The part 1 of the post is here --- continuing ---
So back again - different coffee shop (Starbucks at Carling), freshly charged battery, Grande Latte and no internet connection (which means no distractions from emails and the Web) - here we go again, part 2.
If I should single out one or two technologies that I think I have neglected and should have paid much more attention to it would be the Web trio of HTML/JavaScript/CSS as one and the SQL as second.
We are recently interviewing quite a lot in anticipation of the great things coming. It is sort of similar task as we did year and something ago, but I enjoy this round much better. This time, rather than "we have to assemble the project team ASAP", we have the luxury of longer term view and focus more on hiring the people that will be great match to the company culture, will be with us for longer period and will grow with the company.
One of the languages that I managed to completely ignore for almost 20 years was Objective-C. I always saw it as less developed, dead-end version of C++ that has little perspective - despite that GCC supported it since early days. I guess I was wrong on two of three counts - that of little perspective still holds as long as you want to stay outside of OS-X platform.
One of the issues I had was strange syntax and that from not too many books on subject, they were
I was trying to set up an Oracle appliance - install the Oracle Express XE into a virtual machine. What (in my mind) should be smooth and straightforward process was something very different. I should have been forewarned warned after seeing the discussion ... To make long story short, the installer failed on three different Linux VM's I had available - because of unavailable dependencies, too small swap space etc, etc.
I have been running the Unix only workstations for over a week now. During this week, I have managed to clean up and convert two Windows boxes to VMWARE virtual machines, but actually had to resort to use the VM's only in two cases. Everything else worked just fine.
The first case was requirement to review an non-trivial Excel file. Normally, Numbers does very decent job when it comes to loading Excel files and for the most the remaining cases, the OpenOffice (in it's more polished Cocoa version NeoOffice) works just fine. Well - as long as you do not open spreadsheet with pivot tables. In my case, the spreadsheet contained pivot tables and charts based on these tables. Numbers warned during import that this feature is not supported and the converted spreadsheet was very good looking - nicer that in Excel, but not quite so functional :-). Strangely enough, the charts were imported OK but lost the drill-down capabilities. After trying out the NeoOffice, the imported spreadsheet had retained some pivot capabilities of the original, but lost charts completely. The only resort was falling back to Office 2003 in virtual machine and using Excel. Fortunately one of the two VM's created from old hardware had Office 2003 installed, so that worked out OK.
Last year, when I got my first Mac, it was a wild ride of discoveries and trying out new software. As result I have ended up with many programs installed that I do not really need or use. Fortunately, the uninstall process is as simple as install and there is no registry that could get corrupted, so it was not really a big deal. With the new one, I am going to be much more selective what I put on the harddrive and what not.
During the vacation, we stopped in small bookstore in Verona which was selling computer software as well. At the entrance, there was a poster showing smiling Finder's face, Apple logo and announcing reasons why you would want to make the big jump - il grande salto - to Mac platform. That is to explain the title :-)
Grande Salto is exactly what I did. Without too much preparation or notice. Since Tuesday evening I am happy owner of the beautiful piece of hardware (17 inch 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 250 GB HDD and 4 GB of RAM) that is greatly complemented by the amazing software collection (OS X 10.5, iLife 08, iWork 08 and many others) running on it. I spent Wednesday playing with it and between 'Wows' and 'Ahhs' managed to setup the core applications I need for work: several configurations of Eclipse (with and without MyEclipseIDE), Netbeans with Ruby, couple of gems and of course THE editor. Then transferred the sources, installed Ant, Spring, Tomcat and couple of opensource packages (e.g. Jakarta Commons). And on Thursday, I jumped right into the field, to the client continuing in development of my current Java project in the place where I left it on Monday with Fujitsu N5100 running XP-ProSP2. As a plan B, I had my old notebook also with me - but did not have to resort to using it.
Trying to install ATG on the Linux platform turned out to be not completely hickup-free. The default installer died with the following message:
$ ./ATG2007.1.bin> Preparing to install...> Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...> Configuring the installer for this system's environment...> awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> /bin/ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory> basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory[/sourcecode]> Fortunately, the fix was easy after I found out what went wrong: incorrect assumption about kernel version. To make it work, this "hack" helped:> [sourcecode language='css']> $ mv ATG2007.1.bin ATG2007.1.bin.orig> $ cat ATG2007.1.bin.orig | sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" >ATG2007-1.bin None of this of course happens on Windows - oh, yes - the joys of not swimming with the crowd :-). You will encounter issues otherwise unknown - but also learn something in the process.
I am in the middle of a non-computer related project. Last week we have decided to get rid of carpeting in my home office and library and to put in the hardwood floor. My wife picked the wood and color, I picked the contractor, with my son's help we moved out the furniture and the renovation started. The most painful thing was shutting down and disconnecting all the computers and servers - only the lonely router is hanging on the wall and suffering the dust and noise of the power tools. As result, my family is now server-less and until we finish and connect them back, we have to survive using the notebooks only. Fortunately, I have at least one notebook available for each household member, except the cat. Even more fortunately, she (the cat) does not mind.
Since the big meow on Friday, lot of unhappy people had been talking and blogging about how terrible and unacceptable is the absence of the Java 6 from the Leopard. Some post were sounding very dramatic "I would not buy Mac if I only knew ..." - which is a bit silly. The Leopard's 300 new features were posted and touted and hyped for two weeks. Some of the "great" improvements were actually fairly modest improvements - so it was OBVIOUS that Java 6 is not going to be included because it would definitely make the list. QED.