Head On

Problems With VirtualBox When Regenerating Box With Veewee

2012-03-28T00:00:00-07:00

We’re experimenting using veewee to create our vagrant boxes. However, when we tried to regenerate them, the disk was never attached and the installation halted.

We tried deleting the whole VM directory to no avail, the disk still was never mounted. It was only after trying to mount it manually in the VirtualBox GUI that we saw that VirtualBox keeps a sort of registry of disks.

To solve the problem – open the Virtual Media Manager, remove the old disk and restart the veewee install process.

Speaking at DevLin2012

2012-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

I will give my talk on “Design for Replaceability – Architecture For An Agile Lifestyle” at DevLin2012 Thursday next week. I was quite happy how the talk was received at JFokus, and will incorporate some of the great feedback I got. This time I will only have 25 minutes though, so I will either speak very fast or cut out some slides.

I had a great time at DevLin last year and l reallly look forward to this years conference.

How To Fix Vagrant Up Hanging

2012-01-21T00:00:00-08:00

Following along the Deploying Rails book, I stumbled immediately when vagrant up hung showing;

Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.

even though the server in fact had booted ok.

I found a solution in the mailing list from a Stefano Pallica:

Boot in GUI mode:

config.vm.boot_mode = :gui

Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following before exit 0:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Worked for me.

Netcfg And USB Tethering

2012-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

In order to use netcfg for USB tethering, just configure it as a regular ethernet connection. The following worked for me, remember to modprobe usbnet.

CONNECTION='ethernet'
DESCRIPTION='A basic dhcp ethernet connection using iproute'
INTERFACE='usb0'
IP='dhcp'

Rooted Galaxy Note

2012-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

I got a new Samsung Galaxy Note today and after some trial and error I managed to root it.

I basicallly followed the instructions here with a few additions. I changed the binary in the runmelinux.sh to my system Android SDK adb, I added a udev rule for the phone:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e8",OWNER="mahnve",MODE="0666"

and finally I needed to run sudo adb devices once before running runmelinux.sh

Migrating from my old phone using Titanium Backup now.

New Post Over At Valtech Labs

2012-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

I published a new blog post today over at Valtech Labs in Swedish about the difference between the swedish words “agile” and “nimble” (lättrörlig). In short, while they once meant the same thing, agile has lost a lot of its meaning. Instead of trying to change things back, we should let agile mean whatever people think it means, and use a more descriptive word, like nimble, to describe the process we once called agile. Which of course means XP :).

Skeleton For Responsive Design

2012-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

I just managed to get this site to display properly in a mobile browser with media queries, which means I am now among the cool responsive design kids.

If you, like me, use Skeleton, it turns out that you shouldn’t forget this line in your head

1 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

Layers of Complexity at Smidig 2011

2011-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

I am in Oslo for Smidig 2011, where I gave a talk titled “Layers of complexity”. It centers around medium number systems and Cynefin framework in order to provide a model for software development and explain why we cannot use time based measurements in order to improve the process. It also mentions why time estimates are never correct.

Later today at 18:00 I will give my talk on Taylorism and Mass Production at Oslo XP Meetup. Hope to see you there.

Mongoid and Embedded Relations

2011-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

I am experimenting with Mongoid and embedded relations. I have a class A that can have three named 1..1 relations to class B, and I found it quite problematic to get the reverse relationship setup. After specifying class_name and inverse_of everything started working as expected.

 1 class B
 2 
 3   include Mongoid::Document
 4 
 5   embedded_in :a, class_name: "A"
 6 
 7 end
 8 
 9 class A
10 
11   include Mongoid::Document
12 
13   embeds_one :something, class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a
14   embeds_one :completely class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a
15   embeds_one :different, class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a
16 
17 end

Todo.txt and Zenity

2011-04-09T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve switched back and forth a lot to try to find a todo list solution that works for me. Gina Trapani’s todo.txt is the latest one, and while not perfect I do find it useable.

I have two zenity scripts mapped to keyboard shortcuts that allows me to quickly add and check off todo’s:

Speaking at DevLin 2011 with ShowOff

2011-03-10T00:00:00-08:00

I am in Linköping for Devlin 2011 where I will give a talk named “Git – Version Control You’ve Only Dreamt Of”. It is a one day conference organized by my friends at Responsive

I did the slides for this talk in ShowOff, which allows me to write my presentation in text and version it in Git. Firefox 4 supports SVG well enough for me to use it for all my images. This allows me to just save and directly use whatever I draw in Inkscape, no exports required.

Notes From Smidig Open Space on Why Agile Isn't About Development Anymore

2010-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Today at Smidig 2010 I sponsored an Open Space session on the topic “How and When did Agile System Development Stop Being About System Development”

We had a very good discussion, and these are the notes we managed to gather, in the order they were discussed:

It’s Scrums fault
It’s easier to sell with soft skills arguments
Agile is trying to sell into other fields where the technical practices don’t apply.
Obsolete knowledge in management, old Cobol programmers not up to date with todays technologies.
As people speak more at conferences, the less they program.
More attention to people who are good at talking, and devs normally aren’t.
Using wrong metaphors, i.e. factory, to explain process to managers who do not understand leads to wrong process.
Recipient of system development does not understand the problem of why engineering practices are important.
Soft skills are easier to acquire.
Average organizations have average employees. Does not want to take responsibility, not that interested.
Management who does not understand the process they are running.
- Is this partly developers fault?

Thanks all who joined in!

1996 revisited

2009-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

After receiveing what I believe was the third promotional email from my beloved mobile phone operator, showing this not-so-useful information

I was curious to see what sort of HTML did not even render images in Safari.

Behold:

 1 <title>Sista chansen: Specialpris på Telia Mobilt bredband</title>
 2 <base target=&quot;_blank&quot;>
 3 <HTML><HEAD>
 4 <META http-equiv=Content-Type content=&quot;text/html; charset=iso-8859-1&quot;>
 5 <META content=&quot;MSHTML 6.00.5730.13&quot; name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
 6 <BODY bgColor=#818177 leftMargin=0 topMargin=0 marginheight=&quot;0&quot; marginwidth=&quot;0&quot;>
 7 <TABLE height=&quot;100%&quot; cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=&quot;100%&quot; bgColor=#818177 border=0>
 8 <TR>
 9 <TD vAlign=top align=middle>
10 <DIV style=&quot;FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #505050; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot;>Ser mailet konstigt ut? <A style=&quot;FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #cf0566; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot; href=&quot;#&quot; target=_blank>Klicka här »</A></DIV><BR>
11 <TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=590 align=center bgColor=#aaaaa4 border=0>
12 <TR>
13 <TD vAlign=top align=middle><A href=&quot;http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&amp;mid=250386&amp;uid=124849854&amp;&amp;&amp;http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313&quot; target=_blank><IMG alt=&quot;Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset.&quot; src=&quot;http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj1.jpg&quot; border=0></A></TD></TR>
14 <TR>
15 <TD vAlign=top align=middle><A href=&quot;http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&amp;mid=250386&amp;uid=124849854&amp;&amp;&amp;http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313&quot; target=_blank><IMG alt=&quot;Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset.&quot; src=&quot;http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj2.jpg&quot; border=0></A></TD></TR>
16 <TR>
17 <TD vAlign=top align=middle><A href=&quot;http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&amp;mid=250386&amp;uid=124849854&amp;&amp;&amp;http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313&quot; target=_blank><IMG alt=&quot;Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset.&quot; src=&quot;http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj3.jpg&quot; border=0></A></TD></TR>
18 <TR>
19 <TD vAlign=top align=middle><A href=&quot;http://tr.anp.se/track?t=c&amp;mid=250386&amp;uid=124849854&amp;&amp;&amp;http://track.adform.net/C/?bn=212313&quot; target=_blank><IMG alt=&quot;Nu höjer vi hastigheten och sänker priset.&quot; src=&quot;http://adata.attraction.se/Telia/buss14/09-Utskick_v15/images/erbj4.jpg&quot; border=0></A></TD></TR></TABLE><BR>
20 <DIV style=&quot;FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #505050; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot;>Vill du inte få fler erbjudanden från Telia till denna epostadress, <A style=&quot;FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 10px; COLOR: #cf0566; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif&quot; href=&quot;http://www.anp.se/oa/250386/4342584B72474751437243465143&quot; target=_blank>klicka här »</A></DIV></TD></TR></TABLE></BODY></HTML>
21 <img border=0 width=1 height=1 src=&quot;http://www.anp.se/Clicks.asp?sqid=250386&amp;sid=124849854&amp;pf_action=View&amp;pf_Link=&quot;>

Wow – it is like a time machine to 1996. MSHTML did supposedly generate it.

ThoughWorks Free Seminars in Stockholm

2009-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

ThoughtWorks will give two free seminars at Berns Tuesday April 21 2009.

The morning one is given by me and will be on the business value of agile and lean, and how it can be the competitive advantage in difficult times.

In the afternoon my colleague Zack Exley will give a behind-the-scenes look at the technological side of the Barack Obama campaign.

Both of the talks will be kicked off by our chairman Roy Singham who will give his view on why he believes Scandinavia has a great future in the software development world.

You are welcome to attend either one of these – or both of course.

For registration and more info please visit: http://connect.thoughtworks.com/stockholmEvent/

Simple beats complicated

2009-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

Peter Krantz sent this clip from a Capoeira fight (rating: violent) which I see as a really good analogy for XP’s YAGNI and the simplest thing that could possibly work.

ThoughtWorks Hosts A Track and Speaks At Scandinavian Developer Conference

2009-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

ThoughtWorks cohosting and speaking at the Emerging Technologies track at the Scandinavian Developer Conference. Ola will speak about JRuby and I will give a presentation with a title stolen from XP: ‘The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work’.

It is a one day conference which I am really looking forward to – Kent Beck keynoting is reason enough to be there. See the full program here.

ThoughtWorks Sweden Gets A Roommate

2009-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

ThoughtWorks Sweden will move in with our great friends at Agical at the end of this month. Our new address will be

ThoughtWorks Sweden
Västerlånggatan 79 2tr
111 29 Stockholm
Sweden

Personally it will be the first time I have an office in Old Town – cool.

Playing to win, culture style

2009-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

This Saturdays edition of Dagens Industri had a really interesting column by Jan Åman, former curator of Färgfabriken. He writes about how you can either move forward or secure your back, and how the world is run by people watching their backs and making sure that decisions can never be questioned.

It is very close my favorite XP slogan “playing to win” and what I talk about in my presentation on Agile Documentation. A good read, but unfortunately only in the paper edition.

Quoted in Computer Sweden

2008-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

I am quoted in todays issue of Computer Sweden on BDD. It is a well written article even if I do not agree with Emil Gustafssons quote in the end where he states that BDD doesn’t bring that much new things to the table. I think that people looking at BDD for the first time might perceive it as such, but I must say that there is a clear difference in both approach and outcome.

Agile Sweden Christmas Party

2008-12-09T00:00:00-08:00

The Agile Sweden annual christmas party is on Thursday at the Agical office. The evening will kick off with a few lightning talks, of which I am doing one. My talk is titled “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” and will discuss how XP’s value of simplicity has more or less been forgotten as agile has gone mainstream.

Symptoms vs. Causes

2008-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

There latest storm in the teacup that is Swedish IT is caused by the national news agency TT decision to move from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office, mainly because ‘I (head of development) do not want to sit here wondering how I will connect OpenOffice with a hundred eleven other systems’. I believe ‘a hundred eleven’ is a long form for ‘a lot’.

This has in almost deterministic fashion caused people from both sides of the OSS-MS divide to wave their party flags. But no one asks the to me more obvious question – why do you connect your office suite with all those systems, and why is that a problem if you do not have Microsoft Office? Seems more like an architecture question if you ask me.

Smidig Videos Are Up

2008-12-02T00:00:00-08:00

The videos from Smidig 2008 are up. This is mine (in Swedish):

Icebears Out, Polar Bears In

2008-11-30T00:00:00-08:00

Aslak reminded me that there is no such thing as an icebear. Tag line changed.

Words don't come easy: MoSCoW and BDD

2008-11-26T00:00:00-08:00

I had a interesting conversation with Kevlin Henney at Øredev regarding the word ‘should’ and its usage in Behaviour Driven Development. Kevlin does not like ‘should’ as he feels it is too vague in many circumstances. And I have to agree with Kevlin.

Sometime you are speccing something like “the title of the index page should be ‘blabbr.com – the worlds largest social network’”, which might be something that we will change in the future. ‘Should’ is a good choice of words here.

Another time the spec says ‘when the nuclear reactor overheats it should shut down.’. ‘Should’ is not a good choice of word here. I’d much rather say that the nuclear reactor must shutdown, as to really say that we have no other option.

So, let’s use both. Use ‘should’ when describing a something might change, and ‘must’ when describing something carved in rock.

This might also help using the specs as an executable requirement. At the moment all specs are valued the same, every fail breaks the build. Perhaps there is a value in saying that certain specs are really important and should never fail. We could have different colors for different types of failure.

Perhaps there is a use for the rest of MoSCoW?

Thoughts?

Going to Øredev

2008-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

My Friday morning inbox contained an email from Niclas Nilsson asking me to replace him doing interviews for InfoQ at Øredev. It took some planning calls to my wife and booking of babysitting, but now I am good to go.

I will be interviewing these six gentlemen:

Jon Bostrom
Walter Bright
James Bach
Roger Sullivan
Luke Hohmann
BJ Hargrave

Let me know if you have any question you would like me to ask.

Speaking at Smidig 2008

2008-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

I am happy to say that I will give one of the lightning talks at Smidig 2008. My presentation is about optimizing the whole product chain, from concept to cash, and stop focusing on projects as they fragment the organization and cause local optimization.

Last years conference was great and inspired us here in Stockholm to do our own version in the form of Agila Sverige. I am really looking forward to going back to Oslo.

Going to JAOO

2008-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

I will be at JAOO this year, telling everyone who is interested all about ThoughtWorks Sweden. Last time I went to JAOO was 2001, so I am really looking forward to it.

I will probably spend quite some time in the ThoughtWorks booth, so come by and say hi. Or beat me in the IT-run which I have signed up for.

Presentation About Test Driven Development

2008-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

I will do a presentation on ‘Successfully Using Test Driven Development’ at .NetAkademin Tuesday September 16th. This talk will cover stuff like BDD, outside-in but also how the test-driven approach is used on the project as a whole.

To match my .Net experience, we will touch on frameworks and tools for .Net, but focus on the ideas and philosophies behind them, making it a very platform independent presentation.

The event is first and foremost for clients and members of .NetAkademin, but any seat not taken by them is available to the public.

Oops

2008-08-28T00:00:00-07:00

No more tweet summaries here. Thanks Ben.

ThoughtWorks Sweden Is Open For Business

2008-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

ThoughtWorks Sweden has come a long way since I last posted anything about it. We have ourselves a nice office downtown, with proper phone numbers and pretty business cards.

This means that we are available for consulting gigs, primarily in Stockholm, but we can serve basically all of Scandinavia. With ThoughtWorks global organization behind us, we offer software delivery in Java, Ruby and .Net as well as agile coaching and consulting. We are also keen to show off our products Mingle, Cruise and Twist.

Call us, email us, come by the office for a coffee or lunch. We look forward to hearing from you.

ThoughtWorks
Mäster Samuelsgatan 60, 8 tr.
111 21 Stockholm

Office: +46 8 5500 2100
Skype me: mahnve
email me: mahnve at thoughtworks dot com

Separating the View And the API

2008-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

Assaf writes about using Hahlo and Fluid, and I find this paragraph especially interesting:

A great Web app uses persistent, readable URLs for every interesting resource. Twitter does that, so it’s pretty easy to share links to people, statuses and other points of interest. Hahlo hides the entire user interface behind a single URL, but it works extremely well because Hahlo is just a front end, Twitter is the system of record. If I need to link, I wouldn’t be using Hahlo links anyway (although link discovery is missing in the current version).

Perhaps this is a good way to both have the cake and eat it? Have a restful, share nothing API, which is accessed by a separate GUI app built in say Seaside that can use state as much as it wants.

All Your Technology Are Belong To You

2008-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

Jonathan Schwartz writes about finance as a technology business

I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he’d cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I’d asked him why – his response has stuck with me. ‘Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can’t win if I don’t have my own team.’

Independent of his views on outsourcing, I’ve heard the same point made by many (but not all) financial services executives – banking (like big swaths of telecommunications, media and retailing) has become a technology business, where every ounce of performance and differentiation matters. Even, and especially, in the midst of market turmoil.

Which is why you should use consultants that can help you improve your game, not play the game for you.

(Via Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog.)

Not everybody is into Euro 2008

2008-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

Not everybody was following the Euro 2008 final:

Congrats to Spain for a well deserved win anyway. I’ll tell Peter about it over lunch tomorrow.

It's been a while

2008-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

Projektplatsen.se reminds me that it has been more than 8 years, or 2932 days to be exact, since I logged in the last time. So I agree with them when they say that I lot has happened since then :).

Get Back At Our Politicians

2008-06-25T00:00:00-07:00

This is my kind of modern grassroots politics: Use the Internet which they want to control to do to them as they do to us.

A Few Tips For Giving A Lecture On Lean

2008-06-16T00:00:00-07:00

So, you are about to give a lecture on lean software development? Here are a few tips:

Do not say that the agile movement came out of the dot-com era. Mentioning the Smalltalk community at least once plus.
If you name the language that first introduced the notion of object orientation, Simula 67 good choice.
Do not say that Winston Royce advocated Waterfall. He didn’t
Do not claim that all US Government work in the 60’s and 70’s was done in a waterfall fashion. Nasa ran iterative projects in the 1960’s.
Understand that most Toyota practices that has been adapted by the software development community are taken from Toyota Product Development System, not Toyota Production System.
If you still intend to do 1-5, do not start the presentation by saying that you are going to correct some misunderstandings about agile.

Good luck.

Monday Evening

2008-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

Football on BBC’s excellent live streaming service, Stevenote on IRC. Twitter is very much down as expected.

Jonathan Ive on Understanding Customers

2008-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

Jonathan Ive on understanding customers: “‘We don’t have to take this great intuitive leap to understand the mythical concerns of our users, because we are the users.’”

That sure helps.

WPS Makes the Best URL's

2008-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

You can count on Websphere Portal Server to create the longest URL’s ever known to man:

http://www.hb.se/wps/portal/!ut/p/c1/hY3RCoIwGEafKP5myy7nDm3gU4kXOaN7CJikBoUPn-ToLvs-y4PhwM9xE9-CTf_CvPk79BBzwdZ6faQEYG1cAVSloojawTDjER-4YOtaVskhpCUS4KU6yQrnUGVsz2ee1t-yvHHxP44d8CymYfC0o5W5q8UnyTc4Vg9Txe4fRc4DF2GMxOvAEeRL3J/dl2/d1/L2dPQSEvUU93Q2dBISEvWUJweGx4dHcvNl9FTUhVOUIxQTBPQVZGMDIzOEFDM1FBMzgxMS82X0VNSFU5QjFBME9BVkYwMjM4QUMzUUEzOEgzLzZfRU1IVTlCMUEwT0FWRjAyMzhBQzNRQTM4SDQ!/

Try sending that via Twitter.

