What
· Technology
· · Software
Eclipse to IntelliJ · After two years I still loathe Eclipse, and my former love NetBeans is now from a bad neighborhood, and more and more people I respect are switching to IntelliJ Idea. So I thought I’d give it a try, since I’m just starting on a project that might grow large-ish. This is going to be a diary of the experience, heavily loaded with GoogleBait in case others encounter some of the same pain points that are inevitable in such a transition ...
Network App Macroeconomics · A friend of mine is working on a complicated publishing app; the data is XML, perfectly appropriate when your objects are documents. She told me they were thinking about automating some of the work by running XSLT transformations out there in the client with libxslt. I said “Well yeah, as long as the client’s a PC not a tablet”. The category of “things you can do on a PC but not a tablet” is interesting ...
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Type-System Criteria · Starting some time around 2005, under the influence of Perl, Python, Erlang, and Ruby, I became convinced that application programs should be written in dynamically-typed languages. You get it built faster, there’s less code to maintain, and the bugs are no worse. I’ve felt negative not just about statically-typed tools in general, but about the Java programming language in particular. Living in the Android world has forced me to think about this more ...
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Geeks Gather in Belgium · I mean the 2011 Devoxx conference, tenth in a series, held in Antwerp, otherwise famous for Rubens and diamonds ...
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Chip Experience · Basically all the credit cards in Canada are now “chipped”, which is to say that there are visible microelectronics toward one end. To pay, you slip that chip into the reader, confirm the deal and enter your PIN. This allows for a surprising amount of variation in user-experience quality ...
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Perma-noob · This week I’ve been learning how one would build a simple RESTful back-end for an Android app, using Sinatra on Rack on JRuby on Java on App Engine and its Datastore, by doing it. The app needs persistence and user-account authentication, among other things. It’s been stimulating, but I’m feeling wistful ...
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“Web” vs. “Native” · Back in February of 2010 I interviewed for a new job. It was the typical Google hiring-process siege; I talked to six or eight people over the course of the day. At least half of them asked me “Native vs Web apps on mobile; what do you think?” ...
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Three Mobile-Software Rules · These days, I spend quite a bit of time talking about how to write software for Android. I think three of the general rules are worth expanding on here because I’m increasingly convinced they apply to software in general, not just for mobile devices ...
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Lightroom 3 · If I read the tea-leaves correctly, this is increasingly the tool of choice among serious photogs, although Aperture isn’t going away any time soon. The new release has been well-covered elsewhere; I don’t have too much more to add, but I do have a major gripe and a couple of pictures to illustrate the much-ballyhooed noise-reduction filters ...
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Modeling Is Hard · In A post-mortem on the previous IT management revolution William Vambenepe writes, on the subject of standardization: “The first lesson is that protocols are easy and models are hard.” I agree about the relative difficulty, but think when it comes to interoperation, protocols are very difficult and shared models usually impossible. A couple of examples occur to me ...
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Lightroom Ping-Pong · Here’s the short form in geek-speak: Apparently, you can use rsync to keep two computers running Lightroom in harmony. The long version is well, long, and digresses into Deep Vein Thrombosis and Olympic Table-Tennis qualification ...
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Language Waves · I suppose I could have entitled this A General Model for Progress In Adoption of Popular Programming Languages. What happened was, I was composing a rant intended for use in an internal discussion of developer futures, and it dawned on me that there’s a repeating pattern in the waves of programming languages that manage to succeed in finding broad usage ...
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Tab Sweep — Tech · This goes back weeks and weeks; I’ve been wide-finding and doing Sun stuff and the Web-watching has suffered ...
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TestMaker · I got mail from Frank Cohen saying “We just released TestMaker 5.0, could you give us a plug?” Hey, why not; I don’t know the first thing about the software so this is not an endorsement, and the phrase “SOA Governance” gives me a mild wave of nausea, but Frank’s a good guy, a long-time proponent of dynamic languages on the JVM, and anyhow the software’s Open-Source. Hey Frank, does it talk REST?
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Tech Tab Sweep · We’re all over the map today, from general theories of software development to low-level optimized bit-banging. Well, all over the software map, I guess ...
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Not Much New Here · In recent talks, I’ve been using a graphic from State of the Computer Book Market, written for O’Reilly Radar by Mike Hendrickson, and it’s been preying on my mind. The more I think about it, and about the programming-languages landscape, the more I think that this picture isn’t changing much any time soon. The landscape is stable ...
