It has been quite some time since I used a Swing based Java application. Compared to beauty and close-to-native feeling of Eclipse based application, Swing just did not feel right - it looked differently and behaved a bit differently. For long time, my desktop was Swing-free (not counting the JDK demo). Not any more, though.
What made me to reconsider, is new release of the Netbeans v 6. In the latest milestone builds (M6 to M9), Netbeans team built amazing Ruby development environment. Compared to Ruby plugin in Eclipse, it has way more functionality, better debugging, really impressive editing support and very cool Rails extensions. The full description of new features is here.
The wild ride is over and the city gets back to normal. I wish we had won the Cup, but - Ducks were playing pretty good and found what worked on our team. Thanks, Alfie and the Sens - for all the great moments. You were fantastic. There will be another season in few months and another chance to bring the cup home.
On the positive side - it is good to have 2-3 more free evenings a week, now - when there is again nothing on the TV :-). Time to start catching up with neglected podcasts, blogs and feeds.
Despite pretty impressive battery life - which is btw *nowhere* in the range of advertised 7500 page turns - over period of few months I have noted that the charging of the reader behaves kind of funny. Sometimes, even after being plugged-in for 24 hours, the battery indicator stubbornly stays on two squares out of four. Other times, right after connecting, it jumps right to full charge.
It is hard to really measure these things as the battery depletion is very slow on reading and I do not really listen to music on this device (that's what iPods are for). I am not the only person who noticed this behaviour - Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte, who enhanced my favorite podcast Security Now! to be an unofficial eBook Sony Reader news exchange :-) have seen the same thing (search for Sony). Btw, Steve and Leo - thanks for doing the eBooks plugs - I appreciate that a lot ...
There has been lots of interesting news related to Microsof and Ruby recently, mostly about DLR's support of dynamic languages. One of my favorite tech authors stirred the waters once again last Friday with an article that goes beyond this and tries to paint larger picture of the uneasy relation between Ruby platform, Agile movement, OpenSource Community and Microsoft.
One quote from the article:
The attitude to open-source is a large part of this problem. When Java appeared there were yawning gaps in its portfolio, and worse some dreadful standard tools in its API (visions of Entity Beans spring to mind). Those gaps and bad ideas were fixed by the open-source community. Ant gave us a build tool, EJB was displaced by Spring and Hibernate. .NET has also got its gaps, and again the open source community has stepped up to fill them. Yet Microsoft refuses to collaborate with these efforts, even seems to go out of its way to undermine them. I was particularly sickened by Microsoft's reaction to NUnit - an excellent XUnit testing tool, elements of whose design were lauded by Anders Hejlsberg at OOPSLA. Microsoft ended not just bringing out a competitive library, but deliberately making it incompatible. That's not the kind of reaction that encourages people to invest their time in the platform.
The support for using dynamic languages such as Ruby or Python to code ASP.NET pages was announced for future versions of ASP.NET in the ASP.NET futures.
Unless I am mistaken, it means that we eventually will be able to write control event handlers in Python or even Ruby - which is certainly more fun than in VB.NET or even in C#, but is it really so important ?
What would be *really* cool if the whole ASP.NET become more agile and more "rail-ish". To make overall architecture more flexible - such as departure from not very flexible page-centric architecture towards MVC and routing. Maybe some version of ActiveRecord ? Or even multiple (and pluggable) template languages ? That would be really something.
With latest iTunes update, quite silently, a very nice new feature appeared. Apple started to offer for download lectures from many universities, with wide selection of topics: from environment through politics to mathematics and computer science. Most of the lectures are videos, but you will find also audio tracks - albeit for some topics, audio is quite problematic. Can you imagine doing e.g. differential equations in audio-only ?
The best feature - the lectures are free downloads. See more details here or on iTunes.
Joel Oleson is suffering if you do not blog ! Sounds strange ? Read the article Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/05/25/you-don-t-blog-i-m-suffering-because-you-don-t-blog.aspx
He makes several very good points - which have very little to do with Sharepoint - but I think the best one is helping the "organic indexing" of the Web space and helping the search engines out there better rank content. I wrote about this while ago.
It happened! After starting my preferred feed aggregator - Google Reader I have noticed the new feature that sounded so good that I almost could not believe it: offline reading. Using new plugin - Google Gears, the reader can cache 2000 items locally and allows you to go offline and read the news, blogs or whatever you have subscribed to absolutely anywhere.
The installation starts with this screen:
"Corporate IT is dominated by bloatware. Time and time again we have to deal with expensive software purchased on golf-courses that just get in our way while sucking funds and development hours. Technologies that make it harder for programmers to do what they like to do best - make a difference for the businesses they are supporting. "
-- Martin Fowler
A brief look at my Google Reader subscription list made me aware that I have added to my reading list a loooot of blogs, newslist and so on. Unfortunately, they are not organized very well and should be properly placed into folders. In a process of doing that, I will put some of the interesting blogs here.
For today, it is Frans Bouma's blog - focusing on .NET and Microsoft technology platforms. From the most recent good articles, look at why API's should not be designed by scientists - discussing and comparing various ways how the database level paging is handled in various databases (MySQL, PostgreSql, DB2, Oracle, SS2005), or read Frans' comments on Entity Framework being cut from .NET 3.5 - which is sad, but IMHO fairly accurate summary of the recent development. See for yourself.