Tools, again

2008-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

Computer Swedens developer columnist Tobias FjÃ¤lling the other day answered the question “What should a good development environment include?”. (Måsten i en bra utvecklingsmiljö – Computer Sweden).

Tobias list:

Auto-complete

Refactoring

Navigationsupport

Extendability

Speed

Debugger

Code templates

I find this to be spot on what Ola wrote about) the other day which I already quoted:

It’s interesting, many Java programmers talk so much about tools, but they never seem to think about their language as a tool.

Tobias seems to be a good guy, I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he forgot.

Three Tickets To Agila Sverige 2008 Available

2008-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

Another thing: ThoughtWorks is sponsoring Agila Sverige 2008, and we have three tickets to give away. Send me an email or add a comment to this post if you want one.

Joining ThoughtWorks, Starting Office in Stockholm

2008-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

I am thrilled and honored to say that I will be joining ThoughtWorks starting June. Stockholm is the next pin on the ThoughtWorks world map and my job will be heading the operations locally.

The Stockholm office will initially be manned by me and homeward bound Ola, but we plan to find and attract some of the great talent available here.

It is really exciting to become a part of the excellent organization that is ThoughtWorks. I have already had the chance to meet quite a few of my future colleagues who all have shown that ThoughtWorks is made up of great people. Thanks for making me feel welcome.

I am really looking forward to this, it will be hard work and a lot of fun.

Time For Some Nepotism (Not So Shameless Plug)

2008-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

If you are in the Stockholm area and in need to move your teeth around ever so slightly, look no further than Vasastans Tandreglering. You will get truly professional treatment which will leave your teeth in those straight lines you dream of.

Of course this is my moms new business I am talking about. Good luck mom, you’re the best.

The Programming Language Is Your Most Powerful Tool

2008-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

Ola is so spot on with this one:

A New Hope: Polyglotism: “The one thing that I am totally sure if is that we need better tools. And the most important tool in my book is the language. It’s interesting, many Java programmers talk so much about tools, but they never seem to think about their language as a tool. For me, the language is what shapes my thinking, and thus it’s definitely much more important than which editor I’m using.”

I do not know how many discussions I have had with Java developers who questions Ruby et al. because there are no IDE’s with the same feature sets as those found in Java.

(Via Ola Bini on Java, Lisp, Ruby and AI)

The Good Pragmatic Developers

2008-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

Java in 2008: “These are people who arenâ€™t religious and arenâ€™t close-minded and just want to Get Shit Done. Oh, and theyâ€™ve already got a lot of it done and they arenâ€™t interested in discarding that investment.”

(Via ongoing)

Misunderstanding the Meaning of "Web Based"

2008-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

As I have been in charge of setting the administrative infrastructure at WeMind I continuously tried to use web based systems to limit the number of systems administered by us. We use Google Apps, Basecamp and outsource all our servers to Mathias and colleagues at GlobalInn.

We have however run into problems when trying to find web based services that are preferrably local to Sweden, like accounting. Even if marketed as “web based”, they are all based on Internet Explorer using ActiveX or some other proprietary part of IE. As we use Macs at WeMind, these services are as available to us as any software packaged as a .exe file.

I tend to see this in Sweden and not as much in other countries, or am I wrong?

What He Said

2008-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

I have used Mercurial for over a year, and started using Git on Agila Sverige. I really like Git and I have therefore kept a draft blog post trying to capture why I like better than Mercurial.

That draft was just deleted since I essentially share Dustin Sallings thoughts on the differences between Mercurial and Git. Apart from the Gnu Arch and Darcs parts – what he said.

Rails is moving from SVN to Git

2008-04-03T00:00:00-07:00

A year ago I was frustrated over Rails' close ties to Subversion. But as Rails is moving from SVN to Git, the future is looking bright. The only bastion left I can think of is RubyForge.

OpenUP

2008-04-03T00:00:00-07:00

Proponents of RUP, the golden methodology of 1998, is trying revamp it as OpenUP.

My first reaction is positive – browsing the Work Products I cannot find any required UML diagram. But after a while I get the feeling that they have fixed the implementation without getting the big picture.

It is still has four phases, delivering a feature complete project after the transition phase. No lean, incremental deliveries to production, but how could they? It explicitly defers deployment and operation leaving it to other parts of the organization.

But this is my favorite one:

OpenUP is minimal, complete, and extensible. It’s the minimum amount of process for a small team.

No, it is not minimal and it is not complete. It is less lipstick on the pig.

Things I Have Actually Used

2008-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

Robby Russell is a constant source of information on Ruby and Rails, I have used his instruction on how to set up Rails and PostgreSQL on Mac a number of times. It is therefore fun to see that I have actually used 3 out of the 5 things he wants to know more about::

RSpec User Stories

We were very early adopters of this one, we started using it the same day it hit trunk in a useable form. Everyone should start using it today – I cannot speak highly enough of it. The only thing I miss is a Fit-style table approach to rules, but I have my own thoughts about that one.

Using Selenium with RSpec

We have used the now outdated spec/ui library at WeMind. Today we use RSpec Stories almost exclusively for acceptance testing. My position is to use Selenium only where you really need it, for example to test Javascript functionality.

JQuery

I have used it for the dynamic hiding of speaker info for Agila Sverige. Not at all enough to judge a library by, but it feels a lot sweeter than Prototype/RJS.

JSSpec (BDD for Javascript)

Yeah, I wanna know more about this as well.

Using the Google Charts API with Rails

Same here.

Other than that I would love to try out:

Seaside – I have dabbled with it but nothing worth mentioning.
CouchDB

A scary future

2008-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Mathias just sent this video of Boston Dynamics Big Dog. If this is the next level of mechanized warfare, the future will most certainly be scary.

Vintage Computing

2008-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

The Ahnve family spent the afternoon at the Stockholm Technical Museum. It was the last day of the Vintage Gaming exhibition, and man, did they have hardware to reminisce about.

I first stopped by an old Commodore Vic-20, my first computer which my dad bought me in 1983. It was running a Tetris clone, programmed by the computers owner two years ago. He also showed me the flash card add-on card I suppose he soldered himself which replaced the tapedrive. Awesome.

I then met Niklas whom I worked with at TeliaSonera a few years ago. He showed me an Atari 800 and some Nintendo 3D thingy. They even had an original Atari game console from 1976. Wow.

I found a Donkey Kong Game and Watch on sale for SEK 800. So cool.

All this time my wife stood confounded and suggested that they should have a designated place for bored spouses.

The closing of script tags

2008-03-11T00:00:00-07:00

I found a bug in my HTML code today running Firefox 3. <script> tags must supposedly be closed by a </script> and not by the less verbose but obviously wrong <script/>, as explained in this dismissed bug report.

If you insist on using <script/> FF3 will punish you with a blank page caused by the body tag being self closed, <body/>. Sort of: “You close your script tags like that – I’ll close your damn body tag like that. Now, how do you like that???”

I had no clue. Sorry.

The Lazyweb

2008-03-06T00:00:00-08:00

Yesterday I twittered that I was trying to find a version of Ruby that both cc.rb and Rails likes. Last night, Wordpress plugin Twittertools posted yesterdays twitters to this blog. And this morning, I have an answer from Alexey Verkhovsky what the good versions are. Gotta love the lazyweb.

Microsoft Keyboards F Lock Key

2008-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

I use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard with my MacBook Pro – make that two, one at home and one at work. The function keys stopped working last week on the one at work which is a pretty big deal if you use ExposÃ© as much as I do. I did the whole routine and could not find the problem. As the keyboard at home worked just fine, I started to believe that there was something wrong with the actual keyboard.

Then I came across this post which finally explained to me that I have a key right next to the F12 key named “F Lock” which makes the function keys do other things than I want them to do. A key stroke later all is good again.

The funny thing is that I have no idea how it got into this mode as I cannot turn it off again.

Microsoft and Heroes

2008-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

I have never programmed anything using Microsoft products, but if I did, heroes happen here and source fource would make me feel embarrassed. Who are they targeting?

TripIt Invitations All Over The Place

2008-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

I managed to send an invite to TripIt to everyone in my GMail addressbook this morning. This was unintentional, I guess either I am stupid or the TripIt interface is unclear.

Anyway, as I have 500+ email addresses in GMail, and some are people I have mailed once, this might turn out to be quite awkward. So sorry about that if you got the mail and wonder why the hell I sent it.

How To Automigrate the Test Database Using Merb, Datamapper and RSpec

2008-02-16T00:00:00-08:00

I am creating a small site using Merb, DataMapper and RSpec, all in all a very enjoyable experience. I did however have problem getting the test database to be automigrated when running the specs, as I am used to in Rails.

As Google did not help, I turned to #merb on IRC, and got immediate help.

Two alternatives:

Run rake MERB_ENV=test dm:db:automigrate before running rake specs
Insert DataMapper::Base.auto_migrate! into your spec/spec_helper.rb

Big thanks to topfunky, afrench and jdempsey for the help.

Oh, another thing

2008-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

For all the good reasons, yak shaving is the thing to do these days.

My Talk From Smidig 2007 Available Online

2008-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

I just found out that the talk I gave at Smidig 2007 is available online. If you think there is something wrong with the sound, it is in swedish.

git Is Winning The DVCS Battle With git-svn

2008-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve been using distributed version control for over a year now, and if it is up to me, I will never use a centralized VCS again.

When I evaluated the alternatives last year, I choose Mercurial as the DVCS we are using at WeMind. The reasons were:

Usability – git was quite obscure back then
Speed – bazaar and monotone was quite slow
Large enough uptake – OpenSolaris and Mozilla started using Mercurial at the same time.
Runs on all platforms, if we ever employed someone who wants to use Windows
Built in Python which could be a good think if I ever wanted to extend it

A year later we are happy with Mercurial, but the landscape has changed. In particular I am seeing a huge growth of people using git, especially within the Ruby community. Which in itself is something I am happy about.

The biggest reason I see for git’s resurgence is git-svn. It allows people to start using git locally while still having Subversion as the backend, and when everyones ready the switch is easy.

There is a hgsvn in the Mercurial world, but it is read only, so you cannot push your changes back to Subversion. I strongly believe that the Mercurial community should focus on this if it wants to regain its momentum.

Git still has weak support for Windows, but that seems to be a non-issue in the Ruby world.

I am pretty agnostic about which DVCS will be the dominant one. The most important thing is that people are moving away from the centralized VCS’s.

For a great post on the subject, read what Dave Dribin has to say about it

Java vs the JVM

2008-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

Tim Bray on the JVM being the good part of Java:

“But the Java language just doesnâ€™t seem like the interesting thing about Java, these days.”

I wish more Java programmers would agree to this. One of my observations at JFokus the other day was that a lot of people really like Java the language, and are going through hoops to implement their ideas in it.

Stephan Janssen has created a kick ass new version of parleys.com in Flex/Air, but he wants to redo it all in JavaFX script, just so that it is Java. Rickard Ã–bergs new framework for composite oriented programming could be useful, but in my opinion it introduces enough new concepts to qualify for a whole new language. Lipsticking on top of Java makes it feel verbose and clumsy. After a year of Ruby I have very little patience for Java interfaces.

(Via ongoing)

One hour talks are too long

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

JFokus has the traditional format of speakers talking for an hour, which is way too long. Every speaker I have listened to has spent more than half of their allotted time providing context and explaining why they are talking about whatever they are talking about.

I so wish that they would have used lightning talks.

I am really old

2008-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

I am actually 53 days older than the universe, I had no clue.

Jon Leaves ThoughtWorks For Google

2008-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Jon is leaving ThoughtWorks to join Google

Jon is one of the most brilliant people I have been fortunate enough to work with. Congratulations to Google to have hired him.

Jonathan Schwartz says Sun will continue to support PostgreSQL

2008-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

My suspicion that Sun will not continue to support PostgreSQL after purchasing MySQL was unfounded:

From Jonathan Schwartz blog::

What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?

It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres – and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.

Awesome.

Update: Josh Berkus says the the same thing

Groovy and Ruby

2008-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

I cannot help myself from making a small comment on Rick Hightowers post on Groovy vs JRuby. In short he thinks Sun should support Groovy instead og JRuby, because the syntax is familiar to Java programmers.

To support his case he presents a chart showing language popularity according to job postings. And since Ruby is at the bottom and Java is on the top, Sun should support Groovy. Which by the way is not even on the chart.

One thing I did recognize was this:

Notice that between Java and Ruby/Python there is a wasteland of languages that you will not see running on the JVM in any near future. So if Sun wants to expand the developer base for the JVM (not Java the language), I believe they are making a very wise decision to support the largest languages available to them outside of Java.

Supporting Groovy would probably be popular among the already converted, but Sun has to appeal to new markets to expand the JVM usage. I believe that is what they are doing.

Sun buys MySQL - what about PostgreSQL?

2008-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

There is one thing that strikes me in the Sun MySQL thingy – what about Sun’s previous commitment to PostgreSQL, where they say stuff like: “PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 is the open source enterprise database platform of choice”?

Tim Bray comments on the deal and totally dismisses any alternatives:

MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For databases, nothing that matters.

I strongly prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL, and I have previously used Sun as a reference for it. Perhaps no more.

IPhone for sale with extra services

2008-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

There is an iPhone for sale on the swedish site Blocket:

Funny part translated from swedish: “… I can include the telephone number to my friend who helped me unlock it”

Watching the keynote

2008-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

I am following the keynote via IRC and MacRumoursLive. Why am I like so many others totally intrigued by this? I suppose a lot of people would say that it is the gadget freak in me who wants to own everything coming out of Cupertino. But to me, this is not about the gadgets per se. It is about seeing progress being made, Others make progress as well, but nobody packages it as well as Apple does.

Patrick Kua: Explaining Your Rituals

2008-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

Pats posts on team building and coaching are always a refreshing read. His latest on explaining rituals is no different and something I myself is notoriously bad at.

(Via Planet TW)

NetNewsWire for free

2008-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

Great news, NetNewsWire is available for free and available for download!

(Via Macfeber)

Ola Bini: JtestR 0.1 released

2007-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

Ola has released JtestR 0.1. It seems to b a great tool for those doing Java development. I can personally not imagine doing any development these days without RSpec.

Agile Sweden 2008

2007-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

After reading Aslaks post on his upcoming conferences it is obvious to me that Stockholm is sorely lacking in the conference space.

Aslak mentions RubyFools in Copenhagen and Oslo, and Smidig 2008 in Oslo. RubyFools seems to be great, and I know that Smidig was awesome in 2007.

The only conference I can think of in Stockholm is JFokus, which I hear is very good but Java only. Looking to the whole of Sweden we have Ã˜redev which I always has found too unfocused, and Expo-C which I cannot tell if they exist anymore.

I guess I have no right complaining if I am not prepared to do anything about it. So, after Smidig 2007 in Oslo, we have had talks within the Agile Sweden network about running a similar conference in Stockholm this spring. And while this is no announcement by any means, I am putting pressure on myself to actually contribute to make it happen by speaking openly about it.

Look out for Agile Sweden 2008 this spring.

Acorn

2007-12-21T00:00:00-08:00

Theocacao: A Look at the Acorn Image Editor: “Acorn is first working example of what I would consider a programmer’s image editor. It has a very ‘objecty’ feel to it â€” sort of what might happen if Interface Builder was reincarnated as a bitmap tool. If you feel more at home in an IDE than Photoshop, I think you will probably like Acorn.”

Cool, I purchased Acorn a couple of months ago and now I know why.

Tool Support Should Be Loosely Coupled

2007-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

I just read the following in a month old post on the RSpec list:

As someone who uses an IDE, I find dealing with multiple SCMs is a real pain, and one of the cool things about Ruby has been that (traditionally) nearly everything’s in Subversion

It might be that Rails will have hard time keeping up with new stuff, both technically and culturally, since it tied really close knots with everything that was cool 2005.

iChat Video Only For LAN Internal Use?

2007-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

Me and Peter Krantz just tried to get an iChat video chat going, just to test it out. We never got it going.

We forwarded a gazillion ports on our routers, turned off the firewalls on our laptops but to no avail.

The thing is, had we managed to get it working it would still have been way too hard to set up for any sort of reqular use. And how often do you have access to the router anyway?

This tells me that iChat is primarily made for internal, LAN based use. Am I wrong? Too bad if I am not.

RSpec 1.1 is out!

2007-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

RSpec 1.1: “The RSpec Development Team is pleased as glug (thatâ€™s kind of like punch, but more festive) to announce RSpec-1.1.0.”

Woohoo! We’ve used RSpec since the 0.7-ies and I personally could not be happier with it. The RSpec community is really pushing the boundaries for testing/speccing frameworks and is now the standard for all others to follow.

(Via David Chelimsky)

YUI Grids

2007-12-13T00:00:00-08:00

I had to straighten up the CSS for our public website, and I thought of looking into YUI Grids as I had heard lots of good things about it. It took me less than two hours to completely redo the layout, and the the end result was a better design, less custom CSS and better browser portability. I am a convert.

Choice Is Good

2007-12-13T00:00:00-08:00

I was happy to note that Dion Almaer commented on my blog post on Merb. Dion is one of my favorite bloggers/podcasters and I value what he writes highly.

But I disagree with him on this one. The problem with using Java for web application development was never one of too much choice. In fact, it was because of that choice that Java became a player in the server side market at all. Sun alone never had the answer to what was needed for server side development, instead the open source world stepped in and made incremental corrections.

The same thing is happening to the Rails world. The core team cannot create a framework that is a one-size-fits-all. The initial Rails proposal is great for a large number of webapps, but it is other things around it like plugins and JRuby that is making Rails a viable choice for all.

My Java tools of choice was usually Tomcat/Jetty, FreeMarker, iBatis, WebWork tied together with Spring or PicoContainer. What I hated was having some frankensteinian-enterprise-architect-design-by-comittee-lets-not-be-different stack forced upon me with a fullblown J2EE server, EJB’s, Struts or the JSF monster, sprinkled with an Eclipse-only development environment. And I hope dearly that Rails development is not going the same way where people question you on your choice of tools and wonder why you are not using MySQL and TextMate like the rest.

There is one choice that I do not miss though – directory layout. I am truly happy every time I do not have to choose it.

Instead of not having to choose, the most important difference I’ve experienced is that Java as a language together with the Servlet/J2EE spec induces a lot of accidental complexity, which is almost non-existent in the Ruby/Rails world. It is that which enables the increased velocity many development teams experience when switching to Ruby.

Google Says JavaScript Is A Language For Non-Programmers

2007-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

They actually do say that, here in Sweden. In a brochure handed out at SIME07, Google provides a little glossary for the technically challenged, and to my amusement JavaScript is described as follows:

JavaScript – scripting language for those who are not programmers, in first hand intended for creating web pages.

The translation is mine. The original text in Swedish: “JavaScript – skriptspråk för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett får att skapa webbsidor”

This is of course a mistake, and my guess is that mistakes like these are inevitable if you have local offices like the one is Stockholm without technical knowledge. I find it funny, but I wonder if Sergey and Larry would laugh if they were to find out?

Rails Marketing Is Really Good

2007-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

DHH’s post about the Rails 2.0 is incredibly well written. It is almost as he is showing off a unknown past as a PR agent when he talks about Rails not supporting commercial databases out of the box:

But that doesnâ€™t mean the commercial databases are left out in the cold. Rather, theyâ€™ve now been set free to have an independent release schedule from the main Rails distribution.

