Business at the speed of snail

Things are different now, again.

2016-08-17T04:40:00.002-07:00

Quite a lot has happened in a few months. Windows 10 became much much better and now includes Linux built in, so you have the full energy saving, sleep, hibernate stuff fully working for windows, all the other benefits, software, services, cheaper hardware and full Linux, if all they had given us was just BASH, things would still just be the same.

What this BASH shell is, it is a real linux system, with full access to the whole system, sudo access, you can edit your /etc/host file and it is system wide. But the real kicker is, it is a real linux computer, no emulation, not a virtual machine.

I installed redis and MongoDB with just 2 commands, and these systems are running on my windows machine, everything is available on localhost. You also have open ssh and all that comes with it. This means, you can run NodeJS and Python servers. Everything you could do in Linux (pretty much) is now available.

I have set myself goal of writing a fully blown NodeJS server, using only Windows 10 machine with BASH shell. This is a web server running with Redis and Mongo, NodeJS and a lot of packages, using a windows programming editor, and then deploy on a Linux server.

Is this just as easy as using macOS machine? Just as easy or even easier than using virtual linux host ? Well I am off to find out.

The Thinkpad machine that I have available is no macintosh, that is for sure. It is dual core i7 with 8GB memory, SSD disk and not very good monitor, the keyboard is excellent though.

So I will keep at this. I just think paying $3000 for a laptop is way over the point when you get a very good PC laptop for $600-800. i7 Quad core, gaming GPU, backlit keyboard and such, usually though the screen and the feel of the machine is quite bad. The second question usually is, is it that much worse ? You could aways loose one, drop one, spill water/coffee/cola over it. It could get stolen.

Like I said earlier, a machine that costs $3000, is about $100 per month over almost 3 years. That is a lot of money. 2 machines for $600 each, over 30 months, is just $40 a month, and if you are lucky and just have 1 machine, it is just $20. Then you can swap out the disk, add more memory, I saw an Asus with 4 banks of memory, which in my books means it is possible to expand it's memory to 32GB, now we are talking.

Not looking good

2015-12-21T05:08:00.002-08:00

Ok. A day before my travel I was working on my Thinkpad and it kind of dawned on me why I stopped using Windows as my main operating system way back when dinosaurs roamed, well, ok, not that long time ago.

First, the machine worked for all purposes, execpt for quite a few things. While downloading updates, it just got stuck at 23% for 2 hours, no matter what I did, sign off, reboots and whatever else, nothing moved the update progress bar, not even when it tried again, it got stuck at 23%.

When you click the START button, you can just type in whatever you want, and it is way faster than actually trying to find things, but every single search results resulted in a non working link. Pressing the Add remove software from the menu resulted in the machine just stalling for a minute or two, then nothing happened.

Going into the Control panel or settings resulted in the same thing.

There was nothing that caught my eye in the event viewer.

It kind of looks like the machine is toast, except for, I could install and download applications, both from the store and from other web sites, the web worked quite well, opening files from network drives worked, Netflix worked, everything seemed to work but really it wasn't.

So, I did not take the Thinkpad with me on my travel. How this will affect my transition trial remains to be seen, but things is not looking good. This like the moment when a scientist calls success on his experiment a minute before it blows up.

I was looking forward to actually doing work on Windows only vacation for 2 weeks. This really puts a huge downer on the experiment, and things were looking so good.

Nearing conclusions

2015-12-18T03:53:00.003-08:00

The title of this post was supposed to be called "Wet towels do work after all", and I meant that using Windows was like trying to dry yourself with a wet towel, when you are in a swimming place, you drop the towel on the floor and it gets cold and wet. You can still dry yourself, but it just isn't comfortable, things just don't work quite perfect, but they do work.

That was almost my conclusion about windows 10. Here are some negative feelings.

- There are so many ways of doing things. You have pc settings and control panel to change settings, then you right click on the desktop and go into display settings, there you can change the size and patterns of windows, screen sizes and even some layout. Things are just spread all over the place. Then the oldie but gold Control Panel, it is almost impossible to find anything there, if it were not for the excellent search function inside the control panel, it would be completely impossible. Things move around between operating system upgrades. This things is a huge wart in the face of modern operating system.

- Cygwin works, ye sit works, just not always the way you are used to. You have to install scripts to get the apt-get kind of feeling, but that does not work all the time, you just can't find everything. I needed a specific xml library, then I restarted the Cygwin installer and was able to find the library I needed, apparently this is the way to do things, re-run the installer. That just doesn't feel right. trying to setup Cygwin with Git, Zshell, oh my zshell and others is difficult, even for a veteran Unix administrator. But when you run services that have a prompt, like node, mongo or redis-cli just to name 3 items, as that is the rule, you always have to name 3 items. The prompt does not work, doesn't show up, you can type but you can't press ctrl-r to do recursive search through history and things like that, things you take for granted. Weird thing is, the prompts work in CMD terminal, MinGW shell that came with Git and in powershell, which tells me this has to be some simple thing, please fix. Why don't I just use MinGW that came with Git, because more things break there and there are more issues with that shell, would have been great if it worked.

- When you task switch over to a window, it does not switch to that application. Ok, this point is just me, it did take me some time to get used to the opposite when I moved to the Mac, and when you use something for 12-13 years, you kind of get the feeling that this just has to be the right way. Well, I do think this has to be the right way. My usual work environment is that I have two cygwin windows up and running, each taking half of the display, one is just for running the web application and the other one is for doing searches like ack, grep through the source code, is a window for git and committing and logging and plain just terminal for the source code. So when I switch over to Cygwin, I just get one window, and it takes quite a number of alt-tabbing to get the other one. This is not a fatal flaw, but it is a wet towel, extremely annyoing and there is no way to just jump to an application and all its windows.

- I know I said 3 items are the rule, well, 4 items will proof my point. No other filesystem support. Oh boy would this be fantastic. I kind of like ntfs, but that is surely just because I have used it for over 20 years. But we live in 2015. We should have ZFS or something like that. I love ZFS so much, I use it on linux, on FreeBSD, of course on Solaris but I don't use solaris today unfortunately because of lousy hardware support AND on my Mac. Yes, I have ZFS on my mac. ZFS is very cool. Just a quick thing. I can create a partition that is encrypted, a partition where the same byte is not written twice, so if you have 2 copies of a file, it is just stored once, I can set resource properties, like max size and many others, I can mirror filesystems and even have a filesystem as a blob that you can f.ex. export as an iSCSI disk. Of course not everything is supported by Windows, probably can't be, but having something like that would make windows awesome.

