IO(thoughts) flatMap (_.propagandize)
If you have a dual head video card.
Try maximizing safari on your secondary monitor..
Happy browsing..
Maybe the apple guys should just stay with apple stuff or either test their stuff a little better before releasing it to the windows public. Surely they are under heavy scrutony if you publish commercials that have no truth in them.
Through Kirk’s blog I got to a site that allows you to test which type of programmer you are.
Here are my results.
You can take the test yourself
Your programmer personality type is:
DHTB
You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.
Apple has released safari 3 for windows as well
Another Thursday, another lunch with geeks in wellington.
We decided to move the lunch to be on tuesdays. This will allow for Tim Haines to join the discussions.
Today the attendees were Simone, JD, Andrew Peters, Kirk Jackson and yours truly.
We touched a broad range of topics in our talks which went from Google Gears to Linux vs. Windows to everybody has a killer idea for a website to microsoft surface and we also touched briefly on database servers.
We started out discussing offline storage for web apps, because Google announced it’s gears plugin today. The opinions in our discussion leaned more towards nobody really liking the idea of offline storage for webapps except me. According to Simone this introduced an unnecessary layer of complexity. JD quoted DHH on why offline storage doesn’t really matter, the internet is everywhere.
Kirk doesn’t see the point. I tend to think that there has to be some middle ground.
Next I uttered my frustrations about the ongoing vs. debates and we picked windows vs. linux. The problem in this sentence is clearly the vs. Instead of beating the other people to death the energy would be better used by finding some sort of compromise. Andrew said he’d love to see a world where there was a choice between multiple OS’es and everything would just work on all of them.. I too would like to see that day.
From there we moved on to the fact that every Joe Schmo has a killer idea to build but they often don’t realise that the development is only a small part of a bigger picture. After development a lot more money needs to be spent on marketing, sales and support.
JD put our attention onto Microsoft surface for which most of us got links etc yesterday. Bottom line it looks really cool but the team seems relatively small according to Kirk. JD then explained us why it could be such a small team and that we might be able to get some preview of it before the end of the year.
We had a bit of fun by coming up with ways to use this device which go from gaming to having a digital tv-guide,….
JD then asked me about the CRM I’m building in rails for when he could get some preview or test of it. The reply to this was a little bit more complicated but it brought us to our next point of discussion. Andrew asked me if I had used postgres because I was saying that we are moving this crm now to mysql so it can run on dreamhost. He went on about running the unit tests for lightspeed and their different database providers. It turns out that postgres performs better than all the other databases they support on windows in their unit tests. (this hasn’t been benchmarked in an official lab or anything)
This concluded our discussions. If I forgot something please email me or add them in the comments.
Once again I decided to give up smoking, which at first doesn’t seem all that hard. It seems like it’s not hard, many people have done it before me. So why do I struggle so hard even to not smoke just one day or a couple of hours.
First off I’d like to give an exerpt of what’s been going on in my mind between 9 and 9.05 am this morning, to give you an idea of what makes it hard:
I got up around 7 and went to work without smoking => 3 cigarettes saved from an early burning. At 9am I’d be at work for about 30 minutes, enough to read email and get settled for the day to come.
9.00.00: wow that’s interesting in IE I get such and such behaviour in firefox things just work.
9.00.01: wouldn’t this be a great time to smoke a cigarette and ponder upon possible solutions
No can’t do that your quiting smoking today.
One can’t hurt can it. YES IT CAN
9.00.15: well i guess i could just write this and this line.
9.01.30: ok let’s test this b***h
9.02.30: sweet it worked, let’s celebrate with a cigarette. No can’t have a cigarette take a tasty
nicotine gum instead. Barf, that gum sucks it doesn’t even taste like gum. Have a gum and
stop whining sissy.
9.04.00: Ooh that gum made me unclinch my teeth and relaxed my shoulders nice, you see quitting
ain’t that hard. Well now I only have to find something that makes me not long for the act of
smoking in itself
Alas the gum didn’t triumph every occasion and after taking a gum that inner voice did quiet down a lot.
In total I smoked 3 cigarettes during the day. I normally would have smoked about 14 by now. All is not lost and tomorrow there is another day to battle the demon.
What this experience is teaching me that the saying You’re your own worst enemy (link 2)
And I would definitely want to thank everybody @ Xero for their support in this matter. I would have smoked more than 2 cigarettes if it weren’t for them. These guys have been fantastic and I hope they can carry me through this mess.
After Alex James setting an example with the Architects chats in Auckland, I decided we needed the same thing in Wellington.
I called it Lunch with geeks, more because I don’t try to label developers and IT people.
Anyway our first meeting was a successful one :) And the turnout was quite impressive. There is a lot of talent in Wellington. The people that joined our first meeting were JB (Jeremy Boyd), JD (John-Daniel Trask), Andrew Peters, James Hippolite, Simone Chiaretta, Adam Burmister
We had some interesting discussions and tried to limit the session to one hour, seen as we all have jobs to go to etc.
