Head On

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

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?

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 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.

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 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:

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

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

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 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.

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.

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)

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 Øredev 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.

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.

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 Hellesøy 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.