Ok, enough is enough. Why did I change the title of this post ? Why isn't it negative ?

Well, one word, babun (http://babun.github.io). Huh ? Babun ? What is that ? Well let me give you the short explanation. Babun is a clone/fork of Cygwin with everything you want and need. It has oh myzshell, ZSH as default, it has its own package system, just badun install this and that. It works great, it is very fast, and it works 95% as well as the Mac Terminal, why 95% ? Because it does not display prompts for node, mongo and redis-cli, why not ?

I have been playing with Raspberry PI2 quite a lot lately, been writing many sd card, info to sd cards. The Mac is just a a joke when it comes to writing images on things, even back when to a DVD disk. It is so slow. Just to give you an example, I wrote Raspbian debian for Raspberry onto an sd card with dd command and it took so long time that I went to the store and to the gym, trained for an hour and when I came home it still had not finished. Yes I know I write to /dev/rdisk... it is so slow. Just for the fun of it, I did the exact same with dd inside Badun and wrote to the f drive, it took just a few minutes, it was blazing fast. WHAT ?

The search feature on the new start button is just so fast, it is amazing. It can't send email or search for contacts, but you can search for files, applications, games, settings, properties and even just type in a help question which it will search the net for you. I don't have cortana. But this works very well.

Working on net drives. I have a home made SAN at home, plenty of disks and plenty of space. Working with the Mac on these drives is a real hit or miss. When the Mac works, it works great and over a gig ethernet, I get really great speeds, but change over to wifi and it will take you many minutes to get that disk back, open files lock down and things just go wrong, then things can and will get super slow and there is nothing you can do about it. Well working with samba shares on the windows machine is super great, switch to a wifi, no problems, loose all network for a moment, no problems, get the connection again and nothing has happened, now we are talking.

So, where do I stand ?

I own a Macbook, fully loaded, and due to strong dollar and weak norwegian krona, I can sell it 2 years later for more money than I paid for it, I paid 19.900 kr, it costs 27.000 today. Looking at the market of PC machines, their prices have risen quite dramatically as well. So as a replacement machine for my Macbook would set me back at least 25.000 kr ($2200-2400). That is an awful lot of money.

BUT

Yes, there is always a but, and here there are many butts.
My Macbook is as it is. It has 500 GB SSD disk and 16 GB memory. I can't change anything on it.

At work I have two machines. My Thinkpad test machine and my work machine a 13" i7 16GB 512GB SSD Macbook pro retina.

These two machines are almost identical when it comes to specs, except the Macbook has way better and higher res monitor. But as I said, I almost never work on that monitor, so it is not an issue.
They have the same amount of memory, disks and cpu.
But the Thinkpad feels much faster, way way faster. I also removed the DVD drive and set in a bracket and a 2TB disk, so I have 2 disks, do that on a Mac. I must agree that I probably can't expand the memory any more than 16GB, but I don't need to. When I am working on the Thinkpad, I am using like 2-3GB memory, thats it. I know very well that the memory free is a nonsense on the Mac as the operating system claims most memory to speed up work and caching, so you never really run out of memory.
My Thinkpad is much faster at everything than my 13" Macbook and the Thinkpad never just stops for no apparent reason. I have not tried any games on the Thinkpad, will do that over christmas probably, but running games on the 13" Macbook is not possible, they just run slowly and skip all frames, not possible.

Then there is one last thing. I have been in the Apple world for 12-13 years. I use iCloud, I use Messages and I use iTunes Music. I have to say that iTunes Music is worse than Spotify, way worse. It is slow to start, doesn't just download everything, so the next song sometimes needs to wait until your train is out of the tunnel, and even when playing your own music the network spinner is spinning constantly. Why do I then use it ? Well my kids are all into music and love listening to music, and I just pay like 150 kr a month for the whole family, instead of paying 99 kr per person, this adds up quickly. If spotify could match this, I would probably move over.
But on Windows 10, there is this thing called Groovy, yeah I know it is groovy, people stopped saying groovy in the early 1960s. But the client is quite good actually after a limited try. I just copied my iTunes library to a net drive and pointed Groovy to that directory and it not only scanned all my music, it added album covers, even on Icelandic songs, so I checked the groovy subscription service, it does have Icelandic music as well in there, though all I need is early Bubbi and Todmobile and I am happy.
I have not checked out prices or OSX clients, but I will also check that during christmas vacation. It seems on first check to contain the same music as Spotify and iTunes Music.
It all remains to be seen.

I am not quite jumping ship yet, but my attitude has become much more positive. I can see myself though using Windows 10 and doing my work on it. The 15" Macbook pro retina has though spoiled me so much. It has raised my standards to so much height that it is almost unthinkable to use anything else, and the battery life ? Ohhh the battery life is so good on both Macbooks and not so good on the Thinkpad, but is it good enough ? Well, we shall see. Over christmas I will travel to that icy rock in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, I will only bring with me the work 13" Macbook and my Thinkpad, no 15" retina machine. My work machine will remain private free, no private crap on it unless everything else fails, all private work and doodling and programming will happen on Thinkpad. This will do for 2 weeks and we shall see. I will checkout Groovy while I am at it and I will write a post about this.
This is a process, be patient.

Moving to windows 10 from OS X? Ongoing experiment

2015-10-22T11:20:00.001-07:00

I wrote earlier about the possibilities of using Windows instead of doing OS X. Well life got in the way of doing quick results, busy at work, busy with kids and family, but a few weeks later, here I am and I am bearing some results.

My premise of the experiment was to see if I could start to use Windows machine as my main machine instead of using a Mac. I work as a web developer, deep with Linux servers and most of the latest cool kids toys, Go, NodeJS, Python, NoSQL with Redis and MongoDB.

Well besides my day to day work, I have a side project that is starting to become huge, I wrote from scratch a travel management system for Discover.is, go have a look.

This system uses Python tornado web server, nginx, redis, mongo and a number of libraries. It is running on a Linux server. My main goal IS NOT TO get the site it self running on Windows in production, I will never do that (I know, never say never). My goal is to see if I can develop, debug and run the service on windows without using a virtual machine.

Well, today I am here to say, YES, yes you can do that. Of course you can't do this out of the box, but you can't do any windows development out of the box, it does not come with any such tools, you have to fetch them all by your self. This isn't a good thing.

So I fetched and installed Go, Python, Mongodb and Redis. I found easy way to get mongodb and redis to run as windows services, so I don't have to manually start them, but that would have been an option if needed. Once I had python installed, I installed pip, the python package manager and virtual env with setup tools, both python packages.

