Martin @ Blog

Last months I started reading more books, because I like it 🙂
While I didn’t read that much books recently, I managed to finish some books, but mainly non-fiction.
The Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt. A very interesting book, which provides a very large number of pratical tips and tricks in order to become a better software developer, but also better in other tasks. Essentially, this book should be a ‘must read’ for every person working as a developer in the IT industry. It would probably result in less badly written software and improve the general quality of the IT industry. I can recommend this book to everyone.
The book gives tips and advice on how to become more productive while keeping the quality of your products on a constant level. For example, it provides a large number of hints on how to avoid repeating yourself (DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself) like using code generation, reducing the efforts for creating documentation, etc. It also provides a large number of tips and references on tools which a decent programmer should use on a daily basis, like a decent texteditor (VIM, Emacs or something different), source code management (CVS, Subversion) and things like that.

Learning Perl – Randal L. Schwartz. I decided to read this book, because I didn’t have any knowledge about this scripting language, while it is used very much – especially in the Unix-world. I don’t think I will the program language use now for everything, but now I know a little bit about the language, I think I will use it when appropriate. The book is easy to read and doesn’t cover everything of the language, but provides basic knowledge sufficient for using Perl on a regular basis.

Yesterday, the WWDC opened its doors with a keynote speech of Steve Jobs introducing the new Mac OS X version called Leopard and the anticipated Mac Pro systems. Additionally, the company also introduced new versions of is Xserv server systems and Leopard for the servers.

The innovations in Leopard are not very spectacular in my opinion, or at least I was not waiting for them. The most important innovations according to Apple are Time Machine and Spaces. Time Machines enables user to take a snapshot of the system (stored on an external harddisk or a Xserve) and revert to these snapshots whenever one wants. Unfortunately for Apple, they’re not the first one shipping such a tool, as Miguel points out. Dirvish provides identical features.

Another ‘innovation’ according to Apple is ‘spaces’, which enables the user to keep sets of applications for a given task instantly available. Wow, this sounds very similar to virtual desktops – what an innovation. Ok, I have to admit that I did not see this feature working yet, so probably it is a little more polished than most virtual desktop implementations, but it is not very unlikely that the possibilities are similar. According to the article at AppleInsider, Spaces includes the possibility to preview the various desktops in tumbnial format – probably similar to the working of Exposé. Well, at least is is more useful than the new features (uh, which features?) in Microsoft Vista, whith the difference that Vista contains a lot more changes ‘under the hood’ (at least, I think it does). Ok, so far not a high-priority upgrade.
Obviously Leopard does have more improvements. For example, there are PhotoBooth effects available for Mail (nice, but not something I was waiting for) and Mail.app provides facilities to store notes and todo lists and aggregate RSS feeds. That could be useful, but there are already tons of e-mail applications which provides these features, and Mac OS X already contained applictions like iCal and sticky notes which fullfill these tasks.
Another thing to mention is the new application Xray, which enables developers to debug applications and do some profiling. According to Calum Bensom, Xray is based on DTrace, which is created by Sun and open sourced under the OpenSolaris project. The implementation of Apple will probably be very nice and the use case they provide in their promotional material confirms this assumption. But while I still didn’t do any development for Mac OS X, I think I will not use it. There are more improvements, but the other improvements in Leopard are mainly bug fixes and small features which in fact doesn’t require a complete new operating system. Currently, I don’t think I will spend money on Leopard, because it doesn’t provide features I will need very much.

Ok, so far on Leopard. Apple also announced a new Mac Pro system. As expected, this system contains two dual-core Xeon processors based on the Woodcrest core (which is in fact a similar core to the Core 2 Duo cores Intel recently introduced). This is a very powerfull system for (considering the features) a resonable price of 2500 dollars. Apart from new processors and the obvious upgrades (new videocard, more memory, faster and bigger harddisks), the system is similar to its PowerPC predecessor. If I had the money, I think I would like to have such a system, because it has so much power that the coming years, upgrades are not very necessary. It is like buying a Ferrari – much faster isn’t available.

Yes, I’m still alive. I didn’t write much lately, mainly because I had some troubles with my life and the very hot weather. I hope I will be able to write some interesting stuff the coming weeks.
My girlfriend decided this week that she wanted to get some time for herself in order to determine if she still likes our relationship (at the moment she thinks she doesn’t). The reason for this, is that I was having some mental problems (maybe I was a little depressed the last few weeks?), but didn’t talk about it with her. Additionally, I didn’t work very hard on my final project for my Msc. grade, which caused some friction in our relationship as well.
Currently I’m staying at my parents house in order to get things sorted out. Life ain’t easy. I really hope we will be able to get our relation working again, because she definately is the girl of my dreams and I really don’t want to lose her. Time will tell.

On other news, I started programming on the OntoAIMS project, in order to finish my graduation project. I also started learning Perl, which is a very nice language for easy tasks. Especailly the regular expressions, which are also implemented in other languages, are very nice. While I already had some knowledge on Perl compatible regular expressions, I definately learned some new things and it is also nice to know how to use these things in the language for which they were originally developed.