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Lightroom and Open Source · Over the last few years, I’ve become something of an open-source triumphalist, drifting to the conclusion that (on the engineering side) it’s the best way to build software and (on the business side) it’s a better way to monetize it. I have to confess that Adobe Lightroom has kind of shaken my convictions. Certain elements of its UI and design (for example, the crop/rotate tool, and the nondestructive editing paradigm) are qualitative steps forward in the state of the art. Furthermore, I can’t think of a single good business reason for Adobe to open-source it. I guess the conclusion is obvious: for the foreseeable future, both models of software building and marketing are going to march along; neither is doomed.
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Whither IT? · There are a couple of browser tabs I’ve had open for at least a week now and they’ve been making me think and I think they’re related but I still don’t have a synthesis. The first is Bill de hÓra’s Matchstick Men, which says a bunch of smart things about WS-* and REST, but that’s not what resonates, it’s this: Critically the upkeep and maintenance of legacy systems has come to dominate business software spending. Most large enterprise IT divisions now have the equivalent of a pensions fund crisis, except that all the money is being spent on old systems instead of old people. The second is Nicholas Carr’s Citi whacks IT, from begins: In yet another sign of the vast amount of waste inherent in big-company IT operations... ...
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Lightroom Fanboy · I really don’t often use this space to blather on about how good some piece of commercial client-side closed-source software is, but, well... Adobe Lightroom is a truly great piece of work. Not only is it just the thing for the serious photographer, I think it may have advanced the state of the GUI art ...
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Obie Says · That would be Obie Fernandez; he offers Some of My Software Opinions, and I recommend it heartily. I agreed with almost all of them; enough that I fully intend to re-use them myself.
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Defining Standards · In Pro Choice, Sam Ruby says: I prefer simpler definitions. A standard is one that has multiple, inter-operable, independent implementations. An open standard, at least in the software world, is one where at least one of those implementations is open source. You can sign me up for that, too.
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Interview, with Snarls · James Gray of Linux Journal has published a lengthy email interview with me. Those who visit ongoing regularly won’t find much to surprise them; but I did take the chance to fulminate about dastardly DRM and Microsoft’s odious Office XML. And now that I think of it, I’ve been stingy with the polemics around here recently, maybe a little bland even; aren’t bloggers supposed to be ruthless attack puppies? It’s having a cute little girl baby around that does it I guess.
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Cars and User Interfaces · I can remember, back in the day, when we were arguing about user interfaces we said “It should be as intuitive as a car is. Any experienced driver can get in a new, strange, car and figure it out in minutes.” Well, I’ve been using a bunch of different computers and driving a bunch of different cars lately, and I think we’re there. With a sad picture and some automotive micro-reviews ...
ORM Bien Phu · I thought the laugh line “Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science” was ancient, but Ted Neward claims that he made it up in 2004. Ted has written an immense, detailed, essay on the subject, The Vietnam of Computer Science, which, just to be thorough, includes a capsule history of the Vietnam conflict. This ought to be required reading for all Computer Science undergrads, so they’ll at least be forewarned before they stumble into their own private Southeast Asia. Bonus: in the comments, the first commenter asks “If ORM = Vietnam, does SOA = Iraq?”
Stiff’s Questions · A while ago I got an email out of the blue from Jarosław Rzeszótko, who’s from Poland I think, saying “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a few questions about software.” Then I ran across it again while looking for something in my inbox on a plane ride, so I dashed off some answers; the person seemed pleasant and polite. He calls himself “Stiff” and his blog “Sztywny Blog”. Anyhow, he also heard back from Linus Torvalds, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Yegge, Peter Norvig, Guido van Rossum, and James Gosling. The answers to his questions are interesting.
