futuremint

Upgrading my eeePC 1001P right now. Hopefully my funky wireless card will continue to work fine with the nidswrapper.

Something I appreciate is that I don't have to go to a "store" somewhere and get a "disk" to install and do an "upgrade". Update Manager is pretty nice at being no-hassle.

Overall my opinion is that Ubuntu is roughly equal to OS X for the little to no-hassle OS department.

I used to run Gentoo years ago, and then I got a real job and didn't want to spend time configuring and compiling and wanted Photoshop, so I switched to OS X. My PS needs are much less now days and I'm quickly drifting back to Linux and liking Ubuntu.

My wife has an iPad. Its completely awesome for our toddler to play games on, and for the wife to check her e-mail, surf the web a little, and see her calendar. Adding events to the calendar on the iPad is annoying, best to do it in iCal on the real computer (though iCal's UI is really weak in my opinion).

I have a 10" ASUS eeePC and its completely awesome for me to do a lot of typing on (also has great battery life), have an Ubuntu environment setup running identical versions of the services that the server runs, and for overall hacking.

They're two completely different things and I think it is disingenuous to directly compare an iPad to other form factors, much as you wouldn't compare your iPhone to your desktop in terms of functionality. Just because two devices have a similar screen size does not mean they are equal!

If Google bought them, would they force ITA to rewrite their C++ / Lisp engine in Java?

You can actually build fat-client apps with just Pharo too. The only downside is it doesn't support OS native widgets or windows (its all inside one window).

I would like to, unfortunately it isn't a public application, and also contains medical information. Maybe one day I'll setup a demo account on a stand-alone server with fake data... but that is a really low priority (in fact, I just now came up with that, so its at the bottom of the list :)

Its called Magma. Its implemented in Squeak Smalltalk and runs fine on Pharo and is open source. So far I've enjoyed using it, but I haven't had to scale it yet. It does support replication with automatic fail-over though.

Edit: Some basic docs: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665 The rest of the docs are just "read the code/comments" which actually works in Smalltalk. I've found "read the code" never works well in any other language due to poor code navigation in file-based PLs

Edit Edit: Sorry, didn't read your comment entirely. Its a pure OO database. These are pretty common in Smalltalk as it has good built-in serialization/marshaling routines, so most OO dbs are just a layer on top of the built-in stuff.

I built a seaside app on Squeak last year and ported it to Pharo in October. So far I've liked Seaside a lot better than Rails, and Pharo a lot better than Squeak. Pharo is a nice, clean smalltalk with a professional UI useful for the developer. We've even started selling the app. on a very small scale and have had great feedback on the flexibility we gained by using a Smalltalk, Seaside, and an object database

Uh oh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

This is similar to the "browse implementor" or "find senders" in smalltalk, or "Find Usages" and "Browse Implementation" in IntelliJ (I use RubyMine). You navigate the code, not the files. I've found I can concentrate on the design of the software a lot better when I'm not also worrying which subdirs certain files are in.

Did anyone ever think that maybe the problem is the FILES?

Let me ask that one more time. Would people be ranting like this if there were NO FILES?

I still believe the "future of programming" is where your code objects are not arbitrarily mapped onto files in the file system, you just manipulate them directly!

A few Smalltalks and Lisps out there do this using image-based development. This is where it's at. If you can't use a image-based Smalltalk or Lisp to get your work done, then use a JetBrains/Eclipse IDE. They're generally modeled off of the Smalltalk IDE and are the next best thing if you're forced to use a broken file-based language.

If you just take "files" for granted and think that the UNIX design philosophy is the best thing ever, then accept your fate and stop bitching.

I don't know what OPA is, but I think that building an application on top of Gemstone/S and Seaside (GLASS), or their upcoming Maglev product and Rails would be a "one pot application".

I've been a Rails developer for years, and just recently started using Seaside to build an application and I used a basic object database for it. Eventually I'll port it to GLASS, but either way the lack of plumbing has been refreshing. So "OPA" isn't a new idea and there are existing technologies out there for it already, AFAIK.

I'm probably not thinking this through all the way, but wouldn't a memory profiler be more straight-forward, and less dangerous in Smalltalk?

I haven't built one myself, but I know that the Seaside framework comes with a built-in memory profiler.

Doing intercession of messages to objects in Smalltalk isn't trivial, but it isn't voodoo either. I whipped up a quick method replacement class that swaps out a database 'save' method's behavior for testing. However, I would imagine that trying to replace VM primitive calls would lead to some not-so-nice side effects (maybe... or would it just make the image slower?).

I like Ruby, and I like Smalltalk, but I'm liking Smalltalk much better lately because the "turtles all the way down" aspect which makes things like a memory profiler much less "voodoo-y".

Yep, contracting for a company that has been using HTTP-Bind in Ejabberd for almost 2 years now.