Of course we couldn’t resist to have a discussion about the americas cup: Team New Zealand vs Italian Luna Rossa. Next on the agenda came a discussion on subtext vs. nblogr which is not a comparison really because subtext is going on v.2.0 and nblogr is going for v0.19 alpha. In the end it turns out that if you want to start blogging today you probably should go with subtext. And by the time they release 2.0 nblogr should be completely on par with them regarding features and released as v1.0.
The next point of discussion was the DLR with IronRuby and IronPython, where Andrew P. took the lead in the discussion. From the DLR the discussion moved onto Silverlight and what it exactly is. The guys from Mindscape obviously had a more in depth play with it than the rest of us which was pretty enlightening for me. And it put a couple of concerns to rest. Adam was concerned about the fact that you wouldn’t be able to do view source on an application so you could learn from other peoples work. This issue is solved with a new reflector application that downloads the silverlight app and shows you the source. My concern was that search engines would face the same problem to index silverlight as they have with indexing a flash application.
James wanted to know if silverlight was going to be the flash killer and we agreed that it would be more an html killer than it would be a flash killer. Andrew explained how nicely silverlight plays with the DOM to such a degree that you can manipulate the DOM from within the silverlight app and you can control the silverlight app from javascript. All of these things are nice to have and things that were missing really from flash in the days that I was working with flash.
JD mentioned that there was a benchmark on a demo he saw where there was a chess game that calculated the next possible moves. On 1 side there was a javascript app and on the other side a silverlight app. The javascript app could calculate something like 10000 new moves and the silverlight app would do millions in the same timeframe.
Next week we doing the lunch again.. Come along if you like.
**UPDATE: **To be clear Subtext is already at 1.0 and will go to 2.0. It's nblogr that will be going 1.0
We had a lunch with Sam from TradeMe today from which I took that most of the people are surfing at dial up speeds in NZ. First off : I can’t believe you would settle for that :)
This poses a problem because on my pc or connection I have got full speed so all my javascript etc initializes fast. Sam went on in his talk only briefly mentioning Sloppy a tool that will simulate other bandwith speeds on your machine
Link to Sloppy - the slow proxy for dial-up modem speed simulation (slow down)
Did I miss the memo about having to be religious about the tools you use. In my mind anything that falls in the category religion should be banned as it is a cancer on society. Philosophy is good. Budhism is a philosophy to which I would subscribe for example. I am allergic to people that tell me what to think, probably why I never really fell for the “ruby community”. I don’t need convincing, I’ll do that myself, I just want correct information and plenty of it.
That being said I stumbled across this thread where people are actively discouraging Miguel de Icaza to implement silverlight and co in Mono
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/03/2033219
These are the reactions to it on channel 9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=305405#305405
I personally use both I use Linux and I use vista both on a 64 bit system. I like the whole simplicity of linux but the applications for it are not nearly as finished as the ones that are there on the windows platform.
For example MonoDevelop doesn’t come anywhere near Visual studio. Gimp is no photoshop, ….
Microsoft provides a more viable eco system for people to make money of what they do. I do wish Microsoft would support open source a bit more instead of copying it and thus mostly killing the OSS project. Although I do understand that they are a business
If I would have more time I’d certainly want to contribute to Mono but unfortunately there are only so many hours in a day and these hours are not enough.
To get back to my original point. You can be passionate about something, and everybody that has spent some time talking to me will have picked up on the fact that I don’t just accept the technologies that are being shoved down our throats these days.
The reason I don’t read blogs on Ruby anymore is the following: I simply couldn’t stomach the people going on and on about how cool their mac is and yet they need to reboot it on a regular basis. My vista pc at work hasn’t rebooted for the last 2 weeks now, before that I got a BSOD regarding memory management :)
Furthermore there are programmers that keep going on about the fact that notepad/vi/emacs/textmate/eclipse are the best tools for developing applications.
I don’t know about you but for me programming is about creating stuff, preferrably fast and visual studio is the perfect fit for it.
Granted my vista pc doesn’t look nearly as cool as a mac or an ubuntu with berryl machine but I am far more productive for my job on it.
So my conclusion for this post would be :
Don’t get religious about your tools/language/platform but choose the best one for the job at hand.
Uhm.. this post turned out to be a big rant instead of my intended post which was going to be about how much I look forward to C# 3.0 and the DLR.
As soon as I can get my hands on some of the bits I’ll be posting my findings.
Politics done Belgian style. It’s a party that runs for a couple of seats in the flemish council.
Topless poster etc.. please visit :D
40.000 blowjobs promised by sexy politician (serious update)
I know about IronRuby and I think it’s exciting news. I’ve been following the work of gardens point and their ruby.net compiler.
They’ve just announced visual studio 2005 integration of their compiler. It does require the sdk 4.0 to be installed on your machine