This sort of well formulated marketing has been known to render some sour remarks from the rest of the open source web framework world. My belief is though that when they ask themselves “Why are people so attracted to Rails, my framework of choice is just as good or even better”, sentences like the one above are probably a large part of the answer.

Merb, Leaner And Meaner Than Rails

2007-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

I have used Rails on a daily basis for almost a year now, and before that I was a night time hangaround. While I am definitely a happier programmer using Rails than anything built on Java, I still feel that it can get better.

First of all I want more things to be plugins. And really, they should not be plugins at all but gems instead.

Why plugins? We use RSpec instead of Test/Unit, HAML instead of erb and are seriously looking into JQuery instead of Prototype. And of course, we are using Mercurial instead of Subversion. All of this is of course possible to use in Rails, but a lot of things are sort of made for the default choice, such as generators generating tests, and plugins having the -x switch for Subversion. And I am pretty sure that this is the way DHH wants it.

So, when 2.0 is now released, I see that the Rails community as a whole does not see the same problems as I do. If they did, they would have done more like the stuff above, instead of sexy migrations and ActiveResource.

This is where Merb becomes really interesting. I have looked at it before not understanding its value, but now I see a framework that does everything I want Rails to do. Gems as plugins and very agnostic about templating languages, Javascript frameworks and even ORM frameworks – almost a heresy in Rails. I will definitely think about using it instead of Rails in the future.

ThoughtWorks to open an office in Stockholm?

2007-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

I just talked to Sid Pinney and Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, and it seems that ThoughtWorks might open an office in Sweden. That would be a welcome injection to the swedish consulting market where too many players favor quantity over quality.

Smidig2007

2007-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

I came back last night after two great days of conferencing at Smidig2007 in Oslo, Norway. The mornings where all lightning talks and the afternoons where reserved for open space discussions. I gave a lighnting talk on the experiences we have had at WeMind trying to implement a lean enterprise, and I initiated two open space sessions, one on the GUI artists role in an agile process and the other on what makes different languages have so different communities and cultures. I will expand on those in later posts.

During the two days I had the pleasure of hooking up with Niclas Nilsson, Aslak HellesÃ¸y and a bunch og other great people. It was very stimulating discussions and I am really motivated into doing a few new things with our own testing/speccing.

It was all in norwegian, so all you non-scandinavian speakers out there are really missing out on something – finally a reason to take that class in swedish or norwegian you always thought about.

Photos and a few deeper comments are due later, but for now: a big thanks to my norwegian friends for a great time.

Andy Hunt Seminar i Stockholm

2007-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

I spent last evening at an Andy Hunt seminar organized by Valtech Sweden. Andy delivered a very good presentation on “How hard can it be” handling the topic of complexity and how we as developers often make our jobs harder than they are. Highly recommended.

The iPhone is truly a phenomenon

2007-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

One thing that strikes me at SIME07 is how many times iPhone is mentioned. The iPhone is not even announced here in Sweden, but still people talk about it without providing any sort of context, and this is a primarily non-techie crowd. The Blackberry by comparison was available in the US for a long time before coming to Sweden, and very few people knew about it at the time. The way the iPhone is a marketing success is truly remarkable.

SIME07

2007-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

I am at the SIME07 conference in Stockholm. It is is a conference focusing on entrepreneurship, media, Internet etcetera, at a pretty high level. At the conferences I normally attend people speak about what thay have done. This one has a lot of “what do you think will happen” going on.

This morning there was a very interesting panel with three venture capitalists on stage, giving feedback to three companies pitches, and VC strategy in general.

Perhaps not spot on for what I do every day, but providing a nice new perspective on things.

Building Vim with Ruby on Leopard

2007-11-12T00:00:00-08:00

I have had problems compiling Vim on Leopard, and it turns out that the culprit is the built in Mac Ruby. No clue why, but when after port installing Ruby, Vim installs cleanly.

I guess I’ll have to go with MacPorts Ruby – having a working Vim beats DTrace, however cool it is.

When Revolutions Stagnate

2007-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

I am subscriber of the Test Driven Development mailing list as well as the RSpec ones. One thing that strikes me continually is the lack of innovation and new ideas in the former one, as opposed to the flurry of brilliant ideas constantly coming out of the RSpec one. It seems to me that communities stagnate and that the people who once were the revolutionaries turn into keepers of their own revolutions ideas. The free thinkers become conservative.

Guy Kawasaki gave a brilliant keynote on the MySQL conference, talking about innovation. He said that the only way most people think about how to improve themselves is by using the tools they know more proficiently. No makers of horse carriages became car manufacturers. And the original TDD'ers are still talking about the same things they did five years ago. The revolution has moved on.

Distributed Version Control

2007-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

I just read this article on distributed version control by Ben Collins-Sussman who is a lead developer behind Subversion. If I understand his arguments, he basically says that DVCS is better than centralized VCS, but you probably should not use one since 80% of all developers are too dumbfounded too understand VCS at all.

I am one of the pretentious, self-righteous and obnoxious fanboys of DVCS. And let me tell you this: the difference between using DVCS and Subversion is on par with the difference in programming in Ruby compared to Java. If you have made the switch you just do not want to go back.

And finally: We have taught our GUI-guy Martin to use Mercurial. He has limited experience of using VCS’s, but he grasps the difference between commit and push. My face is straight saying this.

Speaking at Smidig2007

2007-10-03T00:00:00-07:00

I just got an email saying that my lightning talk proposal for Smidig2007 was accepted. I will speak about the experiences we have had at WeMind when trying to run a lean enterprise.

I am really looking forward to this conference, it is all lightning talks and open space.

Where is IBM in Rails?

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

I have absolutely no clue as to why David Heinemeier Hanson would hold any suspicious thoughts toward Sun. To me, given the big boys in the playground, they are the good guys. But reading it made me realize that I have not heard of IBM in a very, very long time.

Big Blue was quite quick to join the Java bandwagon, remember VisualAge for Java? But in the new world of dynamic languages IBM, apart from a few developerWorks articles, is not to be heard from.

And this from a company who once was a strong proponent of Smalltalk? In my mind, if there is a mystery man, he and his cat is sitting in an IBM campus somewhere.

Delphi and JBuilder as role models for Rails development?

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

Chatting over a beer with Ola Bini last year, we discussed the possibilities for JRuby. My dream was to run a Ruby IDE on top of JRuby to get a Smalltalk like environment, because Smalltalk is still the best programming environment I have ever used.

Now that 3rdRail, running on JRuby, is released, should I get my hopes up? Some people are actually very excited about it, but when Delphi and JBuilder are referred to as some sort of pinnacle of development it seriously makes me wonder.

Close the window

2007-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

Eurocard really wants you to close the window. (“StÃ¤ng fÃ¶nstret” is swedish for “Close the window”)

How to show you don't get it

2007-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

In todays edition of all things gossipy in IT Sweden, aka Computer Sweden, swedish union SIF manages to make complete fools of themselves. They actually attach a physical CD to an ad supposedly containing their latest tv ads. Filmed by famous-in-Sweden director Felix Herngren no less – it says so on the cover.

SIF just spent a lot of money saying that they basically have no clue how modern communication is done (YouTube comes to mind) or that they from an environmental point of view do not mind some 50 000 cd’s thrown away.

VimPress

2007-08-23T00:00:00-07:00

Trying out the VimPress plugin, posting directly from Vim. Seems really sweet.

Me, an Ipod addict

2007-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

My name is Marcus Ahnve and I am an iPod addict.

My iPod died on me the other day. That is when I realized that I am an addict. I got physically cold and I immediately realized that my next subway ride would be iPod less. I cannot ride the subway without an iPod.

I had plans for this iPod. We were going to spend the fall and winter together, waiting for the iPhone to reach this dark corner of the world sometime next spring. Now I was left alone with no one to turn to.

There are currently two iPods on my desk. I still have the old one as I just can’t let go yet, the other one is a 8GB iPod Nano. No moving parts this time, and the option to buy the Nike+ kit, which isn’t available for the iPhone anyway. I feel better, I will be able to ride the subway again.

Mercurial and 3G - hg pull in the middle of nowhere

2007-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

I am currently on my way home from northern Dalecarlia, and I am making full use of the 3G card. I had received a couple of update mails from our central Mercurial repo, so I tried to do an ‘hg pull’, and expected it to take a while. Lo and behold, I got all changesets within 15 seconds! This says a lot about Mercurials protocol, as the reception was so-so; no surprise as we are driving here:

The correct Telenor Mac downloads

2007-07-17T00:00:00-07:00

I signed up for a two year plan for mobile 3G internet from Telenor, which also happens to be my current cellular carrier. Their current offer is really good, SEK 200 a month, fixed price.

However, the link they provide to download drivers for Mac points to an old version which does not install on my machine. To get the latest and greatest. go to Option: wireless technology

Update: Never mind. Globetrotter Connect is truly useless. I gave up and purchased Launch2Net, very expensive but it just works.

Domain lost and found

2007-07-17T00:00:00-07:00

I accidentally found out that all ahnve.* domains where down today. It has been three years since I last renewed them, so I had forgotten all about it. The big problem was that the contact emails where being sent to an old address, so I never got the warnings I assume GoDaddy sent out.

According to Feedburner, some people have tried to reach the site and failed, sorry about that. It is all good now. But I got quite a scare as we are about to go on vacation, which will make me internetless.

And as any good subscriber of the GeekBrief, I used Calis promocode for a 10% rebate – woohoo.

RubyOSA

2007-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

This tutorial on RubyOSA is great. I have never got around to learn AppleScript, and now it seems like I never will.

211

2007-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

Steve Jobs and Agile

2007-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

I was listening to the podcast of the interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and this one thing struck me. When asked to predict the future, Bill Gates provided some insightful guesses, while Steve Jobs simply answered “I don’t know”. Twice. Steve’s explanation was that five years ago he would not have predicted what we have today, so therefore he does not trust himself to say what the next five years will look like.

I have previously spotted Apple to be early agilists, and Steve’s position here enforces my claim.

One important aspect of grasping agile in my mind is to accept the fact that you cannot predict the unpredictable. Instead of making detailed plans to support the illusion that you know what is going to happen, you say “I don’t know”, but then let that knowledge, that you actually do not know be the base for how you approach your work.

I have many times been faced with the quest of predicting the future, “how long will it take?”. As I have become more experienced I have learned to say “I don’t know”, of course at the same time offering an alternative iterative approach that will eventually provide knowledge for better estimation. Sometimes that is not a popular answer, and the question is forwarded to someone who will answer it. Of course, they do not know, but the illusion of control is very powerful, so their answer is better received.

I guess that many CEO are pressed to predict the future, by employees, share holders etc. And many times they probably provide an answer that they themselves do not believe in. It appears to me that Steve Jobs does not fall into that category.

Markdown

2007-06-16T00:00:00-07:00

I finally got around to installing the Markdown plugin for Wordpress, which I really should have done earlier.

Markdown is my favorite text format, clean and readable. Read up on the Markdown syntax to understand why.

Not speaking at RailsConf Europe

2007-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

I just got a mail confirming that I will not speak at RailsConf Europe this fall. I had submitted a proposal named “Version Control in Rails using Mercurial” which was going to show the benefits of using a distributed version control system when developing a Rails app. My opening line would have been “Hi, I am Marcus and I have been Subversion free for six months”.

For some weird reason, so many people in the Rails community – and the open source community as whole – still talk about Subversion as something great. It is not. Subversion is decent at best if you are comfortable knowing that you are using second or third best tools, but believe me, it is a crap choice knowing the alternatives in distributed version control.

I really wanted to point all this out to the a larger audience so that we maybe will move beyond the Subversion centric mess which is the Rails community today. Oh well, maybe next year.

For a very entertaining and opinionated view on version control systems, watch Linus Torvalds most awesome presentation on Git at Google.

Stockholm is not Portland

2007-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

Sitting in Stockholm reading blogs, it feels like being home on a friday night knowing that there is a great party going on and you are not going.

Ruby DSL's vs YAML vs XML

2007-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

I am using Ruby based DSL’s for a number of tasks in my current project. But one day it struck me – am I using the right tool for the job, could there be a better, more simple solution?

Some DSL’s I use are simply declarative and look something like this:

 1 quiz "Let's ask stuff" do
 2   question "What is 1+1?" do
 3     alternative "2", :correct => true
 4     alternative "3"
 5   end
 6   question "Vad is 2+3" do
 7     alternative "1"
 8     alternative "Infinity"
 9     alternative "Don't know"
10     alternative "5", :correct => true
11   end
12 end

I find that quite readable, but it requires me to maintain code that handle the DSL. So I figured, what if I used YAML? It is simple, and using it would mean less code to maintain.

After doing some experimenting, this is what I came up with:

 1 quiz: Let's ask stuff
 2 questions:
 3   -
 4     question: What is 1+1 
 5     alternatives:
 6       -
 7         text: 2
 8         correct: true
 9       - 
10         text: 3
11   -
12     question: What is 2+3
13     alternatives:
14       -
15         text: 1
16       -
17         text: "Infinity"
18       -
19         text: "Don't know"
20       -
21         text: 5
22         correct: true

In my opinion, the YAML is not as readable as the Ruby DSL. I also find it more error prone as those dashes are sort of tricky.

XML?

 1 <quiz name="Let's ask stuff">
 2 <questions>
 3   <question text="What is 1 +1"> 
 4     <alternatives>
 5       <alternative correct="true">2</alternative>
 6       <alternative>3</alternative>
 7     </alternatives>
 8   </question>
 9   <question text="What is 2+3">
10     <alternatives>
11       <alternative>1</alternative>
12       <alternative>Infinity</alternative>
13       <alternative>Don't know'</alternative>
14        <alternative correct="true">5</alternative>
15     </alternatives>
16   </question>
17 </questions>
18 </quiz>

With the correct schema, errors can be avoided, but it is just too much text in there, it gets heavy and verbose.

The verdict was to stay with the Ruby DSL’s – their readability and flexibility are well worth the effort of maintaining a separate parser – which is quite short really.

Rails, PostgreSQL and Time

2007-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

I just noticed that the mapping between PostgreSQL’s Time Without TimeZone column type maps to Rubys standard Time class. Which gives the following behavior in script/console:

 1 >> t = TimeEntry.find(1)
 2 >> t.time
 3 => Sat Jan 01 23:00:00 +0100 2000
 4 >> t.time = Time.now
 5 => Wed May 09 19:02:07 +0200 2007
 6 >> t.save
 7 => true
 8 >> t = TimeEntry.find(1)
 9 >> t.time
10 => Sat Jan 01 19:02:07 +0100 2000

Am I very anal to find this … sloppy?

Neal Ford: Static Typing is Communist Bureaucracy

2007-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

Last time I quoted Neal I for some reason ended up on TheServerSide – why they did not link to Neal directly is beyond me. Oh well, he is obviously on a roll, I totally love this one:

Static Typing is Communist Bureaucracy

(Via Planet TW.)

Why the Term 'Architect' Doesn't Cut It Anymore

2007-04-30T00:00:00-07:00

Some time ago, there was a lengthy debate on the Agile Sweden mailing list regarding the term “Architect”, and what it means. My position is that the term has become synonymous with the paper or PowerPoint architect, and I therefore try to stay clear of it. Other people haad other opinions.

Neal Ford has changed his title, and describes why in a brilliant way:

Neal Ford: From Architect to Wrangler: […] “The title of ‘Architect’ for software developers has gotten so diluted that its meaningless anymore. In fact, its almost pejorative because so many ‘paper’ architects give it a bad name. I’ve gotten ‘Oh, dude, I’m so sorry’ looks from people when I tell them I’m an architect, assuming that I’ve had a head injury or something and can’t do real development work anymore.

[…] It’s a shame that, because we have no real industry-wide certifications, the nominally most advanced title has been co-opted by so many people divorced from reality. I’ve had to defend decisions made for SOA initiatives in front of ‘Architectural Review Boards’ by people who last wrote code in COBOL. Can they really make good decisions about modern technology if they never touch it?

(Via Planet TW.)

has_many :through and callbacks

2007-04-27T00:00:00-07:00

Reading this a little bit earlier would have saved me a lot of time. In short: callbacks such as :before_add does not work with has_many :through, and the documentation does not tell you that. To get callbacks, add them to the join model.

RSpec, Autotest and views

2007-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

The current incarnation of autotest seems to assume that you are using integrated views. If not, you can modify the rspec_rails_autotest.rb file to run the view specs as well:

1 # when %r%^app/views/layouts/(.*)\.rhtml% then
2 #   ["spec/views/layouts/#{$1}_spec.rb"]
3 when %r%^app/views/(.*)\.rhtml$% then
4   ["spec/views/#{$1}_view_spec.rb"]

Your view spec must be postfixed with “_view_spec.rb” for it to work

Update This works out of the box now.

Another Mercurial Convert

2007-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

Paul Duncan is another Mercurial convert, and explains his choice of VCS very well

Autotest 3.5.0 and Growl

2007-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

Autotest 3.5.0 is out, and the result given from Autotest is no longer a String, it’s an array of strings. So if you still want Growl to function properly just modify the .autotest slightly:

 1 module Autotest::Growl
 2   def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="" 
 3     system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" 
 4   end
 5 
 6   Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
 7     output = at.results.last.slice(/(\d+)\s.*specifications?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?/)
 8     if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
 9       growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_fail.png', 2 #, "-s" 
10     else
11       growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_ok.png'
12     end
13   end
14 end

Google issue solved

2007-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve unsuccessfully tried to migrate my personal domain to Google Apps. I also blamed Google for it not working. I was wrong.

It seems that Textdrive has some nifty Apache security going on which denies the Jakarta HttpClient to connect, returning a “412 – Precondition Failed”. Big thanks to Doug for finding this out.

Any Damn Fool

2007-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

Tim Bray is my hero of the day. So many other people would defend their brainchild, especially a world conquering one, in any situation but Tim clearly stands above such behavior.

Any Damn Fool: “… we designed XML as a document format. When the world gleefully seized upon it as a data-packaging/RPC tool, that was OK, but I doubt you could get any of XML’s original designers to disagree with the statement that JSON, for example, has all sorts of advantages for wrapping up short-lived strongly-typed data.”

(Via ongoing.)

RSpec and Autotest

2007-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

I am getting all parts of my Rails development environment settled. In addition to vanilla Rails, I am currently using RSpec, Selenium and Autotest. I am seriously considering Haml and Sass as well.

When googling arounf to learn more about Autotest, I realized that people are using together with Growl. It works out-of-the-box with Test::Unit, but RSpec needs a little tweaking. I took the basics from here and modified to my liking. The following is what my .autotest looks like.

 1 module Autotest::Growl
 2   def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="" 
 3     system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" 
 4   end
 5 
 6   Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
 7     puts "at: '#{at.results}'"
 8     output = at.results.slice(/(\d+)\s.*specifications?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?/)
 9     puts "out: #{output}"
10     if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
11       growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_fail.png', 2 #, "-s" 
12     else
13       growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_ok.png'
14     end
15   end
16 end

Spring Is In the Air

2007-03-13T00:00:00-07:00

Spring surprised us early this year, so we are currently blessed with a mild 10ºC. As everyone who has ever experienced it knows, the early days of spring after the long dark winter are just wonderful

The photo is taken with my SE K610i, and stitched together with DoubleTake, which deserves a mentioning. I noticed today that I had lost my license for it, so I sent an email to EchoOne explaining the situation. I got a reply with my license within 4 hours. Great stuff.