On PHP · I should really buckle down and try writing a PHP app because, at the moment, I have an attitude problem. I know that IBM now officially loves it, and Tim O’Reilly’s been charting the upcurve in PHP book sales, and everyone’s saying that Oracle’s going to buy Zend. If you want your ears bent back, have a listen to Zend CEO Doron Gerstel; he’ll tell you that half the websites in the world are powered by PHP and that there are 2½ million developers and that the war is over and PHP won. So here’s my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. Everyone agrees on PHP’s upsides: it’s written for the web, it’s easy to deploy and get running, and it’s pretty fast. Those are important advantages. And I’m sure that it’s possible to write clean, comprehensible, maintainable, PHP; only apparently it’s real easy not to. But PHP has competition, most obviously Rails; and don’t write the Java EE crowd off, they’re not stupid at all and they’re trying to learn the lessons that PHP is trying to teach. So PHP has earned everyone’s respect by getting where it is, and Sun should reach out to it more than we have. But in the big picture, it feels vulnerable to me. [Wow, I regret not having comments. There’s been some first-rate discussion in email and on other blogs. On this occasion, I’m going to create a virtual comment section by posting the good ones here.] [There is a new, good pro-PHP rant from Harry Fuecks, and with that I’m going to stop adding to this discussion, unless somebody says something strikingly new. Thanks everyone! I’ve added a brief Table of Contents to try to bring some order to the chaos.] ...
Ultra Sysadmin · I’ve got this Ultra 20 which among other things has a huge disk with room for lots of operating systems. I want to fool around a bit with Linux and Solaris Classic and GNU/Solaris, run some Bonnie numbers and also shake down my own stuff on all these different boxes. I expected pain, and I’ve already had some. This post will be my diary of the things that go wrong, and right ...
Carlyle on REST & O-O · You wouldn’t think there’d be much new to say on the impedance mismatch between the O-O & REST world-views, but Benjamin Carlyle has a very good piece on the subject, with lots of well-thought-out little side-trips. The blog’s called Sound advice and a glance suggests that there’s lots more there worth reading.
Long Weekend News · While most of North America was offline watching fireworks or whatever, the row of tabs across the top of my browser has been getting thicker and thicker with little news nuggets that I thought I ought to write about. Time to houseclean, so here are some interesting things you might have missed. Item: Eric Raymond says we don’t need the GPL any more. Item: Davanum Srinivas points out that OSS implementations of WS-Security may be impossible, foundering on the same rock that Sender-ID did. Item: The WaSP and Microsoft, sittin’ in a tree (and as Scoble notes, ice is observed forming in Hell). Item: Rico continues to pile up buzz.
Threads Redux · The June 12th On Threads piece got slashdotted (twenty thousand hits for a 2,300 word hard-tech piece, not bad), which provoked really interesting feedback from (among others) David Dagastine, Greg Wilson, and Ben Holm, along with pointers to some related work. All those pointers are worth following, and some of the points are worth a little more discussion ...
On Threads · Last week I attended a Sun “CMT Summit”, where CMT stands for “Chip Multi-Threading”; a roomful of really senior Sun people talking about the next wave of CPUs and what they mean. While much of the content was stuff I can’t talk about, I was left with a powerful feeling that there are some real important issues that the whole IT community needs to start thinking about now. I’ve written about this before, and of the many others who have too, I’m particularly impressed by Chris Rijk’s work. But I think it’s worthwhile to pull all this together into one place and do some calls to action, so here goes. [Ed. Note: Too long and too geeky for most.] [Update: This got slashdotted and I got some really smart feedback, thus this follow-up.] ...
Coding and Climbing · It had never occurred to me that writing software is like climbing Mt. Fuji, but Stephan Grell makes it all clear.
PhotoShop Elements 3 Review · Skipping to the conclusion: It’s good, if you’re using Elements already go upgrade. But along the way, there are thoughts on software’s lifespan and pricing. Plus, a thin black woman kissing a flower taller than herself ...
Software in the TLP Era · Flying over the Atlantic, I read all eight parts of Chris Rijk’s Thread Level Parallelism Design Decisions, and I wish a few more software geeks would go and read it. Herewith a few notes on software design in the era of Thread Level Parallelism ...
It’s the Libraries, Stupid · Via Jeff Dillon, some insightful words on programming in Java and in the C#/.NET/Mono ecosystem. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Wondering About Vignette · I’d like to use the Web as a Really Smart Library—first time I’ve done that on this blog—because I’m looking for some user and programmer experience on Vignette. I haven’t been near their products for years, since the days of StoryServer, which was generally hated for bugginess, arcane complexity, and TCL-centricity. If anyone would like to share some Vignette content-management or portal experiences, on or off the record, I’d sure appreciate it, and I’d publish them here too (or not) on request.
