Posts Archive

At work, the task at hand is extending an existing J2EE based product. This means that half of the .war that is to be deployed is hands-off, and the other half is written by us.

The problem I am having is how to get a productive environment. Unfortunately the products file organization is a mess, so there is no way to have a version checked into the version control system as it never would survive an upgrade. Also the deployed app needs to be initialized with a lot of data that is - surprise - saved both in a database and on the filesystem, meaning no easy test db setup.

Google Talk is the thing to mention today so why should I be different? I really hope that it catches on, as it is based on Jabber, which is open, meaning hackable without resorting to reverse engineering and hoping that the protocol does not change overnight as is the case with MSN and ICQ for example.

Presence awareness and IM integration in various contexts can provide some really cool features and is considered a killer feature by IBM in their Workplace product for instance. (A truly crappy piece of software as a whole though)

I submitted my soul to iTunes an hour ago, as Depeche Mode so far has released their new single on the net only. Since I’m an avid loather of DRM this was not an easy step, but I really couldn’t help myself.

The song? Classic Mode stuff - really, really good.

Wow. I am back in Mac land, which I left in 1996 when I started my career at IBM and turned into a PC drone. Now, after four days of pure Mac joy, it feels like I am never going back.

This also goes to show what a cool company Valtech is. I mentioned this to Jon who got really jealous. Apparently the Thoughtworkers get company issued Dells and all Mac stuff is paid for by themselves.

I am really excited about my new position as a consultant at Valtech. After selling software products for five years, I am ready to go back into consulting.

Valtech Stockholm is very strong Java shop and really into agile methodologies. This was the cause of my intitial interest with them. The thing that finally got me though was the interview process which really impressed me. I certainly was not sure that I would get through it myself, and I figured that if everybody working there had passed it, they must be a really exceptional group of people. That impression has intially been confirmed by spending a day and evening with them at a conference.

I’ve spent five good years at Lecando. When I started out, we had ~25 employees. After a year we cut down to 14. After another cut half a year later, we held on to a pretty steady 10 until this spring showed to be terrible if you where in the business of selling addons to IBM Workplace.

Lecando will be employing 3.5 people this fall, none of them being me. I have been thinking about getting a new job for about a year now, so I am really looking forward to the fall and my new employment. More on that later.

I’ve tried a few tools to do screencasts, my favorite so far is Wink.

Notable features:

• Easy to use
• Manual capturing
• Insertion of text into images
• Multiple export formats

Why on earth doesn’t Sun provide a Java Communications API for Linux?

Good thing IBM does.

I’ve created a Gnome Panel Applet to monitor Luntbuild builds. This is basically a spike to try out the Ruby-GTK2 library and the Luntbuild API but it works so I might as well release it.

Download

Mike Clark at Pragmatic Automation blogs about a new CruiseControl widget to monitor CruiseControl Builds by using the new Tiger widget thingys.

Funny enough that I’ve spent some time meddling with something similar for Luntbuild and Gnome. But I have to say, that as far as graphics go, I have some catching up to do.