Well, the cmd.exe is quite bad, especially after being a unix geek for so long, copy paste among other things. I installed Cygwin and apt-cyg tool. Through Cygwin I installed Gnu C++, Git, automake, make and other developer tools and libraries, they even had libxml and libyaml. Cygwin has ssh, so setting up ssh was easy and I had Git up and running. Pretty much everything that is in the build-essentials on Ubuntu.

Little by little I had everything running, my website eventually started from inside Cygwin, and from Microsoft edge, http://localhost:8000 started. I had everything. It was easy to get my dummy data into mongo, edit my hosts file and I was running. This took me a few hours, all in all.

But an experiment is worth nothing if you can't reproduce it, right ?

In walks Thinkpad T430s. Clean installed Windows 10, patches. And then I re-do everything. Install Cygwin and check out my code, it works. I had done it now, under 1 hour.

Now, in theory, I can go to any electronic shop and buy some cheap HP machine and have it up and running for 1/4th the cost, at least of a high end Mac, and 1/2 of the price of a decent mac.

Things are not as good as they are on the Mac. Not as smooth. But I manage and learn new tricks. I can't put my finger on it fully and of course Windows machine will not work the same as a Mac, and I am not trying to. I am not remapping keys or changing layout. I would say things are close, 80% perhaps. Some things like moving and scaling windows and apps from keyboard are extremely cool and only possible on a Mac with 3rd party support.

Now the question is, is 80% good enough ? Will I get used to using windows and learn the quirks and ins and outs of it ? Yes I am sure I will.

Just today, I made some changes in the code, a pretty large change, tested, debugged and put into production, all from my windows machine. No matter if it is my game machine or if it is my Thinkpad.

This is pretty cool, yes it is.

Why am I doing this ?

I really don't have an answer. There are a few things that bother me with the Apple system. Their locked down computers, not the operating system, but the machines themselves.. I am fine with how locked down the iPad is, although it is infuriating to put a movie on it just before going on a road trip with the kids. I have no objections to the new MacBook with its 1 port. But I have an issue with changing a PRO machine into something that is locked down. I don't want to buy a machine for $2500 that I can't swap out the hard disk or extend the memory. I don't want to buy a new machine to get a 1TB ssd disk. And then there is the app fanboyism. That someone spends a year doing the design of a note taking app and twitter clients, just the look and comparing all apps to it. It doesn't take much to write a twitter client, it is actually easy, so how can you spend a year doing the client ?

And the client is so slow, speed and usefulness is not valued, just looks and animations. I think that is just so wrong. Looking at the Mac App store, you see plenty of 0 (zero) star reviews that state though the app is great, it just looks bad. That's just stupid. Of course I am not advocating that an app should have pink background and cyan color letters, it should look good, but it should be speedy. We have computers that are million times faster than the faster machines in 2000 and they made Jurassic park and Terminator 2 back then on those machines. Things should be fast and not crash because a bitmap background is using megabytes of memory. Everyone that disagrees with it gets flogged. There are sites on the network where "ugly" apps are put up and shamed, they get thousands of users and twitter posts. That is just bullying, most of these apps are made by first time programmers and teenagers.

There is no one there saying, this is how you should do this, there is no one there to assist. No, no one has shamed me, yet. I think Apple is going in the wrong direction with the OS X and Mac Pro machines, (Macpro and MacBook Pro). Let the pro people tinker with their machines. I can put 3 hard disks inside a normal Thinkpad. When you need to do it, you know why. When you buy a machine for your wife with 8 MB memory and find out that you really wanted 16GB, you can't do it yourself you have to sell the machine and buy a new one, on a thinkpad you can.
My Game machine has 8 disks in it, yes I use them all, because I can. I can't have a Mac pro machine that I can do this with.

iPhone 6+ battery woes and the internet is wrong

2015-04-07T06:46:00.001-07:00

A little break in my testing to see if I can become a Windows user after 12 years being a Mac user and for the whole time being almost Windows free, meaning, I never turned on a windows machine I did not want to, and mostly to play games, though I did keep up.

More on that later.

On the iPhone, you can go into Settings -> Usage -> Battery Usage and you see how long you have used your phone and how long it has been idle. Normal case is probably 4-5 hours usage and 13-15 hours idle.

Now for the last few months I have been almost equal, that is my phone usage has been almost the same as the idle use. So on the iPhone 6+ with its extensive extra battery size, I was almost out of juice when I went to bed, if this had been the case with iPhone 5s, I would have been out of juice 3-4 o'clock.

What did this mean ? This meant my phone was being used constantly even though I wasn't using it. Being an experienced computer user, I went in to investigate, but forgot to take screenshots, damn. I quickly saw that the battery shamer, where you have a list of apps and how much battery they were using was wrong. It listed Facebook as the main culprit with sometimes 50-60% battery usage.

When I plugged in the phone and launched Xcode and Instruments, I could see that Springboard and Backboard had high cpu usage, especially Backboard. But why ?

Now I entered a weeks worth of search engine searching. I went everywhere and back. I followed every advice. I removed quite a lot of apps, turned off location, background and other settings, and things seemed to become worse.

Then I thought to myself, hey, I have been using this image on the phone since I purchased my iPhone 3 back when it came out, and just updated it. So in iTunes, I decided to set up my device as new device. Completely clean, I thought. I only installed Overcast, no other 3rd party app, no twitter, no facebook. Did this solve my issue ? Nope. My phone was out of battery by supper and running on fumes unless I received a few emails, it would die.

Even turning on Airplane mode did nothing. Sometimes the battery would drop 1% every 10 seconds, which means you watched your phone drain. There was only iCloud and Overcast (5-6 podcast I monitor).

I turned off iCloud, which meant I had a feature phone with a podcast app, not even music or books were synced. NOTHING.

I reset the phone a few times to factory settings, did restore, did setup a new device, even set it up with my wife's settings, no luck.

I sent the phone in for a repair. This would not be the first iPhone I had with a faulty battery, those things happen. But that time when my iPhone 5 (not s) had a faulty battery, it was different. It just jumped from 80% battery down to 10% just like that, nothing in between, and the 10% did not last at all. Now my iPhone 6+ just drained right in front of me.

I got it back from repair saying there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

I wasn't happy. I was even so unhappy with this, I think my "moving to windows" started around that time, and that is being unhappy.

Well, at least I knew this wasn't the hardware, and that is something. I knew this wasn't Safari or Facebook as I did not turn those apps on once in my day test.

