Posts Archive

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.

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.

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

“But the Java language just doesn’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 Öbergs 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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”

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.