Google Apps - Heaven and Hell

2007-03-13T00:00:00-07:00

We’re using Google Apps at Re:mind which is really, really great. So great in fact that I wanted to move my private mail there as well. So after setting the domain up, I created the webpage that was needed for domain activation, put it on my server, clicked the “verify my domain”, and got the usual “this may take 48 hours to complete”

It has now been almost two weeks or something like 300 hours, slightly more than 48. I have sent Google a support email asking what is happening, but I have yet not received an answer. To that mail that is

You see, today I got this mail:

Hello Marcus, You’ve been invited to use Google Apps for ahnve.com, but we noticed that you haven’t started using any services yet. To activate Gmail, Google Calendar, Page Creator or the new start page, log in to the control panel with your administrative account. At any time, if you get stuck or if you want to tell us about your experience with this service, you can find more information and get in touch through our help center (https://www.google.com/support/a). To make room for other domains, we will remove ahnve.com from our system if you don’t activate any of these services in the next two weeks. If you need more time, just click this link: [link] and we’ll extend the deadline to 30 days from now. Alternatively, you can sign up again at a later date when you’re ready to use the service. Sincerely The Google Team

Now, isn’t that ironic?

New Job in Startup Land

2007-02-27T00:00:00-08:00

I almost forgot to mention it, but I have a new job. Again some might say.

After being a consultant for 1.5 years with Valtech Sweden, I am back in startup land. This time it is really, really startup. We registered our domain last friday, we do not have a web site yet, we are all sitting in one room on broken chairs. Ok, one broken chair. Mine is actually the good one.

It has only been three days, but boy, it is a lot of fun. The fact that you get to call all of the shots means that you can have things just the way you want them.

I look forward to this spring with a sense of excitement, that I will be part of building something that actually means something to me. That means a lot.

Mercurial Is My New Favorite VCS

2007-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

I am starting a new development project where I will do a lot of coding myself, at least initially. There will most probably be times when I have to work offline – perhaps a litte evening coding while at vacation with my family, definitely the days when I am home because the kids cannot be at kindergarten.

So I had this initial thought – can I make a offline copy of the Subversion repository, make changes to it and merge it back when I come online again?

It turns out that there are solutions for doing that – namely SVK and svn-mirror. However, while searching I around I also realized that there had been a revolution in the VCS world, and no one told me.

In the wake of the BitKeeper mishap, it appears that several groups of people found it their mission to create the next great distributed versioning system. These days we have:

These seem to the more prominent ones, but I am sure you can dig up a few that I have missed.

To make a long story short, I have decided to use Mercurial for my next development effort. In fact I am using Mercurial for versioning all my files. It is ridiculously simple to set up versioning for an existing folder (hg init; hg add) so there is simply no reason not to.

To learn more, I recommend reading this, this and this.

Exchange Love

2007-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

This is funny if you understand Swedish:

When It Just Doesn't Work

2007-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

When everyone else is writing songs about their love for GMail, I am reverting to old school mutt. It is simply the fastest way to read and manage large amounts of mail (The Rails mailing list comes to mind).

However, the default install did not work out for me, it mishandled international characters and formatting which made it unusable. After trying a bunch of options it finally came down to this:

port install mutt-devel -ncurses -pop -imap

Now, of course pop and imap had nothing to do with it, but I am using the most excellent offlineimap so I do not need them.

Gourmet Web Hosting

2007-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

I am trawling for a hosting company and came across this gem of a web page:

The page won’t load at all if Javascript is disabled, has no doctype, won’t render umlauts in Firefox on Mac (and this is Sweden, we actually use them.)

The final nail in the coffin is that it states “Web hosting for gourmets”.

A Fresh View On Printing

2007-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

My three year old son just managed to print something of the Backyardigans web site and yelled out “Dad! We got mail!”

Finally some decent SOA facts

2007-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

Given what I have previously written about SOA, I really like these facts.

Ruby Code Completion in TextMate

2007-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

For some reason, there has been very little fuss over the fact that TextMate now offers code completion for Ruby using the rcodetools gem. It is all still in svn, so you have to check it out manually.

Log for r6455

[NEW] The Ruby bundle now includes an rcodetools-backed completion command on option-escape. This command is capable of very accurate completion for any accessible Ruby objects and methods, without needing to see you type it first (as TextMate’s default completion requires).

Parallels - Crap International Version and Customer Support

2006-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

Once I got my hands on my new MacBook Pro, I did what mostly everybody else does – I bought a copy of Parallels Workstation for Mac. I need it mainly for running local servers so I can do demos of server environments etc.

For various reasons, we (Valtech) bought the license from the local retailer at the same time as the laptop. Big mistake. You see, if you buy Parallels from a local retailer in a non-english speaking country, you get a special, international, version. This version is not downloadable from the site, and has it’s own line of activation keys, so you cannot use the regular downloads from the site.

Now, that should not be a problem, should it? Well, it is. To make a long story short, I could not get the fine feature of NAT networking going. I did all the huffs and puffs of uninstalling, restarting etc, but to no avail. At the same time, the regular version worked swimmingly, apart from the fact that it would not accept my activation key.

So, I figured it was time to contact Parallels support. My idea was that due to the reasons above I could trade my malfunctioning international activation key for a working regular one. I mean, I had paid for their product and could prove it by sending the key I had.

Enter the Kafka world of Parallels customer support. I have to date sent them eight emails with an ever increasing level of anger. The first replies misunderstood my request, thought that I had lost my key and offered me tips on how to get that back. When I finally got my point across Parallels stopped replying. I had to send two more emails to get an answer. They now understood the nature of my request but there was nothing they could do about it. Instead I should take my product back to the local retailer for a refund, and then buy a new license from Parallels directly.

The local retailer Macoteket referred to the swedish importer who will not return calls or emails. And Parallels still won’t give me a new key.

The moral of the story is: if you are about to buy Parallels Workstation for Mac, make damn sure that you buy the standard version. The international one is crap, much like their customer support.

There should still be hope for VMWare on the Mac.

Update: Macoteket eventually refunded our purchase and I rebought the standard version. Too bad it took so much effort.

Web vs. Client

2006-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

For a long time, I’ve wanted to make the switch and start using online apps, but there has always been reasons that have kept me back. It seems that Dion and I share the same opinion on this one, and he sums up the problem very well.

Mail.app and Exchange

2006-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

If I could ask for one thing in Leopard, it would be the ability to answer Exchange invitations directly from Mail.app. As it is now, I either have to use the heavily dysfunctional non-IE Outlook web interface or fire up Entourage for the sole purpose of clicking ‘Accept’.

MBP Core 2 Duo Sweetness

2006-11-22T00:00:00-08:00

This is written on a spanking new MacBook Pro, the 2.33 GHz, 2GB version. Company issued, mind you. Now if that is not a good reason to work for Valtech, I do not know what is.

The main reason I upgraded from my trusty 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook was not speed, it was the possibilities of Parallels. I do quite a bit of evaluating and demoing of server configurations, and having it all available locally is a complete killer.

The first virtual install was Buildix to convince a customer that Subversion and Trac is a viable platform.

But of course it is wroooom-fast. Extremely responsive, and not hot. I currently have it in my lap – no problems what so ever.

Javaforum in Stockholm Wrap Up

2006-11-22T00:00:00-08:00

I spent yesterday evening at Javaforum. Ola Bini held a great presentation of JRuby that really showed what can be accomplished today and what we can expect in the future.

Ola is not only an über hacker, he is a great guy too. When asked what work is done with Ruby in Sweden today, he was kind enough to mention the work we’ve done at Valtech with Rails, which of course got him a well deserved beer later.

The guys from Interface 21 did a so-so job presenting Spring AOP. I might be biased as I have been in AOP-land and left it, but in my opinion their presentation skills were far better than the actual content.

During after-beer Ola and I discussed the state of Java and agreed that the greatest part of the Java platform is the JVM. It will most probably survive Java the language and be a platform for a multitude of languages. It was therefore funny to read Mike Bowlers blog post today about exactly the same thing.

All in all a good evening.

OK Go

2006-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Oh so brilliant.

Alan Francis: Quite the best pop video I’ve seen for AGES: “ OK Go on YouTube

(Via Planet TW – Alumni.)

Enterprisey technology stacks

2006-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Almost all large companies I have come across have some standards regarding the technology stack that they are using.

The main reason behind this is economy, that developers should be able to rotate between projects and that operations should only have to worry about a limited number of software products. Something like that anyway

However nice this seems, it never delivers on its promise. It is much like the Gantt charts – looks nice, promises a lot, delivers zilch. Not counting the enormous upgrade cost when the whole stack is upgraded after 20 years – COBOL anyone?

It is like a bakery standardizing on a given type of flour, salt and sugar and keeping all ovens at the same temperature, so that the bakers are familiar with the environment should they start working in another part of the bakery.

So you have your chocolate cakes baked using the same ingredients as your sour dough bread, and of course the whole thing is a mess. After a while the bakers start changing oven temperatures without telling anyone – not out of rebellion but because they have to. Different cakes are baked in different ways, and software is just the same.

There is hope though; I was delighted to read this interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon:

Developers of our services can use any tools they see fit to build their services. Developers themselves know best which tools make them most productive and which tools are right for the job. If that means using C++, then so be it. Whatever tools are necessary, we provide them, and then get the hell out of the way of the developers so that they can do their jobs.

That is one man that understands development.

While writing this, Matt wonders how to get stuff past the acceptance red tape. I have no good answer. Guerilla coding is the insubordinate way. Nagging for a very long time has worked a few times. But I probably lean towards Alistair Cockburns analogy with the old joke:

Paddy stopped cutting the hedge as the big car drew up beside him and an English visitor enquired, “Could you tell me the way to Balbriggan, Please?” Paddy wiped his brow. “Certainly, sor. If you take the first road to the left… no still that wouldn’t do… drive on for about four miles then turn left at the crossroads… no that wouldn’t do either.” Paddy scratched his head thoughtfully. “You know, sor, if I was going to Balbriggan I wouldn’t start from here at all.”

Meaning, Matt might be in the wrong place to do what he wants to do.

Finally – if an organization should standardize on something it should be protocols. HTTP for example. Build it, make it accessible with external API’s, and implement it the way you see fit. Just like Amazon does it. Loosely coupled large grained components the way EJB’s never were.

RE: The war is over and Linux won

2006-11-14T00:00:00-08:00

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Here in Sweden, Microsoft has an inexplicable stronghold, even in the server room. The last time Craig Larman, Valtechs Chief Scientist, was here he noted that nowhere did he see as large proportion of server side windows as in Sweden – and Denmark.

I don’t know what makes swedes pay for stuff others get for free. Perhaps the high taxes have made us used to money disappearing?

The Four Programmers

2006-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

A must read

(Via Labnotes.)

Funny Foxtrot

2006-11-09T00:00:00-08:00

Todays Foxtrot reaches new levels of geekiness :).

Shuttle Launch Seen From ISS

2006-11-01T00:00:00-08:00

If you haven’t seen these, you’re in for a treat.

Quote of the day

2006-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

I need to remember this one:

Chuck Reid: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.”

(Via Quotes of the Day.)

IBM vs. Amazon

2006-10-24T00:00:00-07:00

For the love of software development – what the hell is this about? IBM, anyone?

IBM vs. Amazon: “ The Internet has been amazingly quiet about IBM’s litigation against Amazon. It feels to me like maybe the biggest Internet story of, well, maybe, ever. I haven’t gone and read the IBM patents yet, because reading patents always depresses me. If the titles mean anything (not always a sure bet), this might mean that IBM has finally managed to figure out how to set up that Internet Tollbooth that we’ve always been afraid of. If you’re interested in ‘Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service’, ‘Storing Data in an Interactive Network’, ‘Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service’, ‘Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities’, or ‘Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue’, apparently IBM thinks you need to pay them for the right to do any of those things. If the courts agree with them, it’s time for me to find a new line of work.

"

(Via ongoing.)

Java is the new C

2006-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

This could actually turn out to be quite important down the road:

Writing Solaris Device Drivers in Java: “‘We present an experimental implementation of the Java Virtual Machine that runs inside the kernel of the Solaris operating system. The implementation was done by porting an existing small, portable JVM, Squawk, into the Solaris kernel. Our first application of this system is to allow device drivers to be written in Java. A simple device driver was ported from C to Java. Characteristics of the Java device driver and our device driver interface are described.’”

(Via OSNews.)

I am also a ...

2006-10-15T00:00:00-07:00

… a talent!

You’re a risk-taker, and you follow your passions. You’re determined to take on the world and succeed on your own terms. Whether in the arts, science, engineering, business, or politics, you fearlessly express your own vision of the world. You’re not afraid of a fight, and you’re not afraid to bet your future on your own abilities. If you find a job boring or stifling, you’re already preparing your resume. You believe in doing what you love, and you’re not willing to settle for an ordinary life.

Talent: 64% Lifer: 23% Mandarin: 49%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

And now I'm a ...

2006-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

I’m a Chevrolet Corvette!

You’re a classic – powerful, athletic, and competitive. You’re all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Fit is a Requirements Tool, Not a Testing Tool

2006-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

Mike Ratliff did a very good presentation on Fit/Fitnesse at Valtech Days. While praising the effects it can have on a development project, he also highlighted some of its quirks such as the ones I’ve complained about earlier.

The main point he made in my mind was when he said that Fit is not a testing tool but a requirements tool. It does not replace your regular acceptance testing tools. According to Mike, the main advantage Fitnesse brings is an increased, and executable, dialogue between customers and developers, and the possibility for customers to work with the spec in a “what if” manner.

I have been going over that thought for two days now and I think I really like it. And it makes me revalue Fitnesse, I definitely see the value of customers being able to work with the tests dynamically. I might just end up writing a blog post these days titled “Why I like Fit” :).

Valtech Days in Dallas

2006-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

I’ll be traveling to Dallas, Texas this weekend to speak about agile documentation at Valtech Days.

I am looking forward to attending other sessions, the rest of the conference is looking really interesting. If you are in the area and want attend the conference, I believe there are still a few seats available.

My local browser war

2006-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

I switch browsers like others switch … something they switch very often. Why does it have to be so hard? All I want is a browser that:

Is small and nimble
Feels like a Mac application
Has good ad blocking support
Handles Flash on demand

Safari locks up too often, and a number of sites do not work with it. Shiira is small and nice, but has no decent ad blocking. Firefox has lousy Mac integration and eats memory like there is no tomorrow. Flock just does not feel ready yet. OmniWeb has clunky ad blocking and is not worth the money.

My current choice is Camino. It is lightweight and Macish but has terrible, CSS-based, out-of-the-box adblocking. But with the help of CamiTools that can be fixed and you also get the flash handled.

Who knows, I might even be using next week.

Could we please stop using "www"

2006-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Why do so many organizations still demand that you add “www.” in front of their domain name when browsing their site?

People, it is so 1997. Typing is boring. Stop using it.

Axis - how bleeding edge can you get?

2006-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

I was trying to get my head around Axis and read this:

Apache Axis2 is built on Apache Axiom, a new high performant, pull-based XML object model that was released two days ago.

Quoting Quote of the Day: Assaf

2006-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Quote of the Day: Assaf: “I never saw a programming language that can cure stupidity, only languages that add safety caps so they look safe, while slowing you down.”

(Via Raganwald.)

Early Extreme Programming: The Original Mac Team

2006-08-15T00:00:00-07:00

From Revolution in The Valley:

Instead of arguing about new software ideas, we actually tried them out by writing quick prototypes, keeping the ideas that worked best and discarding the others. We always had something running that represented our best thinking at the time.

XP 1.0 is better than XP 2.0

2006-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

Alan Francis: Jobs, etc.: “[…] being an old-school XP-er who thinks Kent got right the first time and only dug a deeper hole trying to re-explain himself. ”

Well put. XP 1.0 is mostly brilliant, whereas the additional value of 2.0 could could have been published in a short addendum.

Kent Beck is probably the hero of the geeky part of my life and I am sorry to say that I find the quality of his work receding. Whatever he wrote or spoke about before, it was always empirically based and with a very appealing rebel touch. It seems to me that he is becoming more and more theoretical. For example, I found his keynote at XP2006 about “responsible developing” very abstract.

Let’s hope that the book he is releasing this fall proves me wrong.

(Via Planet TW – Alumni.)

Why I don't like Fit

2006-08-10T00:00:00-07:00

I don’t like Fit. Believe me, I want to like it, I have tried to like it. I mean, Ward Cunningham created it for crying out loud, the man is a genius, so I am probably just missing something – right?

Every time I have looked at Fit, I always like the parts that handle column fixtures. They are clean and easy to read and generally does a really good job. Buth then we get to weird cousin Row Fixture which is not at all that easy to read and uncle Action Fixture which just won’t stop and finally family FitLibrary which does all good things but are utterly unreadble – which probably is due to my lack of experience, but then again wasn’t this intended for non-programmers?

Geoff Bache told me at XP2006 to look into FitLibrary and Erik Lundh suggested that I read the book on Fit. So now I have done just that, and I still don’t like Fit. As a language that is.

What the book did explain clearly, which I find the truly awesome part of Wards invention, is the idea of executable requirements written in advance. It is soo XP that you just have to love it. And I finally get why you should test the logic layer and not through the UI. Happy now?

But the book did not address all my concerns. It does not talk about the problems with version control; if you choose to work with Excel based Fit tests you will not be able to track changes as they are binary files. Neither does it suggest how Fitnesse pages are to be kept in version control. Also, all Fit formats are hard to follow if you track changes by commit messages by email.

The Fit syntax is in my opinion a table based DSL for writing acceptance tests. How many other programming languages do you regularly use that are table based? Excel? It is awesome for column based calculations which is the same as Column Fixtures, which I like. I alreay wrote that. But the rest is just … ugly.

A better solution in my opinion would be a Markdown based documentation format, where code formatted text, the indented one, is executed as tests just like tables in Fit. Could probably easily be turned into a Wiki if needed. For testdata I would use Yaml. Now if I could just find the time :)

Kent Beck on Ruby

2006-08-09T00:00:00-07:00

I always knew one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn’t know it would be called Ruby.

— Kent Beck

Blaine Buxton links to this quote at ozmmdotorg."

(Via Mike Bowler’s thoughts.)

Word. Why?

2006-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

Why in the name of one trillion unused functions of which the one you actually use doesn’t work can something so completely dysfunctional as Word ever become so successful?

Update: Yes, a lot of aggravation was the cause of the rant above, and yes, I actually have to use it as Pages can’t handle .dot files or quite complex table based company headers and footers.

Different worlds

2006-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

I am reading Cal Henderson’s Building Scalable Web Sites. It covers a lot of topics, some of which I am closely familiar with such as version control.

Cal does however have suggestions for situations I have never been in, in particular I do love this quote from the part on how to handle hardware platform growth: “When you get to the point of having a few thousand servers […]”. Never been there.

