Posted by Eitan Wed, 08 Feb 2006 13:52:00 GMT
As I review and reference the Pragmatic Programmers' Agile Development with Rails book, I am increasingly convinced that any developer, group of developers, or publisher would be hard-pressed to produce a better book on the topic.
My wager is that the only book that will supplant Agile Development with Rails will be the second edition of Agile Development with Rails.
Posted by Eitan Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:16:00 GMT
Over the last year, here and there when I've had an idea or a little time I've changed something or added a feature to ashkelon. Much time has passed and I hadn't cut a release. For a while I really wanted to finish idea x or feature y "before making another release."
That was a bad idea. Yesterday I decided that was enough. It'd been way too long since I'd last published a release. I spent a few hours updating the documentation, testing the release, updating the documentation again, testing the release again until I was satisfied.
Finally, version 0.9 is out. Sure, a number of features are only half finished, but at least others can play with them. I mean they've been in CVS for a while. But few bother to get that close to a project, I admit.
Just because I'm not spending much time developing ashkelon does not mean that I'm not using it. For my purposes, ashkelon has been feature complete since 2001, since before I even considered open-sourcing it.
I use it on a regular basis when I code and have been doing so for five years now. That's an awful long time. People should know when to give up. I think this five-year mark is a sign that if this tool has not gotten any traction by now, it probably never will.
What saddens me the most is that even the idea itself has met failure. As far as I know people are ignorant of the idea, the notion that a better system for api documentation is a database application. In the ruby world we've yet to see rdoc implemented as a rails app. Maybe some day someone will write one.
Posted by Eitan Sat, 04 Feb 2006 16:53:00 GMT
Who said Linux was too hard? My 3-yr old son, Arik, has been running Ubuntu on his laptop since December. He's a very happy user. Every once in a while he'll ask me to help him figure out why something's not working right, but most of the time, he works alone.
He sits at his ubuntu desktop, and can launch a variety of games, including GCompris, SuperTux, Tux Racer, Tux Kart, Slune, and many others.
I'm particularly proud of these facts:
over a few weeks, he's gotten as good as me (actually in some ways better than me) at SuperTux. that's no mean feat.
he recently figured out Frozen-Bubble
he recently figured out SolarWolf, a most addictive and wonderful games, though difficult for really young people.
he's a whiz with the arrow keys
he doesn't know how to read but he's got the entire SuperTux menu hierarchy figured out. He can start a game, pick levels, pause a game, exit out of one level and go to another, picking out the correctly indexed option in the menu hierarchy
he can launch and quit apps all on his own
he loves Tux!
All this he's achieved by himself, with no help from me, and in a pretty short time.
Finally, when I ask him to practice his letters, he'll be considerate of me and launch GCompris's letter-identification game.
Posted by Eitan Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:43:00 GMT
One must applaud Bob Lee for saying what many of us never dared to: I don't get Spring. I think many of us for a long time did not grok Spring either but were afraid to say it. Everything has a reason to exist and Spring is no exception.
I believe today I grok Spring a little better than before, but I'm not sure. Below is a snapshot of my continously morphing hypothesis, as it stands today, on January 31 2006.
Spring solves a number of issues that derive from a not-as-natively-implemented feature of the Java language: closures. In smalltalk, ruby, and JavaScript, treating a method as an object is a much more common thing. And thus using a method as an object is much more commonplace. So things such as Spring's *Template classes are altogether unnecessary unless you're working in Java.
One of the end results of applying Spring to a project is a combination of Java and XML. You inevitably end up with two languages instead of one. Interestingly, this aspect of Spring is directly related to a blog I wrote recently (two weeks ago, to be exact): Skip the Compile.
There are concerns in Java that don't exist in other languages. One of them is the compile step. Removing that issue leads to Internal Domain Specific Languages, the very solution to the Java+XML conundrum.
So by attempting to grok Spring, I am coming to the conclusion that Spring is an artifact that attempts to make some of the pain of working with Java go away. It does a pretty good job in some respects (I consider the fact that we still have a bunch of XML a down-side). But when we look at other languages, specifically at Smalltalk, we see a much more elegant solution: these problems simply don't exist. Everything is written in-band. I advocate that it should be.
Posted by Eitan Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:36:00 GMT
i think this would be cool:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
xmlns:md="somekindofmarkdownnamespace">
<body>
<div>
blah
</div>
<md:markdown-block>
markdown text here.
what firefox would do (assuming plugin is installed
, of course) is filter all text inside
md:markdown-block tags through a markdown
processor, producing html that would then be further
processed by the firefox rendering mechanism
to render the page.
</md:markdown-block>
</body></html>
A second point: define a .markdown mimetype that such a plugin could similarly process.
Posted by Eitan Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:20:00 GMT
i believe apple has benefited much from open source. safari for example is a derivative of konqueror. there are many other examples.
of course, from a business perspective, apple leverages these assets to draw people to the mac platform. and there's nothing wrong with that. it makes perfect business sense. if its jewel apps were available on linux, there'd be less of a reason to give apple money..err i mean, to switch. that's why itunes on windows makes perfect sense: apple had a large market for ipods to gain in return. i suppose the size of the linux market is too small to make a difference in the case of itunes.
i guess my gripe is with this whole wolf in sheep's clothing thing: saying "we're a friend of open source, we're the good guys" is pure rubbish of course. the good guys are the people that forge open source: gnu, linux, the people behind the projects on sourceforge.
anyhow, it'd be nice some day to run quicktime, itunes, and keynote on gnome or kde. i'd pay $100 for a copy of keynote for linux... assuming the copy was at par with its apple counterversion.
Posted by Eitan Fri, 27 Jan 2006 18:38:00 GMT
For a while now I have been developing a software application framework very close to my heart.
At last, this project is now a product, and will soon be available for licensing. I invite you to take a closer look at JMatter here.
Posted by Eitan Fri, 27 Jan 2006 18:37:00 GMT
UptoData has a new look. After some consideration, I have decided to go with the typo content management system.
I hope you like it.
Posted by eitan Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:16:03 GMT
..on Linux for doing presentations.
First there's no support for dynamic video mirroring. I can get over that.
But the presentation software landscape is so unbelievably barren..I tried Open Office 2 but to say that it is terrible would be giving it too much credit. KDE usually really is on top of things but KPresenter is much worse than OO2. I mean, I don't think anyone's tried to do a presentation using that software.
What does that say about people who use Linux? Does no one give presentations? Maybe there's a magic distribution. I thought I was taking it pretty safe when I decided to go with Ubuntu, as far as I can tell, is the most popular distribution, according to distrowatch.org.
I guess I'll be giving S5 a whirl next..
Posted by eitan Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:05:26 GMT
As I was coding today, I started thinking to myself "I like IntelliJ IDEA."
I've been using this IDE for almost a year now. I recall what forced me to finally seriously use IDEA: I had been using Eclipse on MacOSX (don't!) when it finally died after Apple introduced Tiger. Man that feels like a long time ago. I am sooo at home on Ubuntu these days it's not even funny. Anyhow, Eclipse really rocks on Ubuntu. Netbeans does too. Still, IDEA is my preferred tool. I'm still not using it to the max but I really like the performance of IDEA on Java 5 on Ubuntu on my Medion laptop (Pentium M 730 I believe), the feel of things.
Anyone know of a good way to integrate XDoclet with IDEA? The question may be premature.
I just checked out JetBrains' web site and noticed they received the "Best IDE" award from the JDJ for 2005. Congratulations guys! Keep it up.