Today, I decided to try the public beta 2 of Windows Vista. Because the only system I had available for this, was an Athlon 1,33GHz-system with 768MB RAM and a GeForce 4 Ti4200 videocard, I decided to try the OS on this system.
The installation went fairly smoothly, certainly an improvement over the installation of previous Windows-versions, but the duration of the installation was a little long.
Unfortunately, my system appeared to be too slow in order to run Aero, which surprised me. The ‘System performance indicator’ said that my system performed ‘1’, which is the slowest possible number I assume, because ‘3’ indicated that every Windows Vista program should run on the system. The graphics of Vista are currently not very smoothly, with ugly borders (not antialiased for example). Apart from a few – in my opinion – small improvements, it was more an improved Windows XP than a radical new operation system. The Gadgeds (the MS equivalent for the Widgets in Mac OS X) are nice, but the Apple-implementation is done better. The improvements in Internet Explorer, the file explorer and the ‘start menu’ are good, but it was very difficult to make these parts of suck even more than in Windows XP.

Office 2007

While I was already beta-testing for Microsoft, I also decided to give Office 2007 beta 2 a try. While I did not try the new product very long, I have to say the improvements in Office are much more extensive than in Windows. The UI is definately improved over previous version of Office and it is easier to stay in control. I already discovered some strange behaviour while layouting a document, so probably the performance of Word is not really improved. I think OpenOffice.org has to really change in order to keep competing with Office 2007, because the user interface really sucks compared to Office 2007. In fact, the improvements Microsoft now made to Office 2007 could have made a lot earlier by open source products, because I think it is clear to someone who is a bit involved in usability, that current Office suites simply suck on this part. Apple mad some steps in the right direction with Pages, but because this program is only available on Mac OS X, not many people have used this application. Office 2007 has borrowed some stuff from pages, such as a more central role for styles – which is good.

Today I read about a patch for X-Chat-gnome by David Trowbridge. He is using the HSV-colorspace for improving the readability of IRC-text. I think this is a very smart idea and wonder why anybody else didn’t come with such an idea. I think it may also be useful to use this technique for gnome-terminal, were the readability is sometimes also not very good when performing an SSH-session to a remote host.

Red Hat has introduced a new social community site called ‘Mugshot’. It’s not entirely clear to me what the goal of this project is, but I have got the feeling that it could be useful. Currently, it contains a thing called ‘Music radar’, which enables people to publish information about songs on their weblog or website.. I’m not sure what is new about this. Another feature is called Link Swarn, which enables people to discuss about weblinks. This is quite interesting I think. During my exploration of Mugshot, I came across this. I hope that this will not be the process a user has to go through in the final version, because it will be a nightmare for helpdesks and system administrators, because not any non-technical user will understand this behaviour. On the other hand, if it will be the case, there is a clear oportunity for other OS’ses like Mac OS X and Linux because the usability will be so much better, that even stupid users will see it (I hope).

Some students at MIT have created an automated room. Very nice, especially the party mode is cool. When reading about it, you almost feel like to turn your own room into a fully automated environment.

Afgelopen donderdag kwam ik op weg naar huis langs een ongeluk wat op een kruispunt op de ring had plaatsgevonden… dat er een auto achterop een ander rijdt, kan ik me voorstellen. Dat er daarna nog een tegen aan rijdt omdat ie het te laat ziet, ook nog wel… maar vijf stuks vind ik toch wel erg veel 😀

Zie m’n fotoboek voor nog wat foto’s. Ze zijn van matige kwaliteit omdat ik ze met m’n gsm heb genomen 🙂

CNN reports that the ‘chicken and egg’ problem is solved: The egg came first, before the chicken. The reason is that the genetic material of an animal does not change during its life, so the chicken should first exists as an embryo. It is not possible that the chicken exists first before the first egg containing a chicken existed, according to scientist. I’m happy we can stop looking for a solution to this problem 🙂 .

According to AppleInsider Apple has registered the trademark ‘Mac Pro’ in the US. This seems to confirm the rumours that Apple wants to get rid of the word ‘Power’ in its productnames, because it is very probable that Mac Pro will be the new name for the current PowerMac productline. Earlier, the name of the PowerBooks was already changed by ‘MacBook Pro’. The next major update in the PowerMac productline is expected in about a half year. The expectations are that the current PowerPC cpu will be replaced by an Intel processor, probably the Conroe, which is set for introduction this summer. I think Apple do not want to confuse customers by using the word ‘power’, because it may be considered as a pointer to the PowerPC cpu.
I am curious if Apple is also going to change the design of the Mac Pro or that the company stays with the current design, as they did with the MacBook Pro and the iMac. I also think we can expect some updates to the Cinema dislay’s when the new Mac Pro is introduced. While the 30″ and 24″ Cinema Displays are unmatched in their design, the price is relatively high compared to the Dell widescreen displays in 24″ and 30″ format, while these display use the same panel. Only the backlight and the design of the screens is different, but I do not think it justifies a prices difference of several hundred euro’s. The current Cinema Displays are quite a while unchanged, so that gives even more arguments for an possible update.