XP2006

2006-06-19T00:00:00-07:00

I am currently in Oulo, Finland, attending XP2006. I have so far attended really excellent tutorials by the Poppendiecks and Mike Cohn. I am writing this waiting for a session on DSL to start.

This is by far the most social events I have been to, which probably is helped by there only being 200+ people here.

One of those days ... ?

2006-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

On the train to work this morning I proudly realized that my PowerBook had an uptime of 30 days. The fact that Macs can do this is so weird to my non-mac colleagues that they almost don’t believe it.

Well, the God of Failing Computers saw me in my hubris, and promptly crashed my computer, just like that, and would not let it restart. It finally showed some signs of life when I got to the office and plugged it in.

I am a big fan of geektool, and use it to display console.log. This was a good thing because I noticed a whole lot of lines saying that the /tmp directory was missing. When I looked into it, /private/tmp, which /tmp symlinks to, was indeed missing and that caused a lot of mayhem.

I recreated the directory manually, and things have been smooth since. But it was quite a scare.

After that my day has, shall we say, not been smiling at me. Let’s really, really hope that this is not an indicator for tonights big game against Paraguay.

Markdown based S5 in TextMate

2006-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

Happy happy joy joy

(Via TextMate Bundles (svn).)

Cedric Still Doesn't Get Agile

2006-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

Update: Martin Fowler pointed to Jeff Langrs response. It seems Cedric did not give us the full picture. I have edited my post accordingly

~~After attending a less than stellar presentation on TDD,~~Cedric Beust confuses TDD with “Agile” and goes on to tell the world that agile is not good. Let’s have a look, shall we?

First of all, tests are not specs. Not even close. Somebody in the audience was quick to give a counter-example to this absurd claim by using a numeric example (‘how do you specify an exponentiation function with a test?’)

I would not use unit tests for specs. Automatic acceptance tests on the other hand is really nice if you have a customer/product owner that will work with you. Now Cedric has previously stated that he does not really care for the labelling of tests (“However, when I write a test, I don’t really care if it’s a unit test or a functional test”) so that of course makes it harder for him.

And hey, testing an exponentiation function? How about providing test data with given parameters and answers? It would be a prime candidate for a FIT-test by the way.

Relying on tests as a design specification is lazy and unprofessional because you are only testing a very small portion of the solution space of your application (and of course, your tests can have bugs).

Why would you only test “a very small portion of the solution space of your application”?

Tests also fall extremely short of having the expressiveness needed to articulate the subtle shades that a real specification need to cover to be effective.

This is my main gripe with Cedrics rant. He seems to be completely oblivious to the great emphasis on customer interaction that agile methods make, which promotes a two way dialogue.

A specification written in a document is a one way communication. Even in high school psychology I learned how much more information was conveyed in a spoken dialogue than in writing.

This claim is part of a broader and more disturbing general Agilist attitude that is usually articulated like ‘Your code is your spec’, along with some of its ridiculous corollaries such as ‘Documentation gets out of date, code never does’.

What is so ridiculous with the last statement? I have never been involved in a large scale project where the documentation did not get out date.

As for the code being your spec: when you have code and documentation, and the latter does not correctly describe the former, it is out of date, which will you trust? And what do you read to know what the real world looks like? Map, meet terrain.

I am currently getting acquainted with a brand new project that is not even very big, and while I understand Java fairly well, there is no doubt in my mind that for ten minutes I spend trying to understand how a certain part of the application works, a five-line comment would have given me this knowledge in ten seconds.

Sure, if it is up to date, which you will have to read the code to find out. My general rule: if you feel the need, comment on why the code does what it does if it is not obvious. If you feel the need to comment on what the code does, the code is not clear enough. Refactor until done.

Very often, Agilists simply forget that their job is to produce software that satisfies customers, not software that meets some golden software engineering scale.

Again, this is simply ridiculous – all agile methods try to get customers as close as possible to produce just what they want. Anyone even remotely knowledgeable with agile methods knows that.

Frankly, it takes all of ten minutes to explain Test-Driven Development to a developer who’s never heard of it: ‘Write a test that fails and doesn’t compile. Make it compile. Then make it

I actually find it quite hard to get developers to grasp TDD; people find testing something that does not exist confusing. This is of course the basis for behavior driven development, but let’s just be happy for Cedric now.

Some might find it picky, but leaving out ‘refactor’ in the TDD loop tells me that you somehow has not grasped the concept completely. But then Cedric might throw in a comment instead :).

‘What should we test now?’ ‘How about: if we pop an empty stack, we get an exception’ <a bit embarrassed> ‘Mmh, no, let’s not do that’ <hand waving, look down at notes and proceeds while happily ignoring the other raised hands>

~~This is quite easy to test, so I do not see why he could not add it.~~ Read Jeffs answer

1 Stack s = new Stack();
2 
3 try {
4   s.pop();
5   fail("Should not get here");
6 }
7 catch (Exception e){
8   //Ignore
9 }

But I am dead sure Cedric knows this ~~, too bad the presenter did not.~~

To be honest, I am becoming quite suspicious of Agile practices for that reason: all the presentations I have attended and books that I have read are always using toy implementations as examples. Stack, List, Money, Bowling… enough already!

Ignoring the fact that Cedric again confuses TDD and agile, he does have a point. Too many TDD presentations uses examples that are way too simplistic. They should point out the need of a modular architecture, and the fact that using TDD actually helps you get a clean, high cohesion – low coupling architecture.

And please, avoid smug and useless answers such as: ‘A lot of the classes I have to test are hard to isolate, do you have any advice regarding mocks?’ ‘Well, if you had started with TDD in the first place, you wouldn’t be having this problem today’.

It is certainly not a helpful answer, but it is true nonetheless.

Fundamentally, I am disturbed by the Agilists' dishonesty when it comes to presenting their arguments. They offer you all these nice ideas such as Test-Driven Development and Pair Programming but they never — ever — disclose the risks and the downsides. To them, Agility is a silver bullet that is applicable in all cases with no compromises.

Just to give one example, “Practices of an Agile Programmer” clearly states that agile is not for everyone.

The truth is that these practices come at a price, and for a lot of organizations, the price gets high very quickly. Agile development will never go far if its proponents keep ignoring these organizations and make condescending comments to its members.

Here Cedric is spot on. Yay!

I like Test-Driven Development. I really do, and I’m fortunate enough to work on a project that lets me use TDD most of the time. But the truth is: at times, I don’t do TDD because implementing a feature quickly is more important than a fuzzy feeling. And I’m also aware that TestNG is an open source project with less than five developers, all of them on the bleeding edge and aware of the latest advances in software engineering. And this is my main beef with Agilists: I strongly suspect that most of them are spending their time on open source projects with like-minded fellows, but none of them have any experience what companies whose survival depends on shipping software have to go through to organize huge code bases growing thousands of lines of code every day under the combined push of hundreds of a developers, all with their personal background, education and bias.

My main beef with people opposing agility is that they basically say that too many of the developers out there are morons who cannot perform unless closely supervised and given clear instructions, and that there is no hope that that will ever change. It is a weird combination of pessimism and elitism

Now Cedric has a history of not liking agile methods, and that is fine with me. Whatever makes him happy. But his retoric in this case is like watching somebody who does not know karate perform a round house kick – lots of power and effort but misses the target completely.

Upgraded and imported

2006-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

After upgrading to the latest WordPress release, I realized that I could import my early blog posts from the FreeRoller days using RSS. It was a lot of fun to read some of the old ones again and remember what was discussed four years ago. Prevayler anyone?

Least wanted feature of IntelliJ 6.0 announced

2006-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: Built-in Struts Support: “Starting from release 6.0, IntelliJ IDEA will provide Struts support out-of-the-box. The functionality is added by Struts Assistant plugin that is now bundled to IntelliJ IDEA. So you’ll get it without any additional download and installation”

Why?

(Via IntelliJ IDEA Blog.)

Dan North: How simple is too simple?

2006-05-29T00:00:00-07:00

Dan North: How simple is too simple?: “Kent Beck advises us to do ‘the simplest thing that could possibly work’, but this is often mistaken for ‘the first thing I could possibly think of’ or even ‘the only thing I know’”

Well put.

(Via Planet TW.)

Don't trust the non-programmers to design systems

2006-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

I read an article the other day about a surgeon who said that in order to stay a good surgeon, he had to perform operations on a regular basis. Which sounds quite reasonable right?

Ponder that the normal thing for experienced surgeons was to not take part in the actual operation. Instead, they analyze the patient and decide what should be done in great detail, creating diagrams explaining the situation.

The actual surgery is then performed by somebody else, while the surgeon architect at best is standing by in the vicinity, but is probably somewhere else planning the next operation.

It does not work that way. Why do we in the software industry let people who do not program design systems?

English version of my article on REST vs SOAP

2006-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

As I’ve received a few requests for it, I’ve been given permission by my employer Valtech to republish an english version of my article on REST vs. SOAP here at my blog.

Is Sun making a comeback?

2006-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

I am seeing signs in the sky that Sun is making a comeback.

Textdrive is switching from FreeBSD to Solaris
Rumors that ZFS might be ported to Mac OS X
Tim Brays presence and statements on the RoR podcast from Canada on Rails
Sun makes smart moves like supporting PostgreSQL

And not one of them is related to Java.

before_filter and with_scope

2006-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

I will be speaking on the Rails Recipes Meetup here in Stockholm tomorrow. My topic will be on recipe 28 in Chads excellent book, how you can use with_scope to DRY your code.

Whilst I have looked quite deeply into the subject – it is quite small actually – there is one thing I have yet to find out. Chad mentions that you can use wrap your actions with scoping using a before_filter.

The thing is that the author of the patch for nested scopes provides a plugin to enable just that, but he uses an around filter which utilizes funky metaprogramming to do just that. He has a whole blog entry about it.

I’ve asked twice in the IRC channel without any answer, and I’ve posted a question on the books forum.

Does anybody know if a before_filter can be used?

Thomas Looy: How Long is a Piece of String?

2006-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

Thomas Looy: How Long is a Piece of String?: “– Use working software as the only measure of the progress on a project (no more 90% completed tasks);

Measure using smaller sized tasks. Smaller tasks give you better measures than larger ones and will also give you a larger sampling of measures that can be used for meaningful statistical evaluations. Smaller tasks are also completed sooner and therefore give you measurements sooner that you can begin to use to extrapolate to a meaningful project complete date."

(Via Planet TW.)

Hear, hear.

Why REST is good and SOAP is evil

2006-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

On behalf of my employer Valtech, I’ve written a piece on why I dislike SOAP, and favor REST. I originally wrote it in english, but the published version is in swedish.

For some REST preaching in hum-humpty-dum-dee-dum'ish go to

http://valtech.se/templates/JobSubPage.aspx?id=2582.

Update: As suggested by people more intelligent than myself, anchor tags really should have text inside them to be useful :).

Howard Lewis Ship Is Funny When Angry

2006-03-19T00:00:00-08:00

Bitten by IE once again: “Side note: I talk a lot about the importance of Feedback, that tools should clearly identify problems and guide you to solutions. On a grading scale of A – F, IE would receive the grade take out back and put down like a rabid dog on this issue. And many others.”

(Via Tapestry and HiveMind.)

It is time to stop listening to James Gosling

2006-03-11T00:00:00-08:00

It seems that Sun is using James Gosling to spread FUD regarding any technology that competes with Java. He created Java, and he is a techie and techies have high standards and are always honest – right?

He came out slinging against Harmony a year ago, and now he is at it again with Ruby and PHP:

PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems, but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.

He is either grossly misinformed or he is making things up. Either way it is time to stop listening. Too bad.

(Via Loud Thinking.)

Hidden Desktop Manager Gems

2006-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

By accident I stumbled upon the alt-command-O keyboard combination which allows you to move the current window to a given Desktop Manager virtual desktop – or to place it on all of them. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough, but I have not seen this mentioned in any documentation.

This was the only thing I thought was missing in Desktop Manager. I find it really useful for Adium and Skype.

Powerpoint corruption and lies

2006-02-21T00:00:00-08:00

Powerpoint corruption and lies Originally uploaded by mahnve.

I am so intensely mad right now. I have spent the afternoon working on a presentation I am to give at lunch time tomorrow.

To make it short: Powerpoint crashes, and takes my file with it in the fall. I can’t open it anymore.

I am redoing my presentation right now – in Keynote.

Coming up with the title of this entry cheered me up a little. You have to know your New Order to understand it.

Release numbering

2006-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

Cameron states an excellent release numbering system, coincidentally the same as we used back in the days at Lecando:

A ‘dot-zero’ release (like 3.0) is allowed to drop deprecated APIs, change an API in a manner that could break binary compatibility, or change the JDK version requirement.

A ‘dot-X’ release (like 3.1) is only allowed to add features and APIs, but should not break any binary compatibility.

A ‘dot-X-dot-Y’ release (like 3.0.1) is a service pack, designed to correct specific problems, and not to introduce new features.

Over time we’ve found that this system works extraordinarily well because of its simplicity, although it’s not going to get us to version 10.0 anytime soon. (At least I hope not, as that would mean that we were breaking compatibility too often!)

This numbering scheme disqualifies the ones I dislike the most: the weirdly named .5 releases that adds a lot of functionality, but not enough for the powers that be to consider it a full “dot-zero” release.

(Via /dev/null.)

Larry: Chuck Norris Facts

2006-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

Really funny: A list of facts about Chuck Norris

(Via Planet Ruby on Rails.)

Javapolis: Running out of time

2005-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

I have 16 minutes left of my prepaid wireless connection, and I don’t feel like paying more for it. I have covered a few sessions for which the amount of text is too much for the network to handle, so I’ll post it when I get home. I’m right now listening to Scott W Ambler who is really an excellent speaker. More on him later.

Javapolis: Mule

2005-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

Mule is a very different beast to me. It seems to be a swallow anything messaging bus where you can message anything anywhere using any protocol anytime. It seems really cool – I just wish I knew what to use if for. This is not at all to say that it has no use, it is just me that has not worked with anything similar before.

BTW: Demos involving messaging are almost always cool.

Javapolis. EJB3 Persistence

2005-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

Linda DeMichiel together with Mike Keith again walking us through the new EJB3 API. I must say that I like the idea of the one, true, unified O/R mapping framework. Also providing a decent set of default values id really smart – the table mapping is reminiscent of Rails. I wonder what all the app server vendors think of the fact that it can be run outside of EJB? This is another reason that you most probably can get by with Spring in most cases which really must upset the app server vendors and especially JBoss.

Weird Wifi Access

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

The wifi access here at Javapolis is really weird. Surfing the web works like a charm, so does receiving mail. Sending mail seems to be a hard thing to do, as it works half the time. However, when refreshing NetNewsWire, I get no updates. That combined with the fact that I can’t post with MarsEdit makes me suspect that Proximus has some really funky settings for their wireless network.

The Wifi Access is Getting Worse

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

This is a short test to see if I can post at all :(

Must ... have ... power ...

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

As I am constantly on the outlook for power outlets, Pragmatic Andys post on Travelling with power was really funny.

Battery life: the new frontier.

So true

(Via /\ndy’s Blog.)

Javapolis: XOM Design Principles

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

XOM Design Principles with Eliotte Rusty Harold. Eliotte is a very good opionionated speaker. While I do not agree with his view on the topic on humane interfaces, he does present some really good ideas.

Quote to remember: “One out of three untested lines of code has bugs.”

Javapolis: Wicket

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

Wicket provides a really excellent programming paradigm – plain HTML templates, really nice Java and no XML what so ever. My feelings are mixed though, as it is component based with weird URL’s. Also it uses the session by default. I really have to think about this one. I’m not that big a fan of component based web frameworks as I think that they are abtract away too much of the real world of stateless requests and responses.

Javapolis Wednesday

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

Javapolis is held in a combined conference center / movie theater complex. This makes for very comfortable chairs, really good audio and no daytime sunlight what so ever. So far the talks I’ve been to have been really good.

It seems that my problem with wifi jas something to do with size – I can send short emails, but not long. Also, it seems that I have to keep my posts short to get them to my server. This for â‚¬20/24 hrs :(

Javapolis: WebWork

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

This talk had Jason Carreira presenting WebWork. It was good getting information regarding the WebWork/Struts merger straight from the source.

In the Q&A session, people asked a lot of questions about tool support. This surprises me – why do people find this a necessity? Are people actually like Bill Roth of BEA who said in his keynote that he can’t write XML manually? Of course, he sells tools.

Javapolis: Spring Update

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

The room was packed when Javaland superstar Rod Johnson presented the new features in Spring 2.0. The new XML tags are quite nice as they reduce the amount of configuration code.

Rod mentioned that the JPA implementation in Glassfish will basically be TopLink out of the box, making this a truly usable reference implementation.

Javapolis: Spring Caching

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

I’m a little disappointed with this one as I didn’t learn that much from it. As I managed to get one of the coveted seats next to a power outlet i am still here though :).

Javapolis: Keynote Thursday

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

Apart from the RAD race price thingy, Graham Hamilton of Sun presented Mustang and Dolphin, the upcoming Java releases. What cought my interest the most is that Mustang will include Rhino, and Dolphin will provide a completely new byte code format for dynamic languages. Could it be that this is also related to BEA’s future support of “languages that might take off”?

Javapolis: Java Puzzles

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

The first talk I attended was More Java Puzzles with Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter. While I normally find these kind of questions way too C++-ish (“can you tell what this piece of unreadable code does?”) Joshua and Neal presents it very well. I got four out of eight right by the way.

Javapolis: EJB3

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

EJB intro with Linda de Michiel. I remember listening to Linda presenting EJB2 at JavaOne 2000 saying that now they had fixed everything that was wrong with EJB1. I must say that is quite a deja-vu listening to her talking about how EJB3 fixes everything that was wrong with EJB2.

Javapolis: Bitter Java Server Faces

2005-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

This was another packed session, even though according to raised hands less than 10% of the audience actually uses JSF. Maybe people where there gathering arguments to not use it? The talk was very detailed and I can’t help think that JSF seems to be incredibly complex. One advice to get JSF right was to “avoid HTTP thinking”. That is the exact reason why I don’t like component based web frameworks.

Javapolis: Access Wifi at the Metropolis

2005-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

If you have a Mac and want to use the Proximus wifi at the Metropolis, Safari or Firefox won’t help. I got through using Omniweb.

Intial report from Javapolis

2005-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

So I arrived yesterday to Antwerpen, and have just sat through the keynote. It was basically a shameless plug battle between Sun and BEA. The most interesting thing was Bill Roth talking about WebLogic “in the coming years” supporting “languages that might take off”. This is in line with what Jon wrote some time ago. Rails on WebLogic? Could be interesting, if not for no other reason but to gain a wider acceptance for Rails.

Re: Humane Interface

2005-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

Martin Fowler writes: “If you only try to provide the minimum, you end up with multiple clients duplicating code for common cases.”

Or one billion jakarta.commons packages

(Via Martin Fowler’s Bliki.)