Then I decided to test one thing, as a last resort, and if it did not work, I would go out and purchase Windows Lumia 930 phone. Those were the stakes. During the repair period, I used my iPhone 5, not the 5s as that is my wife's phone now. To my complete surprise, the 5 worked fantastically well. The battery worked all day and then some, it was quick, and in short, it was excellent, but too small. I have gotten used to iPhone 6+.

The final straw was logging into my apple developer account and fetching a new iPhone image completely. I manually forced the image onto my phone, setup my phone as a new device, and just like that, around supper time, my phone has 60-70% battery left, sometimes even more.

Migrate from Mac to Windows ?

2015-03-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

Migrate to Windows ? Did I eat something ? Why go against the current ?

;tldr Begin

I am considering, for real, moving over to Windows from Mac. I have been an avid OSX user since 2003 and even made good living off writing iOS software. Now since I mainly do Web development. Is it possible ? Can you use windows even though you are not doing any Windows work ? (not dotNET programming or java).

;tldr End.

I searched long and hard for blog posts about this subject, and I did not find any except for one guy who is a photographer. All developers were running as fast as they can towards a new Mac, very few were moving full time to Linux. I am a huge fan of Linux. I have been using Linux in one form or another since well before version 1.0 came out. In 1999 I moved away from all products coming from Redmond. Before that I was a Delphi programmer and Windows System Administrator for a few years. In 2000 I was a full time Linux system administrator and stayed there until 2007. I am a RHCE (Redhat certified engineer). I purchased a Mac, Powerbook 17" in 2003, gave up on Windows XP. I had given up on getting Linux on the desktop, even though every year since 2001 to 2010 was the year Linux takes over the desktop, and it never did. I started learning some Cocoa programming, and development was fun again. In 2007 the iPhone came out and changed everything.

Now, in 2015, I have been doing Web development as full time employment for a few years. iOS development became a bit tired, as the only thing I was doing was fetching and posting JSON data on a webserver and trying to make everything look good. After more than 20 apps that are almost identical, I decided to try web development for full time. My tools include Python Tornado, Redis, MongoDB, Javascript and such tools, lately I have been doing most new programming in GO. So, non Mac development.

So after I purchased a computer for 23.000 nokr (Norwegian kroner) (about $2.800), and using ViM as an editor, python, GO and mongo for over a year, not even starting Xcode twice in a year, it made me think. It is pretty expensive to have a computer for 2 years that basically cost you 1.000 nok ($120) every month to own, then go through the process of selling it and then paying a huge sum to get a new computer. Since 2003, I had only owned 17" Powerbook/Macbook pro. I also looked at some of the other machines that could have 2 hard disks, higher res screens, more ports with a bit of an envy. When Apple stopped making the 17", I had to get the 15" retina one. Of course I really like the machine, but the retina screen is almost never used as I have the machine either hooked up to 2 crappy monitors or a 27" cinema display. The 512 GB disk gets full very quickly. The hardware is much more limited now and the retina screen is not a selling point, at all. It is nice, but thats about it.

And I use almost no Mac software. I stay in the terminal all day, with ViM, git and other command line tools. So I started thinking about cheaper solutions.

My current work gave me a Thinkpad, T430s when I started. I put it in a drawer and got permission to use my Mac at work. But a few months ago, I stopped carrying the Mac and started using the Thinkpad with Linux installed. Using Linux on the desktop is not a good experience, and I started using i3 as a windows manager, it is quite good. The machine it self is also quite a lot worse machine than my Mac, but it is quite usable, meaning, I can do my job very well on it, and it does not hold me back, really. There are things I am much quicker at on my Mac, but all in all, it works. My biggest grieve is Linux. Of course my web app runs on linux, and I use virtual machines and so forth. That got me thinking. Could I migrate over to Windows ?

In short, yes, yes I can.

I have not really used Windows since 1999. I had begrudgingly used Windows through the years, but not much.

So, I will be posting a few more posts, looking into if it is possible to make a Windows machine as good or even better development machine than a Mac. It has to be at least as good for me to even consider it.

Microsoft Surface RT and my family

2015-03-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

I love my Surface RT most of all my computers and gadgets.

My Surface does everything I want from a tablet and much more. I have full access to the file system, I can mount network drives, I can use a file in one program, and then finish it in another. There is no limit on the machine except for one very brain dead lock that all apps must come from the Microsoft Store. But the same lock and many more are on the Android and iPad. The screen on the Surface is awesome. reading books, watching videos, doing work over ssh, email and web browsing is fantastic. And with the split screen function it becomes totally the best tablet on the market. Just think having Skype or a music player using 1/3 of the screen and your browser or other work uses 2/3. As the screen is quite wide, this works spectacularly well. The machine is actually quite fast. It does everything I want it to do and does it well. And it also has some excellent games. Games like Asphalt and others. Just plug in a USB controller using straight up standard USB port, and it just works. WHo would have thought that Microsoft obeyed and used standards ?

The Netflix client is awesome and really shows why Netflix is such a success.

All in all, my gateway into thinking about Windows, something I have disliked since Windows 2000, is a machine I purchased just because I was curious, and got it very cheap as a B product.

I have two daughters, aged 10 and 8 (this year). My wife and I decided to buy them their first laptops. I ended up getting Thinkpads X201 for very little money. They were good, fast and had a future, unlike my Surface. Had the surface had a solid future, my daughters would have gotten them. I installed Windows 8.1 on these machines, and put on the built in family plan and parental protection, and it works, and works great.

They can use all my software I have bought on the MS Store, I also get a report sent to my email about their usage without snooping. They also know I get this report. This just worked so well. I know the Mac has a family share, but they just recently started offering it and it isn't as solid.

Then at the same time, cracks in my apple usage started to appear. My wife's laptop hard disk is full, and it is full of family pictures, so no, delete is not an option. 256 GB disk wasn't enough. My own 512GB disk is filling up quite fast. And there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to increase this. My work computer, the thinkpad T430s has no such problems. Replacing the disk in it is just 1 screw, pop out and pop a new one in. Adding memory is just as easy. And now here comes the kicker. By popping out the DVD drive with a click of a button, I can put in a second disk, any disk on the market. You can get 1-2 TB disk, or an SSD disk. And better yet, you can add a card in it with an mSATA disk. So you can have 3 disks, and you can get these extensions from anywhere.

So, Windows is kind of winning me over. They (Microsoft) are really trying and running on all cylinders. I think Windows 8 is great, and windows 10 will be even better,

Am I loosing it ?

