Posts Archive

Eventum Issue / Bug Tracking System has to be the best kept secret in issue tracking. I might not get out as much as I should, but I had not heard of it until the other day.

I did spend some time the other day looking at Bugzilla, which we used to use in house before the days of JIRA, to see if they had made any improvements and fixed that god-awful search screen. (They hadn’t)

Some time ago I got a new IBM X40. It is now running Ubuntu Hoary and I must say that it is really an excellent piece of hardware. Everything but the SD card reader works out of the box, which of course also goes to show what a great distro Ubuntu is. Get’em both.

I feel I just have to try Ruby on Rails, I mean everybody else is doing it and I don’t want to feel left out.

So I started setting it up on my X40 which runs Ubuntu. There is still no deb available for it, you have to use the Ruby Gems system to set it up. I dont know if this is good or bad - it seems like a Ruby CPAN and my feelings towards Perls CPAN are mixed. I once ended up with two Perls on a Red Hat box when using it to set up Request Tracker. Let’s hope Gems works better.

Like so many others, I have read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. And, surprise, I find it highly recommendable, like everybody else. The following are a few thoughts about I jotted down while reading:

• Why, oh why, in the name of mad page flipping are the footnotes placed in the back?
• I am surprised that Pete McBreen of Software Craftmanship fame is not mentioned - in my opinion they are making the same case against “Computer Science”
• Contrary to common XP belief Paul Graham favors code ownership. Quite unusual in this day and age, and interesting - I need to reflect on it more.
• His thoughts on developers needing empathy are spot on. Not only for the end users but also for the later developers. It is also better to tell a developer to see things from somebody elses view and document accordingly instead of having him follow the RUP Deliverable Tablets of Stone without reflection.
• Hosting your own web application - I wish. Companies today still see the intranet as something that should be inside their own, very physical, walls. And I can’t blame them - at Lecando we run our own JIRA, Confluence, SugarCRM etcetera in house. It hit me though when thinking about this - what would we choose if Atlassian offered a hosted JIRA at a competitive price? What if that was the only way they offered their solution? Would JIRA be developed faster since they did not have to worry about releases and customers maintenance problems, or would they spend that time managing the server park?
• Paul Graham makes a very strong case for capitalism. Whatever your view on politics - I believe that the starting part of the Wealth chapter describing the difference between wealth and money should be taught to all.
• The parts about Lisp are quite tiresome. And regarding Perl as a higher level language than Java? Please.
• With “Partisans of permissive languages ridiculing the other [preventive languages such as Java - my note] as “B&D” (bondage and discipline) languages” Paul Graham wonders what “prevent”-style people say of Perl? At Lecando we normally just say “Perl …” and shake our heads.
• Paul Graham has a slightly dismissive tone when talking about stuff like object orientation, static typing etcetera which can get on your nerves if you are a Java head.
• I get the feeling that he sees Java people the way Java people see VB people. Prejudice! :)
• He suggests that pointy-haired bosses select Java for programming projects. Since I would select Java for many programming project, would that make me pointy-haired?
• He does explain, perhaps unintentionally, Javas success by emphasizing the importance of existing libraries for a programming language to succeed. Hibernate, Lucene et cetera anyone?.
• When he mentions the importance of efficiency and the ability to rewrite code I believe he is right. But, I can be dead wrong, I imagine Paul being a Emacs hacker, and if you still only use Emacs, it is sure easier to write code in Python, Ruby etc. But in Java land there is this neat thing called refactoring IDE’s - Eclipse, IDEA and the lot. My problem is that it is hard returning to Emacs after using a code-completing, refactoring IDE like IDEA.
• I guess I have to learn Lisp to see what the fuss is all about

Edit: Fixed typos

I’m spending some time getting into Fit style acceptance testing and I’m liking what I see. My biggest problem so far is translation.

For all you non-Swedish-speaking out there, most techie lingo gets a very crude translation, basically by not translating it at all and using the english word as is. So a unit test in english is also a unit test in swedish.

But I’ve bit my tongue at least 10 times today saying “Fit tests” in swedish. Basically by not translating it I’m saying what I believe is considered the dirtiest word in the swedish langauge.

Lavalamps in action Originally uploaded by mahnve.

We’ve finally got our act together and got ourselves a pair of lavalamps. They are controlled by CruiseControl and green equals all tests passed.

When reading about other people doing this, they say that these things need to be turned off every ten hours or so. The only warning notice on ours, bought at Clas Ohlson, says to not drink the fluid - duh.

Now - is this good or bad?

What Famous Leader Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com What Classic Movie Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com

I saw this on Boing Boing and it is just staggering what people can do. As mentioned you have to watch the video clip. And think about what you buy.

I’m in the subway on my way to my moms boyfriends daughters birthday party, using the time to test blogging from my Palm. Seems to work quite decently actually.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5 and the upgrade was really a breeze. The problem with the new default theme is that it is probably too good looking - people won’t change it and my blog will look like everybody elses. Dammit.