Some Very Basic Code Standards

2005-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

Whilst on the topic of aggravation:

 1 /**
 2  * Returns the url for the link
 3  * @return the url for the link
 4  * @param oFooUtil the foo util
 5  * @param sSomething the something
 6  * @param iAge the age
 7  */
 8 public String getRelationPath(FooUtil oFooUtil, String sSomething, int iAge) {
 9  ...
10 }

Do not name your methods deceptively and keep the correct information in the javadoc only
Do not use hungarian notation. It is extra useless in Java as it is an object oriented language which means that many, many variables will be prefixed with o.
Do not comment the obvious

What's Wrong With People?

2005-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

When parking my car today at the supermarket to take care of the weekend grocery shopping, I noticed this guy returning to his car that was parked in a spot reserved for disabled people. He was obviously not disabled, and his car did not sport the sticker required in Sweden to use handicap parking spots.

It really gets to me when people think that rules applies to everybody but themselves and handicapped people be damned, so I walk up to him and tells him that he seems to have lost his handicapped parking permit. This guy, in his fifties, loses it and basically tells me to go to hell, get a life and drop dead.

What the hell? How come people become so narcissistic that not only do they act totally immorally, but when told about it they have the balls to say that I am wrong?

Does this happen elsewhere, or is this a Swedish phenomena?

Really good books

2005-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

While at Lecando, I was quite proud of the library of computer books we assembled oveer the years.

These days as a consultant for Valtech, my employer does indeed have a library, but as I am almost never at the office it is not really accessible.

I have therefore started to buy the books that I find necessary for my daily digital life out of my own pocket so that I can have access to them whenever I want. These are the ones I have got so far:

While looking at the list I couldn’t help but noticing that I really like the Pragmatic books. I am equally surprised that I have so far not felt the urgent need for any of the O'Reilly titles

Continually switching

2005-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

After getting the PowerBook, I’ve made quite a few additional switches in my digital life:

Mac Mini instead of a PC with Ubuntu Linux at home. After a few weeks with a Mac at work, I could no longer live without one at home, so whoops, there it is: a Mac Mini. It is oh so quiet.
NetNewsWire instead of Bloglines. I have not visited my previous darling Bloglines once since I started using NetNewsWire
TextMate instead if JEdit, Vi, Emacs … it rocks.
iTunes and iPod instead of rsync and iRiver. I’m not addicted – right :)

Agile GUI Development

2005-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

These days when almost every body is doing the agile thing, there is still one part of the software development process that is missing out – the design of the GUI.

Too often some snazzy web design studio is brought in, thumb rings and all, to produce mockups in Photoshop. These are then given to the programmers to implement to the last pixel.

I am sorry, but this is the waterfall process straight up. And it does not help that you implement it page by page or even component by component – that is just dividing the predefined work into smaller bits.

If you want to be truly agile, bring the usability people into the development process. Have them work iteratively as well in accordance to the stories being implemented, making paper prototypes the first round and refining in the coming iterations.

Now I can hear all the usability people go “But we need to see the whole picture”. That argument is what everybody has had when resisting the agile change. Remember, project leaders could not do agile development – how could they steer the project if they would not know where the project was going?

I have full faith in the usability community that they also can make the switch.

How to make the LG V9910 region free

2005-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

If you ever get a LG combined DVD/VCR and want to get it region free, look no further than LG RegionFree. Worked like a charm.

Ruby and MySQL on Tiger

2005-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

Lots of people have had problems with Ruby and MySQL. The ever so pragmatic Rails book links to a popular solution which involves installing the MySQL gem and specifying the path to the MySQL. This did not do the trick for me, and I’ve failed trying different alternatives after that. Today I came across PJ Hyett’s idea of installing Ruby-MySQL from source. It worked like a charm.

I'm going to Javapolis

2005-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

I’ll be attending the conference part of Javapolis. Anyone else?

Why Scrum is not enough

2005-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

These days when I talk to people who claim to have adopted agile development, they say they use Scrum. While standup meetings and iterative development with regular demos are good, it is simply not enough. Chris Brown posted the strip below which sums it up pretty good:

(Via Planet TW.)

How to best develop half of a web application?

2005-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

At work, the task at hand is extending an existing J2EE based product. This means that half of the .war that is to be deployed is hands-off, and the other half is written by us.

The problem I am having is how to get a productive environment. Unfortunately the products file organization is a mess, so there is no way to have a version checked into the version control system as it never would survive an upgrade. Also the deployed app needs to be initialized with a lot of data that is – surprise – saved both in a database and on the filesystem, meaning no easy test db setup.

The developers who have been in the project for a while have used an army of symbolic links to connect the dots, probably inspired by the products overgenerous use of such. But I am not content with what I’ve seen, but I cant really point my finger at what to do. Anyone who has done anything similar?

Precious

2005-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

I submitted my soul to iTunes an hour ago, as Depeche Mode so far has released their new single on the net only. Since I’m an avid loather of DRM this was not an easy step, but I really couldn’t help myself.

The song? Classic Mode stuff – really, really good.

Google Talk - it's hackable

2005-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

Google Talk is the thing to mention today so why should I be different? I really hope that it catches on, as it is based on Jabber, which is open, meaning hackable without resorting to reverse engineering and hoping that the protocol does not change overnight as is the case with MSN and ICQ for example.

Presence awareness and IM integration in various contexts can provide some really cool features and is considered a killer feature by IBM in their Workplace product for instance. (A truly crappy piece of software as a whole though)

Finally that Jabber plugin in CruiseControl might come to real use.

Mmm ... Powerbook.

2005-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

Wow. I am back in Mac land, which I left in 1996 when I started my career at IBM and turned into a PC drone. Now, after four days of pure Mac joy, it feels like I am never going back.

This also goes to show what a cool company Valtech is. I mentioned this to Jon who got really jealous. Apparently the Thoughtworkers get company issued Dells and all Mac stuff is paid for by themselves.

My New Job At Valtech

2005-07-29T00:00:00-07:00

I am really excited about my new position as a consultant at Valtech. After selling software products for five years, I am ready to go back into consulting.

Valtech Stockholm is very strong Java shop and really into agile methodologies. This was the cause of my intitial interest with them. The thing that finally got me though was the interview process which really impressed me. I certainly was not sure that I would get through it myself, and I figured that if everybody working there had passed it, they must be a really exceptional group of people. That impression has intially been confirmed by spending a day and evening with them at a conference.

As my wife also got a really cool new job, this fall is looking very bright indeed.

Leaving Lecando

2005-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve spent five good years at Lecando. When I started out, we had \~25 employees. After a year we cut down to 14. After another cut half a year later, we held on to a pretty steady 10 until this spring showed to be terrible if you where in the business of selling addons to IBM Workplace.

Lecando will be employing 3.5 people this fall, none of them being me. I have been thinking about getting a new job for about a year now, so I am really looking forward to the fall and my new employment. More on that later.

I wish Acke, Johan, Behe and Jimmy all the best for the future.

Screencasts with Wink

2005-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve tried a few tools to do screencasts, my favorite so far is Wink.

Notable features:

Easy to use
Manual capturing
Insertion of text into images
Multiple export formats

Why does Sun not provide a Java Communications API for Linux

2005-06-14T00:00:00-07:00

Why on earth doesn’t Sun provide a Java Communications API for Linux?

Good thing IBM does.

Gnome Panel Applet for Luntbuild

2005-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve created a Gnome Panel Applet to monitor Luntbuild builds. This is basically a spike to try out the Ruby-GTK2 library and the Luntbuild API but it works so I might as well release it.

Download

Widgets monitoring automated builds

2005-06-03T00:00:00-07:00

Mike Clark at Pragmatic Automation blogs about a new CruiseControl widget to monitor CruiseControl Builds by using the new Tiger widget thingys.

Funny enough that I’ve spent some time meddling with something similar for Luntbuild and Gnome. But I have to say, that as far as graphics go, I have some catching up to do.

The power of the OpenOffice2 file format

2005-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

The Oasis document format is really cool. My wife who is an architect (the original house building version, that is) – had created a presentation in PowerPoint with a lot of images, and the resulting file was 100M+.

I opened that file in OpenOffice2 and saved it as an .odt file. Then I unzipped it, bulk opened all images in the Gimp and changed their resolution. Finally I zipped it all up, an the presentation was now 8M and looking just the same. Ah, the power of openess.

Linking Courage

2005-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

I was looking up DWR and noticed that they provided links to similar projects. It occured to me that that is usually a sign of a quality project, having the self esteem / humility to show the way to alternatives.

What is Gosling talking about?

2005-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

I most certainly hope that James Gosling was quoted out of context in this article. The way he talks about open-source is comes out very … Balmery, which is disturbing. Why is he talking about open source as a place where “any old person could check in stuff” – that is not the way it is done and he knows it. He should know it. Which is also why enterprise customers are not running away from well-kept open source projects like Linux and Tomcat.

Not doing the “open source is the one true path” dance, let me still be very clear:

Server side Java would be nowhere near the size it has today were it not for the open source community.
I care about being legally clean, and it is not a nightmare (Disclaimer – I live and work in Sweden.). Gosling joins Bill and Steve using the GPL to scare people, and it is just stupid. We all know not to use GPL’d code in our commercial products and it is such a relief then that the vast majority of the server side libraries are not licensed under the GPL.

This really made me upset in the “somebody I thought I knew did something really wrong”-way . For Gosling to come out with this blubbering, he really must be concerned over Harmony.

Me and my X40

2005-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

Some time ago I got a new IBM X40. It is now running Ubuntu Hoary and I must say that it is really an excellent piece of hardware. Everything but the SD card reader works out of the box, which of course also goes to show what a great distro Ubuntu is. Get'em both.

Eventum Issue / Bug Tracking System

2005-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

Eventum Issue / Bug Tracking System has to be the best kept secret in issue tracking. I might not get out as much as I should, but I had not heard of it until the other day.

I did spend some time the other day looking at Bugzilla, which we used to use in house before the days of JIRA, to see if they had made any improvements and fixed that god-awful search screen. (They hadn’t)

In the process, I came across Eventum by chance and since it is a MySQL product I figured it ought to be interesting and installed it on my laptop to give it a go.

The thing is, I really like it. It has the same power user feeling that Request Tracker has, but is more aimed at a development environment. We are happy JIRA customers at Lecando, but Mike and the guys could definitely pick up one or two things from Eventum. My favorite thing is that Eventum uses colored rows when listing issues to indicate the status of the issue, which really gives you a quick overview.

JIRA’s icons look nice, but they do not provide a good overview. Look at the ‘Roadmap’ screen to see what I mean.

Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu

2005-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

I feel I just have to try Ruby on Rails, I mean everybody else is doing it and I don’t want to feel left out.

So I started setting it up on my X40 which runs Ubuntu. There is still no deb available for it, you have to use the Ruby Gems system to set it up. I dont know if this is good or bad – it seems like a Ruby CPAN and my feelings towards Perls CPAN are mixed. I once ended up with two Perls on a Red Hat box when using it to set up Request Tracker. Let’s hope Gems works better.

To start out I had to apt-get rdoc and libzlib-ruby. After that it is installed. Whohoo. What now?

Ok rails ~/work/rortest … Bang. Some dependency is missing. Let’s search Synaptic to see what could possibly make it tick.

libwebrick maybe? Nope.

libmysql-ruby? Nope.

eruby? No.

libdbi-mysql. Noo.

libwhatever-ruby. Nothing works.

Maybe there’s some info on their site? Hmm … there are instructionson how to install it on Debian unstable which involves apt-getting the all ruby libraries known to man – but who cares – let’s try that.

Whohoo! It works. Let’s see some of the Ruby love in the browser then – it is indeed there.

Ok. Now for the database tweaking. Why three databases? I guess I'l find out.

Yaml is really, really nice.

Ok, according to the site, all I have left is to develop my Rails application, so I guess that is what I will do. Wish me luck.

Update: There are now instructions for how to set up Rails on Ubuntu.

Hackers and Painters

2005-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

Like so many others, I have read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. And, surprise, I find it highly recommendable, like everybody else. The following are a few thoughts about I jotted down while reading:

Why, oh why, in the name of mad page flipping are the footnotes placed in the back?
I am surprised that Pete McBreen of Software Craftmanship fame is not mentioned – in my opinion they are making the same case against “Computer Science”
Contrary to common XP belief Paul Graham favors code ownership. Quite unusual in this day and age, and interesting – I need to reflect on it more.
His thoughts on developers needing empathy are spot on. Not only for the end users but also for the later developers. It is also better to tell a developer to see things from somebody elses view and document accordingly instead of having him follow the RUP Deliverable Tablets of Stone without reflection.
Hosting your own web application – I wish. Companies today still see the intranet as something that should be inside their own, very physical, walls. And I can’t blame them – at Lecando we run our own JIRA, Confluence, SugarCRM etcetera in house. It hit me though when thinking about this – what would we choose if Atlassian offered a hosted JIRA at a competitive price? What if that was the only way they offered their solution? Would JIRA be developed faster since they did not have to worry about releases and customers maintenance problems, or would they spend that time managing the server park?
Paul Graham makes a very strong case for capitalism. Whatever your view on politics – I believe that the starting part of the Wealth chapter describing the difference between wealth and money should be taught to all.
The parts about Lisp are quite tiresome. And regarding Perl as a higher level language than Java? Please.
With “Partisans of permissive languages ridiculing the other [preventive languages such as Java – my note] as "B&D” (bondage and discipline) languages" Paul Graham wonders what “prevent”-style people say of Perl? At Lecando we normally just say “Perl …” and shake our heads.
Paul Graham has a slightly dismissive tone when talking about stuff like object orientation, static typing etcetera which can get on your nerves if you are a Java head.
I get the feeling that he sees Java people the way Java people see VB people. Prejudice! :)
He suggests that pointy-haired bosses select Java for programming projects. Since I would select Java for many programming project, would that make me pointy-haired?
He does explain, perhaps unintentionally, Javas success by emphasizing the importance of existing libraries for a programming language to succeed. Hibernate, Lucene et cetera anyone?.
When he mentions the importance of efficiency and the ability to rewrite code I believe he is right. But, I can be dead wrong, I imagine Paul being a Emacs hacker, and if you still only use Emacs, it is sure easier to write code in Python, Ruby etc. But in Java land there is this neat thing called refactoring IDE’s – Eclipse, IDEA and the lot. My problem is that it is hard returning to Emacs after using a code-completing, refactoring IDE like IDEA.
I guess I have to learn Lisp to see what the fuss is all about

Edit: Fixed typos

Fit Testing - how to translate it to Swedish?

2005-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

I’m spending some time getting into Fit style acceptance testing and I’m liking what I see. My biggest problem so far is translation.

For all you non-Swedish-speaking out there, most techie lingo gets a very crude translation, basically by not translating it at all and using the english word as is. So a unit test in english is also a unit test in swedish.

But I’ve bit my tongue at least 10 times today saying “Fit tests” in swedish. Basically by not translating it I’m saying what I believe is considered the dirtiest word in the swedish langauge.

Any ideas for translations, swedish people out there?

Lavalamps in action

2005-03-30T00:00:00-08:00

Lavalamps in action Originally uploaded by mahnve.

We’ve finally got our act together and got ourselves a pair of lavalamps. They are controlled by CruiseControl and green equals all tests passed.

When reading about other people doing this, they say that these things need to be turned off every ten hours or so. The only warning notice on ours, bought at Clas Ohlson, says to not drink the fluid – duh.

Famous Leader and Movie Test

2005-03-29T00:00:00-08:00

Now – is this good or bad?

What Famous Leader Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com What Classic Movie Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com

Oh man ... I'll continue buying ecological eggs

2005-03-05T00:00:00-08:00

I saw this on Boing Boing and it is just staggering what people can do. As mentioned you have to watch the video clip. And think about what you buy.

Testing mo:Blog

2005-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

I’m in the subway on my way to my moms boyfriends daughters birthday party, using the time to test blogging from my Palm. Seems to work quite decently actually.

WordPress 1.5

2005-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5 and the upgrade was really a breeze. The problem with the new default theme is that it is probably too good looking – people won’t change it and my blog will look like everybody elses. Dammit.

Saying hello to our old friend Ant

2005-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

Alef Arendsen ponders on whether to switch from Ant to a Ruby build tool. At Lecando we just this week finished migrating away from a Ruby based build system we called Raven. Our former employee HÃ¥kan speaks in his blog entry from way back then about the enthusiasm we shared. Of course, Håkan speaks of our migration from Maven, the build tool from hell of which one should not speak.

So we’ve now gone full circle – Ant – Maven – Raven – Ant. So what happened and why?

Our build.xml used to be a trillion lines long and quite unmaintainable. When we first saw Maven we thought “Easy targets due to standard directory organization, automatic dependency downloads and we will probably read that really nice webpage thingy very often. Way cool, we want that”. Since we never have hesitated to throw new fun explosive stuff onto our e-learning fire we pushed all our directories around, picked up the ball and ran with it.

I looked at our old project.xml file today. Man, that thing is ugly. As Cedric points out, Maven is really four languages, and Jelly is one of them. Ouch.

At that time we were bitten by the Ruby bug due to a number of reasons, two of them being Jon, head chef of Damage Control who had just left us for new frontiers, and Anders Bengtsson who used to work for us but is still a good friend of some of the guys. This combined with our craving for a shiny new build system made us roll up our sleeves and start to build our own build system in Ruby, Raven.

When you start to build a new file system you most probably start with the easy pieces. “Let’s see … compile? That’s good – we need to compile in our projects. And we can set our classpath in a really non-obtrusive way. Oh, this feels so good, I’m glad we’re doing this. And next … Test? Awesome, we’ll be done in no time.”

… A little later …

“OK. it is not a good as in the beginning but we’ll refactor it. Now we just need to build the docbook docs, package the war, pack it up in a ear, zip that up with all external docs and whatnots and we’re done.”

Spoiler: The resulting build was as hard to maintain as the previous ones had been, albeit in a prettier syntax.

I believe it is exactly the same thing as when you start out with your Ant build file. As long as you’re setting up the compile and test part everything is really clean, but when you get into the specifics that is needed for your app like for example signing an applet – we used to do that – things get dirty. And it does not matter what language you do it in, it is complicated even in plain English, or Swedish. (“Take those files and sign them with that certificate file over there to produce an applet as a jar for Netscape, and when your done you take the same files and sign them again, but this time with that certificate file over there for Explorer, and, oh yeah, make it a CAB file. Don’t mess up or the browser barfs”)

While we were doing this, things happened in Ant land. Imports and Macrodefs solved a lot of problems, making build files readable. IDEA even provides code completion and refactoring support for Ant. As you might suspect, we did not have that for Raven. We slowly accepted fate and began the walk back into XML. However, among the brackets are a few goodies in addition to the ones above.

Ants platform independency is king. Visar, our designer guy, can run the app from his Windows box as well as we do on our Linux ones. I know, Ruby is supposed to be platform independent, but unfortunately it works in the same way Python does it – almost.

We have even rolled our own CruiseControl in Ruby. We really did not like CruiseControl two years ago so we might not use it now either, but at least now we have the choice. I’ve read a lot of good things about it recently and if it is good enough for Mike Clark it must be good enough for us as well.

To sum it up, Ant is a standard which in itself might not be the best thing at all, but with all the support for it it certainly comes out on top for us.