Once in a while technology makes your life easier

2014-05-23T01:13:00.000-07:00

Once in a while you get a moment that you wish you could tell everyone, but a spouse and friends are not computer fans at all. So you need to tell someone. Now I just had my best GIT moment ever. Don't get me wrong, GIT saves my ass many times, even many times per day. I would never leave home without it, never ever do any work without it. I love Fossil also, the problem with fossil is that I don't use it at work, and if you don't use it you forget how it works. It is fantastic.

But here is my email to a friend of mine.

Hi friend,

As I have told you earlier, I made this site, www.discover.is, the cms, admin, booking, visa billing, voucher handling and email sending just to name a few items I had to do. I also don't use any frameworks besides Tornado and jQuery. Just bare metal, python and jquery, and the site is fast, ridiculously fast.

But I am not bragging here. I am telling you, if you use GIT, it will save your behind if you aren't already using it.

For me, the master branch is release branch. But I am lazy and small typos and small css editing happen on master. But like when I add a new template for email sending, I use a branch called f.ex. emails.

I start by checking out that branch, I merge master into it. Start coding, and once I am done, and that includes testing, I checkout master and merge emails into master, then run my distribute.sh script.

Lately I have been finding myself fighting my database, couchdb. It is a wonderful nosql database, but it is much more oriented towards documents and not really relational data. I was pretty happy with myself to have my own database layer, that is, everything that happens on the database is it's own class. If I want to get a list of products, I run a command called "self.db.get_products()", if I want to save a product, I do "self.db.save_product(product)". So I thought to myself, this will be easy as I only have to rewrite the database layer. Baahhh, wrong. The database layer is like 1000 lines. If I was changing from mySQL to PostgreSQL or even Oracle, this would have been a walk in the park, only connection part would have to be rewritten, and perhaps a small number of queries would need a little love. Having a nosql database, rewrite the whole stuff.

I am using tornado, a python system that is asynchronous, it pretty much means, it is fast and never hangs up. Like in php, the whole website stops loading while you fetch data from mysql, but it doesn't hurt since you have 30 copies of the web site running. But the hurt comes when you have over 100-200 users at the same time, you need to have loads and loads of threads, which eat memory and slows the whole system down. That is why NodeJS and Tornado are among these new types of servers gaining popularity. As long as you never ever write a blocking code, you can serve endless amounts of users on just 1-2 processes. If you use blocking code you might use 1 server per cpu core.

Anyway. There isn't any asynchronous driver for any SQL based database. You could take the chance that mysql is always very fast, and just use it anyway, the blocking is then only a few milliseconds. As for most sites, this is all very well and good.

But of course I can't take the wide and open street of common sense. I decided on another nosql database, MongoDB.

Now as I am rewriting everything, I figure out new cool stuff, I rewrite more and more because mongo is much better at querying data. But I am doing everything I am doing on a branch called mongodb.

While I am working on the code, the client (discover) calls and tells me he has hired SEO specialists and they have a lot of small things I need to fix on the site.

So, now, I don't loose any work. I just commit my changes. I checkout master. I make a new branch called seo. I do all the changes they ask for. And I actually found a bug, where I was showing search results inside a div, but the problem was the div wasn't there. So I fix that huge bug also. Test the code and voila. I checkout master, merge seo into it. I then distribute the code, restart the server and all is well.

Now I think to myself. If I checkout the mongo branch, and merge master into it, everything will turn to shit and I need to do a lot of fixes since I was fixing like hundreds of lines, and deleted probably more than a few.

But of course I knew the answer. If all hell breaks loose, I can always just revert. No problems. So I do the 'git merge master' and it starts churning, and there were 0 problems. All went great. I did not loose any work, and actually fixed a bug I didn't know of, and all changes are now in one place. I can't wait to merge the mongodb into master. It is just a few days off, but of course normal life and socialising has its toll on productivity.

I thought I should send this to you as a real life happy story about using git in no advanced way, just predictable way, and how it not only saved my day, it made my dev life easier. I don't recommend just using bare bones jQuery, it is a lot more work, you need to keep up with "on" and "off" events and a bunch of BS, which ember.js does for you.

Links :

http://git-scm.com

http://www.mongodb.com

http://couchdb.apache.org

http://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/

http://nodejs.org

7 days turned to 20 days

2013-04-05T01:48:00.000-07:00

This is my 2nd post and my last post on the issue, for now. Please read this first

http://traustithor.blogspot.no/2013/03/android-for-7-days.html

For those that don't want to read anything :

All in all, by a small margin, I am back using iOS as my day to day device, but I will not put the Nexus into a drawer or try to pimp it to friends or not even to my wife. I will keep it, and will test it periodically when there are updates to Android, and who knows, I might not go back next time...

tl;dr

I used Android on the LG Nexus 4 for almost 3 weeks when I only set out to use it for 1 week. I liked it, I liked it a lot. The device itself is as close to perfect as you can get. I have heard people talk about very bad battery life but that was just not the case. I never ran out of battery, but I always had to charge it when I slept, which is similar to the iPhone, although the iPhone could run for almost full 2 days. The 16 GB storage is a shame for such a device. It is way to small. With a screen like the Nexus has, you want to watch videos, video podcasts, screencasts and so forth. But in order to do that, you have to have at least 32GB, and this is why I have 64GB iPhone 5, but I doubt I would buy a 128GB model if it became available. You could add that I would like to have a LTE connection on the phone but the case is moot as LTE in Norway are like trolls, people say they have seen one, but no one can offer any proof of its existence :) It is here, but you have to be in the right spot and not move an inch. Also people bitch about the camera being bad. I don't know if it is just me, but after digging through the phone and finding well hidden camera settings, my pictures became crisp and full of nice details, the images on the Nexus were very good, and comparable to Nokia Lumia 920, although in darker environments the Nokia beat it hands down, no contest, but in normal lighting, they were very good. The issue I think is that the default settings are all low quality and changing that wasn't obvious, and no camera phone is as good as the iPhone 5, it is the king of the hill.

There are a few things I didn't like, but they were all Android issues. Although it seems extremely trivial, having a browse to top is remarkably useful and missing from Android. On iOS you can click on the top of the screen and it will whisk you away to the top of twitter/facebook/intstragram or a browser to name a few. Using the volume buttons to go page up and down is just genius I have no objections to physical buttons as long as they serve a purpose. On my older Android phone, there was a search button, I would have like to have one physical search button on the device. The facebook client was just extremely awful. Doing edits was just plain out horrible. When you type in a text, and you need to fix one letter f.ex. you typed s instead of a, it is horrible on Android, and on the Facebook client, it was just futile attempt and would hang the phone completely at random intervals, so it would actually save you time just to go back and type everything in again.

