Monday, December 21, 2015

Untitled

Almost evening... Fog outside.
I read and listen Goldberg variations waiting for Mara to wake.
We are both tired after a day of playing.


Sunday, December 20, 2015

Letting tech go

In time I got to attach to one or another technology (framework, language, tool) because I felt comfortable using it and I was productive with it.
But sometimes you have to let thing go and try others. The recent experiences I had were:

1. Gradle. It was quite hard to het rid of Ant and use Maven. But in the end it worth the switch. The dependency management was the holy grail for this. However this year I switched from Maven to Gradle. It was a painful switch but in the end of the year I started to be productive with it also. The learning curve is not steep and in the end you master a more powerful and subtle tool than maven while still retaining its best features

2. NginX. I switched from Apache to Lighty about five years ago when I needed a lightweight server that was able to run in constrained hardware resources. It was fine in the first two or three years but later on the development of new features stalled and today is in a state closer to Apache than to its original purpose. Then I took a ride with NginX. I disliked it at the beginning as I felt that for some purposes it overlapped with HAproxy. But in the end I did the math and I realized that NginX is better than any other combination (HAproxy+Apache/Lighty, ...) on both contrained hardware or full fledged servers. Since then the path changed

3. GIT. Here the path went CVS -> SVN -> ClearCase -> Mercurial -> GIT. I loved Mercurial. I am still using it for my private code but when I have to share I am using GIT.


Saturday, December 5, 2015

Catch up with the world

In no specific order:

- Learning some cryptography

- Reading "Goedel, Escher, Bach" - sometimes it is nice (at least the axiomatics of the number theory) but it is quite verbose and gets boring. The Achilles and Turtle dialogues do not seem too witty to me (at least in the Romanian translation)

- Coping with my daughter's Scarlett Fever

- Created a Storm Trooper cardboard mask - http://www.instructables.com/id/Cardboard-Stormtrooper-Helmet/

- Playing with WebRTC

- Writing the traditional Christmas postcards

- Contemplating a new tube amplifier

- Watched "The Little Prince" animation