Back On Track

2005-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

Whew! I just spent 2,5 hours converting my old B2Evolution blog to WordPress. I have been planning to do this for ages, but I just never got around to it. The idea was to switch hosting providers at the same time but I had a hard time finding something I liked. Then one of the pragmatic guys mentioned TextDrive and that was love at first sight.

Converting was not that straightforward until I found this. Thanks a lot.

Testing BloGTK

2005-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

Testing to blog from BloGTK. I’m not sure that I really see the point of this. It maybe good for off line use, but then I’d probably use JEdit and save it as a .txt file anyway. Oh well.

Funniest Thing In A Long Time

2004-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

From BOFH:

“Yeah, academics and beancounters are the worst for this sort of thing. Somewhere in their brain they believe that just because they USE a computer means they’re somehow gifted in that area.” “How?” “Well it’s a bit like the people who had the first flush toilets – They thought they were somehow a plumbing specialist when in actual fact they were just crap dispensers.”

Gnome 2.8

2004-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

I have been using Gnome 2.8 for a couple of weeks now, and I must say that it is getting really good. Gnome was the first window manager I used when I started using Linux, but I soon became hooked on more lightweight alternatives such as Fluxbox and XFce4, as I did not think that Gnome offered that much to compensate for its relative slowness.

But since I got my laptop, I have grown tired of having to do everything manually whenever the environment changes. And with the advent of Ubuntu it is really a snap.

I honestly do think that it is a way better working environment than Windows. It still has a lot to do to catch up with Mac OSX, but when I look at what is happening over at Planet Gnome I strongly believe that they will eventually get there.

Wireless Again

2004-10-19T00:00:00-07:00

My old 3Com Prism54 card for some reason did not work anymore on Linux. I finally gave in a bought a new MadWifi one which worked out of the box. Sweet!

Patting Myself On the Back

2004-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

It’s not that often that I get to say “told you so” – ask my wife, coworkers or basically anybody – but I found this old blogentry mentioning Phoenix, now better known as Firefox.

Told you so.

Upgrading again

2004-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

Having two kids does limit blogging quite substantially. I still managed to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of b2evolution tonight which took quite a while. I managed to screw up the db upgrade, and when I tried restarting it choked on all table modifications and creations. So I had to step through all of the scripts and comment out all sql that flunked. PHP is quite unreadable really.

Using Dependency Injection for GUI coding

2004-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

My colleague Jimmy and I spent a lunch the other day discussing client application GUI editors. We both agreed that the ones we know suck quite majorly since they create code can’t be touched, does not allow for any sort of creative programming etcetera. On the other hand, it is quite handy to see the GUI develop – not that the result always looks like the one drawn though.

So instead he made the case that you should have a window continuously rendering the code you’re writing. Sort of like seeing the GUI develop while you code instead of watching the code die while you draw the application GUI.

That seemed to require the GUI code to not do anything useful – be a good dumb window basically. The problem with almost all GUI code however is that listeners are implemented as anonymous inner classes, becoming impossible to mock out

Dependency Injection to the rescue! Have all listeners talking to external whatevers become parameters in the constructors. Then they can easily be mocked, the GUI code is clean and decoupled and the sun is shining. Now, it shouldn’t be too hard to have a Beanshell2 based Java code reading GUI-viewer, should it?

Since we’re not in the business of making client applications – anymore, that is – we haven’t tried it yet, but I’m eager to try it.

Eclipse is the new Emacs

2004-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

It was my colleague Håkan Råberg who coined this the other day. Quite insightful I think. I mean, you can play Tetris in them both.

Referrer spam pains

2004-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

I just upgraded this site which is running b2Evolution so that I would get a the new referrer spam filter function up and running, which is long overdue.

After that I spent a good half hour in phpMyAdmin to delete all hits from the offending sites. Jeez, it’s so many! And why in good heavens name would anyone, ever, click on the link toiletphotos.com? Weirdos.

Unit Testing Performance

2004-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

Yesterday we discovered a small but annoying performance bug: when getting a list of languages from the JVM we did not cache them but kept on retrieving them, which turned out to be quite slow.

So, like the good guys we are we wanted to have a test that ensured that the error was not reintroduced. We looked at JUnitPerf which seemed to be appropriate – it decorates a unit test and times it. The only problem here was that we were talking about that good performance was 800 ms, and bad performance was 1800 ms. Such timings can randomly fail on a slower computer or a computer that was busy doing something else. We do not like that kind of tests.

So instead my colleague Jimmy came up with a much better idea: Make the test a Runnable, and run it a large number of times. In our case the good performance was 800 ms the first time and virtually nothing after, but the initial bad performance was 1800 ms every time. Then we set the timeout to 5 seconds, giving enough slack for slow, bogged down test machines, but still catching the bug if reintroduced. Good stuff indeedy.

Blog spam

2003-12-03T00:00:00-08:00

My brother just informed me that I’ve been getting a lot of adult referrers. I have to admit my na?vit? that I was not aware that it even existed.

I will upgrade b2 so that I can blacklist these sites. I have absolutely nothing to do with them.

P900 rocks!l.

2003-11-20T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve got myself a SonyEricsson P900 which no doubt is the coolest gadget ever. I’m writing this sitting on the bus while at the same time listening to some ogg tunes. Awesome!

Functional Testing Revisited

2003-11-14T00:00:00-08:00

We have got our functional testsuite working. It currently consists of more than 260 tests doing everything from the simple login to running recorded WebDAV tests and restarting Websphere etc.

We’ve done it in the way that Testing Extreme Programming prescribes, with collection of methods that are implemented both remotely and locally, running the servlets in-process. The methods are pretty high-level for a very high degree of usability.

We’ve used HtmlUnit as the basis of our tests, extending it in the high-level methods. It is a great package as it tests the JavaScript too, as opposed to recorded tests that only tests the servers response to a given HTTP request.

My laptop is working!

2003-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO: – Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal

network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD

I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/*kernel-version*/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I’ll probably update this as I learn more. This is posted over wireless by the way :)

New Laptop Woes

2003-10-03T00:00:00-07:00

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted – no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.

OK. After that the install went smoothly. I got the Broadcom driver from their site and could eject the Xircom card. Lm-sensors simply does not do IBM, so I had to turn to ACPI. It provided quite some headache, but after reading a lot about it I did at least get the battery stuff going.

Then we had the 3Com wireless PCMCIA card. The nice people of Rutgers University had put together a driver that supposedly should work. After working a _lot_ with it and having a little private kernel patching festival, finally it compiled and I was a happy man. Until I rebooted, that is. The laptop simply did not boot with the 3COM card in it. OK, so I had to do a little more tweaking. Eject the card, and do a hard power off.

So I started the laptop up again just to get me a large fat kernel panic in my face.

Something had barfed on the Reiserfs b-tree and it would not start again. OK, boot with the Live CD and fsck, right? Wrong.

To make a long and sad story short but equally sad, my almost ready killer laptop was gone. Reiserfs could only recover the disk by doing a rebuild-tree. I could identify most folders, but since heartbeat applications like bash were not recovered, I simply had to start over again.

And this for two measly failed startups.

Needless to say, my new setup is running Ext3 and Resiserfs will never be used on a computer fo mine for a very very long time.

And as for the Gentoo install guide referring to Reiserfs as “rock solid” – yeah, right.

XStream

2003-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Joe Walnes seems to be a really smart guy. He has released XStream, which to me seems like the only XML serializing library you will ever need.

Functional Test Updated

2003-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

After evaluating the previous named contenders for webtest tools, the winner was … none of them.

It dawned upon us that the MaxQ way of doing this, ie. recording tests, really is not the way to go, ever. What you’re really doing is testing the server from a HTTP perspective, without testing button clicking and stuff. For example, all hidden fields must be specified at every request. If you have anything Javascript based you still have no clue if this works after having these funtional tests.

On the other hand, using anything based on HttpUnit actually mimics a webbrowser, so you can click buttons and not have to worry about hidden fields. And yes, Javascript is handled.

jWebUnit is based on HttpUnit, but it has a rather limited API, for example you cannot find a button by its name to click it. We came to the conclusion that it was easier to build our own API on top of HttpUnit.

We also decided to implement the same API in a mock implementation á la the way it is described in “Testing XP”. This way functional tests can be run very quickly on development machines and the more time consuming remote HTTP tests are done on the integration

Commenting Functional Tests Comments

2003-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

A few nice people commented on my posts on functional tests and suggested a few other alternatives:

Canoo Webtest. It’s XML-based which makes it go right out my window. Sorry about that. We are a small company where programmers have to do their share of test time. This means that we are not afraid of code, in fact we prefer it.
Jameleon. I had not seen this one, but looking at the tutorial it seems a lot more complex than the stuff we use now.
PureTest. This is a very competent scenario recorder/player, and I do like the guys at Minq. But as I stated earlier, recording HTTP will not test your page the way HttpUnit does with JavaScript and all.

I am truly happy with the way we do it now. We have a base testcase class that provides methods like clickButton(). These methods are implemented as Strategies by both a remote HTTP implementation and a local in-process mock implementation.

Writing the tests are really easy. All you have to do is:

1 public void testLoginWithCorrectNameSucceeds() {
2   goto("/login)";
3   setFormText("Name", "foo");
4   setFormTest("Password", "foo");
5   clickButtonWithName("Login");
6   assert
7 }

After a while you can start pushing common higher level functions such as login to the base class for easier reuse.

Since we use a object oriented web API all test fields with labels are rendered in the same way. This means that we can find the form by the labe which is a good thing, since it eliminates the need for artificial id’s.

Functional testing

2003-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

We are currently in the process of improving our functional testsuite, some might say getting one. I’ve skimmed the JUnit site and have found two alternatives:

jWebUnit. It has a really clear and simple syntax which is why I prefer it over HtmlUnit which I prefer over HttpUnit.
MaxQ. Recorded Jython scripts.

I am not really sure what to make of it. The functional test suite must run separately from the rest of the system, which makes it a good candidate for a scripted language. However, being able to use IDEA is always better than any alternative. I am not sure either if recording is a good or bad thing.

I am leaning towards jWebUnit. You could then easily use JUnitPerf for basic load testing.

IDEA vs Eclipse

2003-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

At Lecando we are long time licensees of IntelliJ IDEA. But since Eclipse is free and open source is good, I have given it a serious try in my spare time. After 2 months I’ve returned to IDEA. Much faster, more intuitive and less weird views of everything (“Do you want to switch to the Java view for your Java project?” Uhhm … yes?). As Jon once said: Eclipse is bloat, IDEA is not.

Eclipse strongest points in my view are incremental compiling and a nice JUnit integration.

The worst part though: it is slow. Really. If you’re an Eclipse user and don’t agree, try IDEA out and see for yourself.

Also, I find it not really focused on what is trying to do. It is a Java IDE, but with it’s micro kernel architecture it can also handle your PHP, Python, Ruby and it can be that IDE toaster oven you always wanted. But editing anything else but Java is done in a very basic fashion. JEdit does IMO a better job of being your versatile handle-everything editor.

Simon!

2003-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

Förra onsdagen föddes mitt och Cecilias andra barn. Det blev en kille som skall heta Simon. Allt är toppen.

Stockholm Syndrome and blameability

2003-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of people in programming suffer from some sort of developers Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, everybody whines about clueless management, we’re not allowed to do this and that, yadda-yadda whine-whine.

But then when presented with a option like Agile methodologies and XP which actually provides the power to decide about the things that should matter them as techies (because that is what XP is all about, you have the right to produce quality code given clear guidance under your own estimates and you go home by five etc), what happens? More whining.

It’s so comfy to blame clueless management for giving to little time, selecting a inferior platform and prioritize features over quality code. Many developers are simply not used to accepting full responsibility for their work. They’ve grown accustomed to the safetynet of blameability and need somebody else to take the responsibility if something should fail.

Kent Beck mentions courage as a essential factor for success. It is very true.

Snurrar just nu

2003-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Lyssnar mest nu på:

The Sounds
Queens of the Stone Age
Ladytron
Marilyn Manson
White Stripes

New home

2003-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

I moved my stuff over from freeroller to here. I used to have a more personal blog here and leave the techie stuff at freeroller, but it got kinda old. This is the tech department and is gonna be in english. If you happen to wander into the other parts, they are in melodic swedish. Translations can be made available upon request.

Moving out

2003-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

I’m moving out of here, and into my own home. Thanks a lot freeroller.

Whatever

2003-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

Bäst, bäst, bäst just nu: “United States of Whatever” med Liam Lynch. Måste ses och höras. Jag lyssnar på den på repeat – och den är 1 minut och 26 sekunder lång.

Jag var d

2003-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Jag var där. Jag var där. Jag var där.

Jag lyckades för många pengar komma över en biljett till “A Night With Martin L Gore”. Och det var värt varenda öre. Nalen är ingen optimal lokal, scenen är låg, men jag hade tur och lyckades få en riktigt bra plats. Jag stod i mitten, sju meter från scenen, samtidigt som Martin sjunger Shake the Disease och In Your Room med endast pianoackompangemang. Hur djävla fantastiskt som helst.

Det var extremt vanligt att folk sände vidare spelningen via mobiltelefon. Själv vill jag fokusera på konserten, men det är väl kul för den som får lyssna. På slutet av Shake the Disease, som avslutade hela konserten, tog Martin mobilen av en i publiken och sjöng in i den. Undrar om den som lyssnade fattade vad som hände.

Från och med nu delas världen in i två delar. Vi som var där och ni andra.

Jag var där.

Christian Kjellvander

2003-03-27T00:00:00-08:00

Inte riktigt vad jag brukar lyssna på men … tokigt bra. Känns lika oundgängligt i varje manlig skivback som Chris Isaac. Manligt vemod som lockar får en att längta till någon odefinierad lägereld med öl och goda vänner. Rekommenderas varmt.

Time estimates

2003-02-27T00:00:00-08:00

Joe is asking for ideas regarding time estimates.

First of all, read Planning Extreme Programming by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck. Even if you don’t want to do XP it provides excellent ideas for planning.

The book promotes “the gummi bears principle” meaning that estimates should not translate to calendar time. Instead stories should be measured relatively to each other. So if story A is a 2 and story B is slightly harder, then it is a 3. This requires an upstart period where you “calibrate” your measures. But after a while you get quite good at it.

To really get away from calendar time thinking, we give stories “time points” which can be from 1 to 5. This helps developers to not think in terms if time, but instead sort of grading the stories.

At the end of each iteration, we sum up how many time points we did. This is our velocity and stories for the same amount of time points are planned for the next week.

It is by no means perfect, but better than any other technique I’ve tried.

Palm Tungsten

2003-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

Jag har haft min Palm Tungsten i typ tre veckor nu. I förrgår kom ljudpatchen som går att man kan använda den som mp3-spelare.

Ovärderlig pryl.

XP, One Last Thing

2003-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

I realized that after defending PP vigourously, it would be a good idea to second what Jon wrote about XP and the synergies of the practices. Which of course, Kent Beck stated already in the white book. (The XP'ers know what I’m talking about. To the rest, it’s the first of the commie XP books.). PP is a part of a bigger, grander scheme, and seeing is believing. (Now, this might be mistaken for some Scientology offspring. One of the main differences is that you are allowed to read the books. :–)

XP shop.

2003-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

Chiara wants to work where Jon works, which is where I work too.

I wanna work where that boy works.

Just so you know, we’re an XP shop :–).

What time did Mr.Tirsen arrive?

Our morning meetings are at ten. I believe he was in by then.

As for the rest, sticking to architectural guidelines etc … too bad. “Do the simplest thing that can possibly work” and “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” are our mottos. Works wonders with architecture too, but it requires them “best and brightest” to come down from their ivory towers and start contributing to the code. I know a few people who feel that coding is below their skill level and dignity, so they won’t. Whatever, they will be the first to go when the revolution comes :–).

TFL

2003-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

Tyskarna Från Lunds platta är unik. Den bästa beskrivning jag kan ge är att de är synthmusikens Victor Borge, ni vet den där skojige danske farbrorn som spexade vid pianot.

Musik och humor brukar bli Svenne Rubins. Kul text, kass låt. Grejen med TFL är att de lyckas skapa musik som i sig refererar till annan, gärna tysk, musik. Alphaville-slingor i Scorpions-covern “Still Loving You” är enormt tyskt och enormt kul. Min dassiga tyska gjorde att jag inte kopplade vad “Eis Auto” handlade om genom att läsa titeln. Nu vet jag hur det hade låtit om Ralf och Florian hade fått uppdraget att skriva glassbilslåten.

Victor Borge skämtade på samma sätt med den klassiska musiken som TFL går med synthen. Stort. Detta är en humorfylld kärleksförklaring till synthmusiken, rekommenderas för er som kan er Kraftwerk.

Pair Programming

2003-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

The pair programming thing turned up on TSS and ended up with the usual “You suck” enlighments with the occasional, surprisingly non-embarassed, opinions on whether or not the Struts API is easy to understand (sic).

Whatever.

If you don’t like to pair program don’t do it. I am not going to tell people what to do.

Unless of course you work where I work. In that case, share the (wireless) keyboard. The reason being code quality, and development speed.

We used to have a problem with code quality. Not code resulting in bugs necessarily, but code that was not 100% in terms of maintainability etc. We did of course have code reviews but it seemed that we could not get enough of them. Enter PP, with continuous code reviews. Code quality has never been better. Of course, all of you people out there who don’t like PP are probably very, very good programmers who don’t never had this kind of problem, right? :–)

PP answers our need for speed. No, I have no benchmarks, but take my word for it. At our place development is faster since we switched to PP. Cedric, normally somebody whose opinion I highly respect, has started sharing the managerial opinion of two people at keyboard equals half the productivity:

[…] the combination of developers + QA engineers can work wonder, and you will get twice as much done than XP will ever allow.

Please! I don’t know who said it first, but the speed of development hardly depend on how fast you can type, whatever the superpowers of your QA department. I can accept a lot of reasons against PP, but that one is, in my very humble opinion, plain rubbish. Sorry.

Rickard is from what I understand an ultra talented programmer.

The point of pair programming, as I’ve understood it, is not actually the programming itself, but the exchange of ideas.

However, he’s missed the full point of PP. Exchange of ideas is good, of course, but in my opinion it’s the notion of continuous code reviews, which incorporates a lot more, that does it.

This almost turned into one of those TSS rants. Ouch.

I never imagined I'd defend Kent Beck.

2003-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

Long time, no blog. Too much holiday and managemental duties to keep me away from the development trenches. But I keep up with what others are writing and it has mostly been discussions about code standards and how stupid people think George W. Bush is. Oh, and that really weird C# vs Java thingy.

But hey presto! Things are living up again! And let’s start of with that good girl Chiara who I enjoy immensely but not necessarily agree with.

I don’t think Kent Beck has neither the expertise nor the talent to make decisions about how programmers should work.

Uhhm … how shall I put it … how can I express how much I disagree? When I first was introduced to XP I hated it, since it was shoved down my throat, much the way french geese are fed. Turning point #1 was when I went to, the most excellent, JAOO conference where Kent held a keynote speech. That sort of took my blind hatred away. Then at next years JAOO Martin Fowler had a half-day tutorial in the planning game. My world has not been the same since. We now run our home-grown version of it, pair-programming and all. We twist the idea of the customer on site since we’re a product company, we use JIRA instead of the orthodox way of the cards and a few other things. Oh yeah, we sit down at our morning meetings too.