Unlike Andy Ihnatko, I did not see any improvement on the keyboard of Android or iPhone, and if anything the iOS keyboard was better. I didn't get used to the swipe typing, but the suggestion of words was very good on android. I must say that I have turned off any autocorrect on both phones as it was never ever helpful. Android did not allow me to type in all Icelandic characters which is a big failure. But I am sure my hands are much smaller than Andy's.

But one of the biggest failures must be that because there are no physical buttons, the phone will display buttons at the bottom of the screen to do away with keyboard, menu and search. For most apps this works as expected but it is quite easy to put your finger on it when typing f.ex.a space or a dot (.), but when playing games, this is just ridiculous. The buttons become stuck in ON state and when doing games that have touch on the right side, like all driving games, it becomes way to easy to accidentally click on the home button and voila, you are no longer driving at 200 mph but looking at your home screen and your game is lost, and why does the phone only support landscape left ?

Games like Angry birds was just great, although the game itself looked very good, all backdrops were in excellent quality, all controls and the birds themselves, became quite tiny, it didn't look good. EA Need for speed games were great, except for games that were more than 1 year old, they looked fuzzy, out of focus. Not grainy as expected, but all smeared, like the screen was very dirty.

There were excellent apps on Android. Kindle app for one was fantastic, same with Audible app. Both apps allow you to search and purchase items directly which is just great and one of the biggest failures of Apple to block that. I got a much better podcast app than the awful podcast app on the iOS. I got pretty good ebook reader. Putting stuff on the phone was very easy, although I needed to use some Android file transfer app since I use a Mac, it wasn't bad, and a way I prefer greatly above iTunes sync everything, which always ends up taking huge amount of time. On Android I could add that 1 song, that 1 podcast or that 1 video as easy as drinking water in less than 5 minutes before leaving the house, but when I need to have that file on an iPhone, it always ends up re-syncing my phone, taking a backup, refusing to move certain files, and picking those files from what looks like a webform is so slow that it is almost useless. Well I guess I have issues with iTunes after all :)

All in all, at the end of the day, I am back on iOS. But not because it is way better, but only because it is marginally better. I would probably rate iOS at 85% perfect, but Android only at 65-70%. The devices would have to score even, at 95% each, but because of the storage, it lowers the ratings of the Nexus, down 10% at least. Of course keep in mind that these numbers are made up here on the spot while I typed them, but I am back using iOS because it gives me less grief. If iOS 7 isn't something completely new, earth shattering new, when it comes out, and Android 5 will most likely fix all the issues I have with it, then there is very little keeping me from moving over to Android full time, and being an iOS developer, this isn't just saying.

iOS 7 must become better. Larger screen than iPhone 5 is a must! It is much better having larger screen than I would have thought. I do expect iOS 7 to come with full bindings support and a few more cool things like that, but Android is getting so close to iOS that it is scary.

On a lighter note, I think Samsung royally screwed up with Galaxy IV, and that it isn't better than Galaxy III, not in any way. They still haven't released Android 4.2.2 which I had on day 1 of the Nexus, and was one of the big reasons to buy the Nexus above Galaxy III, phone companies just don't understand the need for updates.

Android for 7 days

2013-03-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

After Andy Ihnatko decided that the iPhone 4s didn't do enough for him, I started thinking which usually ends up making a dumb decision. He choose the Samsung Galaxy III, I ended up picking the LG Nexus 4, and for a very good reason.

Because I have tried before.

guist of this is : Andy Ihnatko bought an android phone. I thought they were awful, but he triggered a curiosity in me, I bought one, and I totally love this phone. I must go see a doctor.

tl;dr
A few years ago, I decided to test Android and instead of just buying some cheap phone, I laboured over this and ended up buying HTC Desire, back then a top of the line model (a few days later the Desire HD came). I hated it. The build quality was good, but everything the phone did, it did it badly. The battery didn't live through the day, and usually gave up at around 5, the time I came home from work. Everything onscreen was ugly, dark and hard to read. There was a constant battle with storage, my mail was filling up the onboard memory and I could not move my email to the sd card, I could move a few apps to the sd card but not enough, and the card kept unmounting itself for no apparent reason, and the upgrades, or the lack of them was infuriating to say the least. My phone got 1 update after I bought it, a point release which didn't do anything, and thats where it stayed. I felt betrayed, cheated, left out. But when I looked around, this was the case with every other Android phone out there, every single one.

After less than a week the phone went into a drawer for over a year and got used once in a while as a guest phone for guests who visited me from iceland, so when they got lost in oslo, they didn't have to call me using very expensive roaming.

I even tried to get my wife to use the phone, it was expensive and I was frustrated that this toy wasn't usable. My wife hated it even more than I did and didn't use it.

Then ca last christmas, I rooted the phone and installed Cyanogenmod (hope I typed it correctly), since I had to use the phone as a second phone on a trip to Iceland. I don't want to pay ridiculous roaming charges. And it became a totally new phone. It was actually a useful device. Battery life was good and everything about it was good, not iPhone quality, but a good. On that trip, I almost bought the Samsung Nexus phone and was tempted to buy Samsung Galaxy III, but decided against it, Android wasn't good.

Ever since, I have been 100% iOS, and pretty much ever since the iPhone 3G came out, I have been using an iPhone.

BUT, Andy Ihnatko isn't just any man, not only is he funny, he actually makes makes mutton chops look good and he is like the poster boy for apple products, he likes apple products and he knows them. So why did he change ? Before I even read his articles (linked below), I decided that I should try to find out why. Because Android wasn't any good after all, right ? Well, I decided to purchase the 5" Sony xperia Z, but once I came to the store I remembered one huge thing. I LIVED IN NORWAY, and that meant I would have to wait at least 1 month before a device becomes available after it is introduced, even longer. Well, I then thought, what about the Samsung Galaxy III phone. Nah, it wasn't totally updated, it was old, it was plasticky cheap. Then my eyes caught on a black slick device with a very bad name it seemed, on closer inspection the name the store called the phone was just weird, they called it LG E960. It did not ring any bells for me, I had never heard of that device. So I looked at it and realised this was the LG Google Nexus 4, which is a much better name. The phone looked great, awesome even. On just flicking the screen, testing web browsing and such, it surprised me, it was so fast at doing everything, and it was super smooth. All animations, scrolling and zooming was super smooth and fast, totally Apple quality, even better. On closer inspection, the phone was much cheaper than the Galaxy III, same screen size and a little higher resolution, and Quad 1.5 GHz processor, 2GB internal memory and although it only has 16 GB storage, not expandable (common google), I bought it.