The previous version of the product used JSJaC, which was garbage (I can go into details if you want, but its involved).

The product currently uses Strophe and we have a chat UI built with that. We just proxy a domain path through to port 5280 on the ejabberd server and it works like a champ.

Http-bind has been working better this year. Last year when Firefox 3 was released, it was doing something weird with the XML it generated that crashed the http-bind processes occasionally. I believe ProcessOne fixed that in one of the releases last summer.

My favorite example is this: Lets say you want to learn about a new Javascript library.

1. Spend a little bit of time reading about it, so you know about 20% of what you need to know, then convince a group to let you give a talk about using it.

2. Realize, "Oh crap, I know virtually nothing about this, I need to use it for something!" Build something with it and take notes as you go.

3. Your notes can be easily morphed into a presentation, which you give to the group on the assigned date.

The deadline forces you to take action, and the doing before the teaching makes you learn a lot of the material before doing the teaching, and then preparing for the final "teaching" part cements the final bits of knowledge you might have missed.

If you can't find a group to do a presentation, start a local one! Its really easy with the free tools available online now.

The error messages could use some love, but the article is crap. He didn't break Rails in any predictable ways. Who breaks stuff accidentally by misspelling things? Spellcheck can be turned on just about everywhere in any modern IDE or Editor.

I've found RubyMine to do a pretty good job with "red squiggly things". Its an IDE (yes, like Java) but for Ruby. A dynamic language. Static typing isn't a necessity for a good IDE, just look at Smalltalk.

I've just started doing a few small campaigns for my company, and just using the keyword tool to look at search traffic and average CPC for keywords can give you a little insight on how you can market your product/services (though I also realize those numbers technically only indicate what people who use Google like to search for... correlation is not causation :)

And I like how extrapolates that trend in the story to a point where most of them don't know much about... well... thinking? Seems like relegating all decision making to the computers would lead to atrophy of the rational side of our brain.

When I read 'OO-style' sadly I immediately thought of sugar to create private variables/methods and some lame class-based inheritance (which I strongly advocate is nigh useless in JS).

Now I understand you mean 'OO-style' in the message passing / Smalltalk sense of the phrase. Which is much better IMHO, but might be lost on monolingual practitioners using "broken" OO style in their languages.

I used to run a meetup group, and on their site they allow users to RSVP "Yes, No, or Maybe." Along your same lines, I found Maybe to be utterly useless. It was really just a "No" for people who don't like saying no, so I disabled it (thankfully they give you that option).

Either you show up at an appointment or you don't.

Along the same lines, when you start a business, either you're profitable, or you're not. I've seen plenty of startups do the whole "motion" thing, busying themselves with building their product and twiddling knobs, meeting, and imagining how big they'll need to scale some day. Non of which is action.

Note that those stats are for display ads, not for search ads. Display ads would be the crap you see flashing in your face when you go to a site just to read something. Search ads are a different animal as they're better targeted.

Awesome. I like seeing news about the private air industry here. I normally wouldn't think this is hacker related, but knowing a few private pilots they're definitely of the hacker mentality. And seeing this article here just feels rights.

Also, the private pilot culture is definitely of the geeky variety, sans computers (though some cockpit gadgets are pretty impressive now-days).

A content-less post.

The article is all gushy and starry eyed about the "printed circuits" and how durable they might be. The metal ink used to print them melts at 140˚F. Your car in the summer can reach 200˚F.

So they're all great and durable until you leave them in your car. Or too close to your oven. Or on top of the coffee maker.

Too bad all of the "studies" they discussed were clouded by suggestive comments made to the participants for "ethical reasons." Those darned ethics always get in the way of science and business (well, only sometimes with business).

Its fun to watch a bunch of programmers struggle with design. They're learning/blogging about pretty obvious problems that most designers don't even remember solving and usually fix subconsciously.

I personally find these blog posts a little boring. This was the kind of stuff I used to deal with as a designer daily for a media site 5+ years ago. And frankly, none of it is as hard as they make it out to be. They need to hire a good designer and be done with it.

Seems to me like it would take some pretty crazy 3D modeling to come up with that structure. I'd love to see the model of that and how they computed what to put where in order for it to collapse just so. Along the same lines I'm sure the manufacturing of that is pretty unique too.

I like how they moved modules around towards the end. Like they were refactoring it :) (even though I know it was always meant to be that way (remembering the computer animations from school))

Then everyone would need Old Glory Robot Insurance. Because robots eat your medications!

http://www.robotmarketplace.com/video_oldglory_hi.html

This will go great with jQuery. I've missed some of these helpers when moving to jQuery from Prototype. I felt much better about not polluting globals after the switch, but this look like it's a nice half-way solution between Prototype's style and nothing at all.