry because according to the IFPI “60m music players will be sold worldwide, many of them MP3 players not compatible with Apple’s services.” SpiralFrog’s target audience are people between the ages of 13 and 34, not exactly the demographic that owns an iPod or likes to share their music with friends.
Legal advise. Teaching a lawyer how to program is like teaching a ….? Anyway, Rich Ziade has a good piece on How Lawyers Are Like Programmers, except for the better hourly rate. (Via Stake Ventures)
Not just a pretty face. Fabulous Microformat icons by Chris Messina (follow the link for a download).
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August 29th, 2006
Apparently PHP, Ruby et al have kicked Java’s butt so hard, it’s having a problem sitting down. JSR 270 which handles Mustang suggest a process for removing features from the Java language. As in “less is every one else’s killer feature”.
The multi-step removal process means we won’t see much improvement any time soon, and there are more additions than removals. But still, it’s a nice idea to play with.
The current list suggests removing java.sound.midi on account that no one is using it. Here’s a few more suggestions:
- Remove Derby from the same release you intend to add it to.
- Identify the one person using Crimson, if you can’t, save us from JAXP.
- Move Java 3D to the “Eye Candy for Demos” edition of the JDK.
- Until Java ships in a browser, java.applet can go.
- javax.naming. Let’s teach people how to write better code.
- CORBA. Ain’t happening on the desktop. Let it go.
And while we’re at it, if java.awt and java.swing disappeared and all of a sudden we got SWT, you might even put a smile on my face.
What would you suggest for the Java diet?
Hat tip to Alex, photo by malias.
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August 29th, 2006
Microformats, the bigger picture. John Allsopp’s The Big Picture on Microformats is a great wrap up of where Microformats stand today. “In trying to climb the slippery pole of the network effect, new technologies often face a chicken-or-egg moment. … As I’m about to demonstrate, microformats have passed this chicken-or-egg moment in a number of areas.” And check out the blog.
Cpen source yet so close. Paul Brown on open sourcing Java: “Will “open source Java†prevent cruft from getting into the standard libraries for Java or evict some of the current dross and detritus? Will it save us from the next EJB or Crimson?”. I have to agree. The problem with Java is not that the source is hidden, it’s readily available. The problem with Java is that it’s closed, as in attempting to duplicate the operating system inside the VM. “Strip the Java standard libraries down to a minimal subset of what they currently contain, don’t put it back, provide a great package manager, and that’s open enough for me.”
Web Office needs to innovate, not replicate. Om Malik on Web Office vs MS Office: “Web Office should not be about replacing the old, but inventing the new web apps that solve some specific problems.” Most Web office apps strike me as nothing more than changing the delivery method from CD to HTTP, developing with AJAX instead of MFC and expecting some big windfall. I’m not impressed. There’s a lot of room for innovation, it you don’t just change the method of delivery, but change how people do things, for the better. Blogs do that for me, so do Wikis, GMail and Tracks. But most Web apps fails to offer anything new or better. And quite frankly, when did I ever feel the need to spreadsheet while not in front of my computer?
On REST and other stuff. Jon Udell interviews Roy Fielding. A must listen for my next commute. (Via Bill de hÓra)
Oops. Lucas Carlson over-engineers: How I processed a log file 20x SLOWER than before. And then goes to tell us all about it and how to avoid it. There are people who love their technology so much they end up dreaming about nails. Lucas steps back and keeps it real. I have high hopes for Starfish and where he’s going with that.
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