Excited like a 6 year old with a new toy, I sat in my living room, opened the box, which didn't contain much, a pamphlet, charger and a phone. No stickers, no headphones, nothing (again, common google, no headphones ? really). Well I turned on the device, the colors were crisp, the phone booted quickly, asked me for my google account, I enter it, and that was it. The phone was usable, all my contacts where there, my gmail account, gtalk and more. Less than 2 minutes after unpacking, I was using the device. WHAT ? Thats unthinkable :) My kindle app on the Android allows me to purchase books, fantastic stuff. Audible app also allows direct purchases. The podcast app actually updates itself. This is just scary.

Went to the Play! store, got all my previously bought apps, added a few others for ebook reader, podcasts and such. A few hours later, I had spent a few hundred kroner on the store. Got Most Wanted and few more games.

This device behaves great. This device is awesome. After 3 days now, I haven't touched my iPhone 5, not even looked at it. WHAT ? This device has the promise to be updated for a few years, since it gets its updates directly from Google. This device lets me run Commodore 64 games, and even program in C64 basic on it. I have other emulators as well, which work fantastically. Even though the battery says it has 15% left and is showing red by the end of the day, it doesn't just go empty all of the sudden, it actually works this way, and continues on the slow decline to 0%, which it hasn't done once. The build quality on this device is totally Apple quality. It doesn't feel cheap like the Galaxy III. I wonder if I will switch back by the end of my 7 day trial. It sure doesn't look like it. But this might totally be this new thing, new toy factor. Lets see if I get tired of it.

Now, I have read all of Andy's articles, and heard his explanation on Macbreak Weekly. I don't envy him. He actually gets hate messages, common people!!, this is a phone. My taking of his reasons for the switch is that he wanted a bigger screen, and I agree, having a bigger screen is actually great. He talks about the onscreen keyboard being better, I don't know about that, could be because I am writing not only english, but norwegian and Icelandic as well, so that might be why I don't think the keyboard is much better. But then we start to have different opinions. The two above reasons are why he is switching, screen size and keyboard. He says, he is willing to use apps that are not the quality of iPhone apps. I would not settle like that. Either the apps are just as good or better. So far, I would say that the apps and games I use are just as good as the iPhone apps. Of course I still haven't got replacements for all the apps I use, but I am getting there.

I think Andy made a mistake by picking the Samsung Galaxy III phone. It is more than one year old, Samsung Galaxy IV (4) is around the corner so future operating system updates are questionable. He bought an inferior phone, a good phone for sure, but inferior to the Sony Z and the Nexus 4.

I am actually looking forward for the next Macbreak weekly, for an updated view on him using the Android. As one reporter said, don't remember who, it is scary how Google is getting to do Apple quality products and Apple failing to do Google quality web services.

Links :

The first article :
http://www.macworld.com/article/2030042/why-i-switched-from-iphone-to-android.html
Second :
http://www.macworld.com/article/2030116/customize-and-collaborate-why-i-switched-from-iphone-to-android-part-2.html
Third :
http://www.macworld.com/article/2030168/pros-and-cons-why-i-switched-from-iphone-to-android-part-3.html

And Macbreak weekly.
http://twit.tv/show/macbreak-weekly/340

The Nexus 4 : http://www.google.com/nexus/4/

Living off ad revenue

2013-01-21T05:44:00.001-08:00

I have been testing ad sense from google. The way I do it is to provide a service that I myself have actually needed and was unable to find. Let me explain. If anyone knows of a better paying ad service, please leave a comment, but I don't want any blinking banner or crap ware.

My number 1 service is mergepdfs.com, which as the domain states, merges pdf files. Every month I need to give my accountant a bunch of receipts which I need to scan and then send her, by using mergepdfs I am able to upload a bunch of files, any number, and download a single file, which I then send to her. For me, I actually love my own service, I really do. I needed to use such a service and I googled it, like everything else I need and I found quite a few but most of them wanted me to pay for it, others were useless in the sense they were free for small files, but had an extremely difficult to use payment system for larger files. So I built my own, and it is free, completely free as it costs you no money and don't upsell anything. I could give you lower quality for free, but I don't.

This service has had thousands of people to check it out with many hundreds who actually use it. According to Google analytics, almost 50% of visits are recurring, which means people use the service again and again. I am happy.

But can you live off ad revenue with hundreds of active users every month, in short NO. So far, over 6 months I have made something less than $10. But this is one such thing where waiting and improving the service will benefit me. I don't think I can ever live off this, but it would be cool to get at least enough to purchase books from amazon. But hey, the service is fast, easy and free and will continue to be so.

Enjoy.

My other service is watermarkpdf.com which as the name implies adds watermarks on every page you upload. I made this service just for fun. This service is also free.

Use it, enjoy it.

Both services are made with Play! Framework and uses JQuery with backbone.js. All in all, pretty cool services, which I had fun making. I learnt a lot and totally fell for Backbone.js library. It is just so cool.
More on that later.

Why I can't quit stack overflow

2013-01-15T02:37:00.000-08:00

I think stack overflow website has done more good than any other website out there, including facebook and anything google has done (the jury is still out on Wikipedia).

It has collected incredible amount of knowledge which is distributed for free, completely free, you don't even have to login and they play search engines in such a way that any problem I have with any programming project, the search gives me the answer on stack overflow.

It is pretty addictive to answer questions and watch as the points roll in, but it is also extremely demoralising to be awarded a negative point, which means you answer a question which someone, anonymous, don't like or agree with, he gives you negative points, so it actually hurts your high, and has damaging effects, no matter if your answer is actually correct.

I answered one question about which books and information someone should read to get better at Core Data. I listed the books that helped me, with Amazon links to follow, and I used amazon link shortener because amazon links are very long and very ugly. The results were that I raked in negative points and lost the important points that at the time pushed me above the very much sought after 1.000 points and left me at 997 points, like it was mocking me.

This has happened a few times and every time I vouch to quit answering questions on Stack overflow only to see a question lingering to which I know the answer and I say to myself, oh man, Stack overflow is actually so good, it is worth while even if you get punched in the stomach a few times, here and there.

I do understand why you could get negative points, lets say there is a C# question, and I would chime in and tell the person this problem did not exist in C++, which is totally trolling and unhelpful.

