Head On

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

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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?

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.

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.

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 Exposé 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.

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:

1. Usability - git was quite obscure back then
2. Speed - bazaar and monotone was quite slow
3. Large enough uptake - OpenSolaris and Mozilla started using Mercurial at the same time.
4. Runs on all platforms, if we ever employed someone who wants to use Windows
5. 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

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

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.

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

(Via Macfeber)

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 — 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eurocard really wants you to close the window. (”Stäng fönstret” is swedish for “Close the window”)

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

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:

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.

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.

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?