The point I’m trying too make is that there in my mind are few people in the world better suited to speak out on developer practices than Kent Beck. He, Martin Fowler and Alistair Cockburn my top three sources of wisdom.

I think Rickard is an alien!!

From what I’ve read I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought you were one too ;–)

Super Sunday

2003-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

Om två timmar brakar det loss. NFL:s bästa anfall (Oakland Raiders) mot NFL:s bästa försvar (Tampa Bay Bucs). Jag hoppas på Oakland.

Nya skivor

2003-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

Det har landat nya skivor i högen. The Klerks, Tyskarna från Lund, Saint Etienne samt Melody Club. Recensioner kommer.

Toppen

2003-01-14T00:00:00-08:00

Bästa jullåten alla kategorier var i alla fall Tyskarna Från Lunds “Actung Xmas”. Jag föll som en sten första gången jag hörde den på P3. Klockren Kraftwerkpastich. Det enda man undrar är om bandet är “på riktigt” eftersom det verkar vara någon slags avknoppning från Varanteatern. Texterna är ju ganska humor i och för sig.

Long time ...

2003-01-14T00:00:00-08:00

Det var ett tag sedan, en hel december har passerat. Julen tillbringades i tur och ordning i Stockholm (Julafton), Uppsala (Juldagen); Grövelsjön (Fram till nyår) och sedan hemma i Beverly Ängby igen.

V?der

2002-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

Detta är definitivt den tid på året då man undrar varför man inte flyttar söderut. Mulet, fuktigt och kallt.

En pensionsrådgivare sade en gång att om man bor mer 50% av året i tex Frankrike så får man ut sin pensionsförsäkring oskattad. Just idag känns det som extra bra argument att tillbringa de senare oktober-mars i ens liv någon annanstans.

The name

2002-12-02T00:00:00-08:00

Why “Head On”? Because it’s a really awesome song by never-as-famous-as-they-deserved The Jesus and Mary Chain. And a good attitude when tackling problems.

Bra

2002-12-02T00:00:00-08:00

The Faint är extremt ojämna, men “Amorous in a Bauhaus Fashion” är grymt bra.

Ride

2002-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

I avdelningen inspirerande låttitlar kom jag idag tillbaka till Ride’s makalösa “Leave them All Behind”. Man kanske skulle sätta ihop en lista på låtar som får en att känna sig lite bättre än alla andra.

Apples and oranges

2002-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

Bernard replies to my reply:

Me: My thoughts were that it is easier to transform bare data as it is less to transform. You take the old data and insert it into the new code, which is all you need because you don’t want the old implementation anyway.

Bernard: I guess you are somehow comparing apples and oranges. If you want to compare data storage then instead of storing Java objects with data and business logic, just store some objects having data only. Sure, if you store objects with only data you are quite close to the tabular data model. But remember, I only want to be able to “offer” it for OLAP purposes and for upgrades, if then.

I don’t want to degrade my business objects, I want them to carry as much info as possible. This to ensure that the state is all set and verified before the Command executes, as discussed on the Prevayler site.

To sum up the upgrade story: when moving an application between version, the persistent state needs to be transformed. The less info in the persistent model, the less to transform. That is why I, initially, believe that the tabular data model is good for upgrades. But as mentioned, I’m intrigued by the XSL approach, and we will most certainly try it out.

Me: However, we may have to provide a tabular data model for analysis purposes outside the scope of our application. The standard way to access this is using SQL. This is the only reason I want it.

Bernard: At least if your external application could use JCA you could think of a JCA implementation for Prevayler. Very nice thought. We want to provide as a broad support for data extraction as possible which probably would make a connector a good choice.

Me: This morning Jon had a good way of formulating what I wrote on the two persistence needs: “RDBMS do two things: OnLine Transaction Processing and OnLine Analysis Processing. After Prevayler we only need OLAP.”

Agree. This is an empty room for Prevayler. We might have a look at some integration with Mondrian which is rougly a Java OLAP implementation working in-memory. Mondrian looks way cool. Will look into it more.

SQL

2002-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

Bernard commented on my thoughts on schema evolution.

I do not see why schema evolution is harder to handle in Prevayler than it is with a relational database. Changing relations is always a problem whatever the storage strategy you use.

Hmm, let’s see. Maybe I was very using traditional thinking. My thoughts were that it is easier to transform bare data as it is less to transform. You take the old data and insert it into the new code, which is all you need because you don’t want the old implementation anyway.

But you’re saying that with Skaringa I transform the Java object graph to XML, transform that XML data using XSL to a new XML format matching the new code and deserialize it. Whoomp, there it is? Sounds very nice.

Next, do you truly believe SQL is the best way to query your object model?

No, not my object model, not at all. However, we may have to provide a tabular data model for analysis purposes outside the scope of our application. The standard way to access this is using SQL. This is the only reason I want it

I also have this nagging feeling that many customers will want their data in a RDBMS because just because it has always been there. What would we do there? Delete and insert for every snapshot?

This morning Jon had a good way of formulating what I wrote on the two persistence needs: “RDBMS do two things: OnLine Transaction Processing and OnLine Analysis Processing. After Prevayler we only need OLAP.”

Well, stay tuned, or better help the people working on the XML export for Prevayler. As said before, SQL is in my opinion not the best thing because it requires mappings between your objects and your relation database. And ODMG API would probably be better. Carlos Villela wrote a XPath query demo

We will definitely work with Prevayler to enhance this functionality. As for JXPath, already there :–).

My name

2002-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

By the way I realized that my name is not mentioned here, and Jon keeps on calling me “boss”. This is corrected now.

Schema evolution

2002-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

Jon and I had a pretty heated discussion today over serialized objects. The background is as follows:

Using Prevayler, you will have a file on your disk with your serialized object graph. This stores the state of your application, but, very important, also the implementation of that state. When deserializing the object graph, you do not retrieve properties that are set on “new” objects, you are retrieving the object itself. Like, duh.

This introduces a problem when changing the object schema. If you update your application and the new runtime has a different set of classes, you’re screwed. Sure, changing the name of a property or class can easily be done, but what if relations are changed?

Now to my thoughts: The problem is that the serialized object holds too much info in the upgrade scenario. We don’t want to know the implementation then, we only want the state. We thus need to transfer our snapshot from a serialized form to a form with less info. If we can do this we get away from what Joshua Bloch in “Effective Java” describes as making our private code be a part of the API. Using this, we can insert this data into a upgrade program and setup the new object graph. This is not ideal but it works. (Agree so far Jon? :–)

One good thing about a relational database is that it stores a bare minimum of information regarding system state. This means that the dynamic implementation, your runtime, can change and the static, stored, state is changed with a minimal effort. This is truly Good.

But that is not really what is good with a relational database. What is good is the tabular data model. It could as well be described in another format such as any homegrown xml-format. So what is good about relational databases?

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but the good part about relational databases is, argh!, SQL. It is the standard way of retrieving information that is the catch. It is Crystal Reports and Excel. People want this. Not me. Other people. I wish we could just do a XML-serialization, which is all we need for updates, but I know customers will want the SQL support so that they can use their tools. Anyone know of any XML tools with SQL support? (Probably very common, I haven’t looked yet)

A long time ago somebody suggested that Java should provide a versioning system, so that a class is not only defined by its name but also by it’s version. I suddenly realize that this is new no 1 of my “Things I want included in Java” list. This would solve the schema evolution problem since every new version of a class could have a constructor that took the old version of the class as an argument.

As I see it, persistence is needed in two different ways. 1. In the running application where the data is strongly coupled

with the code and performance is very important.

Snapshots for data analysis and updates. This data needs to be “flexible” but performance is generally not an issue

To me, RDBMS solves number 2 very well. I used to think it was half decent at no 1 as well.

Ok, to sum it up, I want to be able to convert the Prevayler snapshot to an XML equivalent. I want that to be readable through SQL. I want a Java to handle versions. I want World Peace and free ice cream.

Ray Davies, forts

2002-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

… och man bör hålla med.

Ray Davies

2002-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

Man bör lyssna på Kinks “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” åtminstone en gång i veckan.

Data, encapsulation etc.

2002-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

We’re right now trying out Prevayler as a persistence layer for our products. It is basically the coolest think I’ve seen since I became an OO-afficionado. I did start out with Smalltalk, and it sort of set the tone for what I believe in.

I need to check out if Jon has mentioned this on his blog. Nope, he hasn’t so I’ll be first then.

Here we go: What Prevayler basically does is store your object graph in memory, recording every transaction as a serialized Command. Every 24 hrs a snapshot of the full object graph is written to disk and the log is cleared. Crash recovery is performed by taking the latest snapshot and redo all the commands that is deserialized from the log.

This basically means complete transparency, wow-whiz-bang performance, database independance and a call to your local RAM-dealer for more memory. It is also very reliable, the full package is something like ten classes, meaning very few dark corners for bugs to hide. We’ve tried it in development and yes, it rocks. I could dance the funky AOP-chicken here and tell you how fast it was done since we only removed the OJB interceptor and added a Prevayler interceptor, but I won’t. Seriously, sure, that rocks too, but haven’t we sort of agreed on that by now?

So what’s the backside? Schema evolution. I’ll save that for a separate post.

Hurra!

2002-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Jag har passerat 33-årsstrecket och är nu riktigt 30-something. Känns förvänansvärt bra. Jag tror att mångas 30-årskriser är helt onödiga, det visar sig att det faktiskt är roligare att vara 35 än 25.

Bakis

2002-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Var på herrmiddag hos Henrik D igår, otroligt trevligt och makalöst god mat. Dock visar det sig dagen efter att man inte riktigt hänger med som man gjorde förr. Huvudvärken släppte lite lagom när jag var med Ellinor och babysimmade – 30-gradigt vatten är bra för kroppen.

Thunderbird

2002-11-14T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve always been a fan of Netscape, but at the same time I never liked the Communicator idea – everything in one package. I don’t have a one piece stereo either, I’m just not that kind of guy. The Phoenix webbrowser is just right for me, it’s fast and lightweight and does not bring anything else down with it if something goes wrong. If Mozilla blows up it takes the mail session with it. If, using Windows, IE blows up everything is gone, reboot and grab a coffee.

It was therefore a pleasure to see the announcement of Thunderbird which is the mail client version of Phoenix. I have always preferred the Netscape mail client so this is truly good news. Now, if somebody could fix a Palm address book integration to go with it, I’m would be incredibly happy.

Client OS

2002-11-09T00:00:00-08:00

I looked at the logs for freeroller and realized that 75% of client OS’s accessing it was Windows. This is of course a lower percentage than would be expected from a more generic set of computer users (I assume we’re all geeks here, right :–), but still, 75%.

I most certainly don’t want to start another Windozesuckslinuxisugly debate, but I was thinking that most sites accessed on freeroller have a strong connection to Java, and often business system Java – as opposed to embedded etc.

The main competitor to Java as business systems go is of course .NET. How come that 75% of the programmers who have made the Java their choice of programming language use Windows as their operating system? Why are they not preferring .NET?

Is it that they consider Windows a superior client os, but want the freedom of choice on the server? That they love the Java syntax? Someone else made the choice? Is this a small indication that .NET is a failure? Just curious.

Up until two years ago I also used Windows as my client os for programming. But then Sun started releasing the JDK’s for Linux at the same time as for Windows and Solaris. I made the switch and never looked back.

For the sake of it, I’m writing this using Phoenix on Windows on my home machine, which dual boots Win XP and Red Hat 8. I strongly prefer RH8, my wife Windows.

Svensk fotboll

2002-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

Man får fälla ned blicken, bita ihop och erkänna att Djurgården är värdiga svenska mästare i fotboll, och att det nog dessutom är bra för svensk fotboll att de är det. De spelar en offensiv och modern fotboll som är den sorts spel som behövs spridas för attvi någon gång skall ha chans att passera kvarten i VM.

Däremot är det deppigt hur dålig allsvenskan är. Djurgården och Malmö etta och tvåa, två lag som kommit upp de senaste åren. Vad säger det om standarden? Lägg till detta det faktum att vi får gå tillbaka till AIK’s Champions League äventyr för att hitta den senaste insatsen som ett svenskt klubblag gjort utanför våra gränser som inte kändes direkt pinsam.

Jag skulle nästan bli glad om DIF fixar hem Linderoth och/eller Zetterberg och ser till att kanske med lite tur ta sig till CL. Det skulle nog vara bra för alla.

Amphetadesk rocks!

2002-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

There has been a lot of talk about news aggregators. Personally I’m using Amphetadesk which does the trick and more. One must know the little secret to using it though. The basic setup works just fine, but the fun starts when you go for this addon which adds expand/collapse of news feeds, time since posting etc.

Sjukstuga

2002-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

Hela huset är en sjukstuga, Ellinor är fortfarande sjuk och har dragit med sig Cissi i fallet. Jag håller dock ställningarna. Dessutom fick humöret sig en skjuts uppåt igår när posten kom med min nya xbox. Ja, jag är en prylbög. Jag plockade hem den på Tradera för ett överkomligt pris, och fick med tre spel jag ville ha, och två som jag skall till TVspelsbörsen med för lite bytesverksamhet. Jag vill ha nya FIFA.

Annars är det bara att fortsätta planera min födelsedag som infaller i övermorgon.

Dessutom har jag startat en techie weblog. För den tekniskt intresserade.

Phoenix

2002-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

Rickard is using mozilla 1.2b. I used it until I stumbled into the Phoenix world, where everything is lighter and oh so fast.

Seeing is believing, try it out.

Getting Things Done

2002-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

Huge kudos to Mike for hinting about “Getting Things Done”. I’ve only made it to page 75 so far, but it has already resulted in my desk being clean. This is something that no coworker of mine has ever seen. I wonder what the rest of the book will do to me.

Helg igen

2002-11-01T00:00:00-08:00

Sådärja, då var det fredag igen. Ellinor har fått feber som endast 1,5-?ringar kan så man hade ett litet oroligt värmeelement i sängen i natt.

Förra veckan var jag i Luxemburg på ett groteskt tråkigt möte. Mötet ramades dessutom in a vad som måste vara Europas tråkigaste och otrevligaste stad. Vart vi än kom lyckades den lokale luxemburgaren få oss övertygade om att vi egentligen borde stannat hemma, men om vi ändå var på plats så kunde han ju ta hutlöst betalt för vad han än ägnade sig halvdant åt.

Denna vecka har varit en helt vanlig Svenssonvecka med dagis-jobb-dagis. Nästa vecka är som alla vet en högtidsvecka eftersom jag fyller år på fredag. Oskar Lins fyller fyra på lördag dessutom. Stort.

Helgen

2002-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

Har varit ensam hemma med Ellinor i helgen, C har varit i Schweiz på studieresa med jobbet. Fantastiskt lite vad man hinner med egentligen, idag har vi hunnit med storhandling B&W (Jag vet, Coop Forum Sydsydväst eller nåt) på förmiddagen och middag hos farmor på eftermiddagen. Sen sova.

Nu borde C snart vara hemma, om flyget landat som det ska. Kom just på att det kan ju se på nätet ju – och det hade landat. Bra.

Vad gjorde man egentligen innan nätet? Dagens studenter måste ha det så mycket ~~enklare~~ roligare. Och så kan de ladda ned all musik de vill ha från n?tet om pengarna tryter. Jag antar att “blandband” är ett ord som snart är lika glömt som “stencil”.

Jay-Jay!

2002-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

Jay-Jay Johanssons “Antenna” är det bästa Pet Shop Boys inte gjort sedan 1992. Klockren melankolisk pop á la PSB:s “Rent” med vissa stänk Portishead går den fullständigt gjuten. Ett impulsköp eftersom jag gillade singeln “On the radio” som klart förtjänar sin plats i lådan.

Ginza

2002-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

Beställde the Vines på Ginza. Det visade sig att Ginza kan skicka upp till fyra skivor direkt hem för efterskottsbetalning – så slipper man postförskottet. Strålande.

Covenants nya

2002-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

Covenants nya dunsade ned för en vecka sedan och har surrat i hörlurarna mycket. De inledande två spåren Monochrome och Call the Ships To Port är briljanta, 6:an We Stand Alone är bra och 8:an We Want Revolution funkar. I övrigt blir det tunt. Det är snyggt producerat och coola ljud men … segt. Som det ofta blir när synthband inte riktigt får till det. Det blir självupptaget, pretto och liksom synth-Hammerfall.

RedHat 8

2002-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

Har precis fått in RH8 hemma, och det ser helt enligt ryktena riktigt bra ut. De antialiasade fonterna blir riktigt bra, synd bara att de inte funkar i alla program. Däremot blir det lite antigeek varning på att det inte finns en konsol-knapp default i menyraden.

Inte heller denna version är en Windows-killer, men om de får fortsÃ¤tta lite så kan det nog bli något riktigt bra. Personligen blir jag glad den dag jag slipper Windows helt och hållet. Idag använder jag det för spel och musik. Spel kan med fördel spelas på ett TV-spel och musik skulle jag gärna ha en Mac för. Med det skulle jag kunna slippa MS helt och hållet – toppen.

Kroppen

2002-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

Tycker att det är förbannat synd att Göran Kropp gick bort. Jag lyssnade på två av hans föredrag nör jag jobbade på Enator och hade förmånen att få möta honom efteråt när han sålde sin bok. En extremt fascinerande människa. Vila i frid.

Synten lever

2002-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

Fick hem Soft Cells nya singel “Mono Culture” i fredags. Toppen. Lite Chemical, samtidigt som Dave Ball är lika bra som vanligt på arrangemang.

Skall snart få hem hela albumet, samtidigt som Covenants nya landar. Vad vore man utan Hot Stuff?

Tung musikhöst, snart kommer Suedes nya också.

NFL p? Viasat

2002-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

15 års väntan är över – äntligen kan man se amerikansk fotboll i svensk tv. Viasat Sport kommer att köra Monday Night Football live (kl 03.00 …) med repris dagen efter. Kommersiell tv när den är som bäst.

18 maj 2002

2002-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

Blir liksom aldrig inaktuellt.

Bäst just nu

2002-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

Caesars Palace första är ju faktiskt vansinnigt bra.

I wanna smoke crack Because you’re never coming back I wanna shoot speedballs Bang my head against the wall I wanna sniff glue Cause I can’t get over you.

“Sort it out”

Det är ju toppen.

Soft Cell?

2002-09-09T00:00:00-07:00

Säg just i hotstuffs mail att Soft Cell släppt ny singel. Hallå, varför säger ingen nåt? Beställning på g. Skall kolla Diskodiktator också, namnet är värt 139 pix. Och så är det dags att skaffa Covenants alla skivor – så bra!

Annars kan jag varmt rekommendera Olle Ljungströms nya. Inga direkta hittar, men skönt eget.

Ellinor headbangar till Metallicas Sad But True. :–)

Deltidsarbete

2002-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

Från och med idag och till och med december kommer jag att jobba 75%, i praktiken innebär korta dagar utom på onsdagar då jag jobbar fullt. Om någon vill leka med mig och Ellinor på eftermiddagarna är det bara att säga till.

First Post!

2002-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

This is the infancy of the new site. Whatever brought you here, stay tuned.