I suggest here inside my /dev/null nothingness, my empty wasteland of blog that if you vote down a question so that it gets a negative rating that you have to write a comment on why you did such heinous act, it could even be anonymous to the victim, but then the victim could fix the issue you have or even delete the post. You should at least know why your answer was so bad that it required you to be beaten up, why your score high was cut short and you would get a way to appeal this and the voter who voted you down would be forced to justify his deeds. You are not required to do so if you vote down, only when you vote down below zero.

www.stackoverflow.com

Dropbox

2013-01-10T05:16:00.002-08:00

I was going to name this why I left dropbox but the title did not tell the truth, I did not leave dropbox, they lost my account and don't answer support emails.

I have been a user of dropbox and a cheerleader for the service for many years, they truly do deliver a fantastic service. I got so many users to use them that I had many extra gigabytes of storage added as a thank you. Then without a notice, puff, my account wasn't available and when I tried to log in and change my password, the answer was simple, no such account. Their support site almost requires you to log in only mention it in a passing that

For me making my own dropbox or dropler service isn't that hard, and I am contemplating on doing so, but this teaches me a lesson, not to become dependant on 3rd party solutions. The worst of it is that dropbox actually is great.

I have now installed skydive from Microsoft, got 25 GB free space, works the same way and lets face it, Microsoft is not going to go bankrupt or end up being bought. They might though kill the service, but hey, they will not close my account without closing everyone else down as well.

Learning new skills

2012-08-21T06:24:00.004-07:00

I got my first computer when I was 12, that was a mind whopping 26 years ago. This was a love at first sight, although I wanted a completely different computer than my parents would allow. I got an Apple //c computer, with practically no games available as these computers were mostly used in academia and business. I did get a few games though, but this wasn't a Commodore 64.

I am glad now that I got an Apple instead of Commodore 64. For one, I could easily write both uppercase and lowercase letters at the same time, I had 80x25 lines of text. I could very easily write all my school projects in Apple Works and Apple Writer and print them out. I had Print Shop by Brøderbund software, so I could do banners. I had a printer even. But first and foremost, I got a world class Basic programming language, for free, completely free. It was just there. Boot from any floppy and you had Basic. You had to list files on that disk, you had to do that in Basic. I never knew this was Microsoft basic until much later. But since you don't have many games, you play with the computer in order to play with the computer, that is become a computer a nerd.

I got pretty good by myself, and taught myself to program, when I was 12, completely by myself.

Ever since that time, I keep up. I am constantly learning new things and getting better. Even as I am closing in the dreaded four o (40), I still am learning new things all the time.

Best way in my mind to learn something new is to make something. Now, I don't have many ideas, but there is usually always something, something you yourself need. A few years back, I searched for a way to merge a few pdf documents. The government in Iceland gives out a paper, both old fashioned and in pdf with all legal things. Companies foreclosures, bankruptcies, legal agreements and such boring stuff, boring for most, but it can be fun reading this. Problem, the documents are quite small, and come out quite frequently, sometimes 2-3 times a week. But when you want to search these documents you could not (this was before Spotlight and Windows Search got good). So to merge all these documents was a pain.

So when I decided to learn Play framework and learn Javascript, I thought, why not make this into a web service, free with ads on the page. So I made mergepdfs.com, with asynchronous uploads, which means, just drop a file into the page, and it gets uploaded given it has the correct meta tags. Then just click on 1 button and it would download the results automatically. Sounds simple, well not that much. But I did make it, and with a Jquery plugin for file uploads, I did make it. I am quite proud of this site.

This is a totally free service, meaning you make your merged document for $0. There are no up sells, no limitations. I am happy with it, and will be releasing a new version real soon, with some more Jquery stuff. Technologies used, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Jquery, blueimp file upload,Play Framework and everything runs on a powerful Intel i5 Linux box.

I just can't explain it but single page web apps, are super cool.

Links :

https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload

http://www.playframework.org

http://backbonejs.org

http://underscorejs.org

http://jquery.com

and finally the website itself :

http://www.mergepdfs.com

Eating crows

2012-08-21T05:56:00.000-07:00

When you have to take back things you have said, things you thought and change your way of thinking completely, it is sometimes called eating Crows, like the bird, which no one eats, and no one would eat, guess it is called that since doing so would be considered very hard.

I have been working hard on studying Javascript. For some time and since I come from mostly C based languages like C, Objective C, Perl, PHP and so forth with Ruby added on top, it has been harder than I thought. Using anonymous functions, or functions without names does take some time getting used to. But this is all going well now, and I keep getting better.

Just for fun, I decided to have a look at Java again. Perhaps it is wrong to say again since I have not looked at Java since ca 1997-8 or something like that, and I never used it even then. It failed so miserably in creating desktop applications that I did not use it.

I have been meaning to use it much more, but there have always been much better solutions. First it was PHP, then Cake PHP which lead me to use Ruby on Rails, which I am a huge fan of. I though it would take me a long time to learn Ruby, but it only took a few hours until I was getting there and less than 2 days later I had re-made my family website in Ruby on Rails, from Cake PHP.

Now when I changed jobs last time, I found that they use something called Play framework for everything they did. My boss at the time loved it so much that I felt I just had to have a look. But back in my head I just thought about the "other" java web frameworks, even other Java rails clones with their awful xml config files for everything. Not my cup of tea, thank you very much. But my boss was such a huge fan that I gave him the benefit and installed it.

The installation was so simple. The Eclipse installation was a horror, install this, add that, update this, but I got that over. But every time I clicked on a css file, or something that wasn't Java, Eclipse opened up an external application to view that file. I did not like that, and it was just silly. It should work the other way around, if I really want to edit a file in Coda, I should ask Eclipse to do that. But I did remember that SUN, my former employer had bought or made an editor called Netbeans. So I gave it a try. It was not love at first sight. I thought it didn't redraw itself correctly, but it worked, and gave me great code complete in Java, which I needed. Then once I checked in my code in Git I figured out what the redraw issue was, it was showing me unchecked code. And after working for a few hours in Netbeans I liked it a lot.

But as for Play Framework, I was just blown away. No one complains about Java speed in a server level, but this was just mind blowing. Play framework was so fast and used very little resources. I had to swallow quite a lot in the first day. Then for the next few days I learnt a lot more. Now I am writing all my web code using Play framework, never looking back. I no longer hate Java, it is very good. Now I have a few websites up and running, mostly just to learn. I will write more about them in other posts.

Links :

http://www.playframework.org
http://jquery.com
http://cakephp.org
http://rubyonrails.org