Saturday, January 30, 2010

Adieu XP

Today I have removed the last XP installation of XP I had.
XP was probably the best Windows I have ever worked with. And I really worked (albeit mostly as a power user) with all of them since Win 3.0 (on 286 machines).
I proved to be stable and not too resource hungry, quite friendly and customizable and had a tremendous application base running on top of it. Frankly the Professional version of XP is still a good business platform and a decent development one - but I have not much experience on Windows/.NET development.
Inspite of that I have decided to kill the last VM running XP.
Why I did this? 7 seems promising. And I'd like to try it out.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2

I have given it a try today by upgrading from 9.10.
This is good news for laptop users and especially for me.
Many devices are now recognized by default - so there is no more the need for custom omnibook drivers as it was the case until now with omnibook drivers that I've hacked. It recognized all the devices correctly, including the Toshiba's problematic bluetooth that is now seen as as an usb attached device.
Power management also improved somehow - the overall battery time increased with about 15 minutes.

Garmin GPS Voice


Garmin released a voice customization tool for their devices.
It could be funny to have Florin Piersic as my GPS's voice... Or why not R2D2...

Excellent wine



The 2007 [yellow tail] Shiraz is an excellent wine.
It is very fruity for a shiraz and resembles to a carmenere on the final note.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Netbeans 6.8



Lovely! I'd give it five stars especially for the DTrace integrations on Solaris and Linux(?). I liked it's memory leak detection tools - as you can see in the picture.
The syntax completion improved a lot and it moves faster on my machine.
The cross references are getting better but there is a long way until they will match SlickEdit's performances.
Also integrations with Glassfish and support for Python and Ruby improved.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

I can hardly wait for a Romanian edition

Fun with Erlang

I have played with Erlang for some time but never very seriously - in a payed project.
Lately I have enjoyed some development based on Erlang's Mnesia database.
For the same level of features Oracle charges BIG BUCKS for its Times10 database.

Update 1:
MySQL has in memory tables, as Times10 has. MySQL is free though... No wonder why Oracle doesn't like it

Update 2:
Erlang style concurrency. Works well in Erlang. Some fellow architect tried to convince me that well designed threaded programs can perform as well. No way. I do not think that I can explain better than http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/concurrency.html

The Gods Themselves

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain
. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

(Fr. Schiller)

I have started to quote poetry lately. Sometimes I found that the verses ae more powerful than my humble words. I remembered this quote from Isaac Asimov's book "The Gods Themselves".
Today I learnt that in a big organization, a big organization in a perpetual transition as it is the casae of my company is no good to be efficient.

To make a long story extremely short. Slow compilation speed on Netra 1125@440MHz servers. Salvage a shinier Fire V240@1002MHZ. Install and configure everything (GCCFS, CMake, SunStudio,...). Compilation about three times faster. Happy with the results. Want Clearcase on the machine in order to deliver. Refusedby the newly HP outsourced IT support. Reason: Not their business anymore. Refused again by lab support team: it is not their business. Briefly I have worked in vain because of the beaurocracy.

The bright side is that I have played a little with Sun machines. During the salvage of the

SFV240 I had to replace a CPU, unglue it from it's cooler, change it's fans, repair a broken CPU pin. It is a long time since I haven't done things like it and it felt quite good.

In the same tone: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/why-do-big-companies-suck/