afongen

Syncato, new weblog software. That is to say, “an XML fragment management system.” Jon Udell probably summarizes it best:

Kimbro Staken’s new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB XML, echoes a theme I’ve been working with myself for a while. A collection of well-formed weblog entries is, implicitly, an XML database whose contents can be searched and intelligently recombined.

Related note to self: play around with Berkeley DB XML, and an article about using it.

Congratulations to the TeaSource, which opened its doors five years ago (they’ve had an online store a couple years longer). I can’t believe the time has gone by so fast.

Once upon a time, Twin Cities residents were hard pressed to fine quality specialty tea in town. One shop opened up in Minneapolis, but … well, they had attitude problems. Buying tea there just didn’t feel right. Just about when I’d given up, Bill Waddington opened up the TeaSource more or less in my neighborhood. I was thrilled. The selection and quality of their teas is really quite impressive, and the staff most friendly. I heartily recommend it.

And yes, Splendid Table fans, that Bill Waddington, the Splendid Table’s tea maven.

Heh. I’m sure he’d be amused to know that I referred to him as that Bill Waddington.

I don’t know if this is a chain-wide promotion or not, but at Barnes & Noble last night I saw they had a few “classic programming books” on sale at 40% off. The ones I noticed were The Pragmatic Programmer and Extreme Programming Explained, but there were a handful of others. In case you’re interested.

I recently started using Subversion for version control instead of CVS, and when I’m on Windows I like to use TortoiseSVN, a Subversion client that integrates with Windows Explorer and makes it very easy to get into the habit of regular commits and updates. Almost too easy.

Mac users are familiar with how when you drag a file into the trash, the can bulges a bit and looks overfull (it no longer bulges in OS X, but it still looks overfull). In User Interface Design for Programmers, Joel Spolsky writes about how this carries the trash can metaphor to a point where it backfires:

The trouble is that neat freaks were distracted by the full trash can. It looks messy. When they wanted to clean up, they would empty the trash. Over time, many people got in the habit of dragging things to the trash can and then mechanically emptying the trash so that the trash can wouldn’t look messy, thus defeating its original purpose: to provide a way to get things back!

I am one of those neat freaks. It takes conscious effort not to empty the trash every chance I get.

One of the really cool things about TortoiseSVN is its icon overlays. You can tell at a glance which files have been edited or added to the repository since the last update:

It didn’t take long to discover that it bugs me to have anything but little green checkmarks on all the files, so I commit at every opportunity. Since TortoiseSVN makes the “commit” command easily accessible on the context menu, this takes practically no time at all. Now, I’m a believer in the principle of continuous integration, but it can be carried to an extreme, especially since I usually work alone. As with the trash can, I require conscious effort not to commit every time a new unit test passes. Committing that frequently is not only unnecessary, it breaks the rhythm of test-driven development (red, green, refactor) so I find it harder to get into the groove. I don’t want to close the Explorer window, so reluctantly I have turned off icon overlays for the time being.

At least until I get used to my new toy.

I’m reading Jonathon Rabb’s The Book of Q, a novel about a Manichaean conspiracy. On my way into work this morning, I was musing about similarities between this and Foucault’s Pendulum (not entirely a fair comparison, but hey). When I stepped onto the bus, a the first guy I saw was reading Foucault’s Pendulum. I was immediately suspicious: that’s obviously not a coincidence, right? I started to look nervously around the rest of the bus, wondering how many of the passengers were consipirators.

I really need to stop reading books like this.

Our marketing people are working with a design firm on a new web site design. The browser used in the mockups is — get this — Internet Explorer 4 for the Mac. Weird.

When I first read what Joel Spolsky had to say about how task switching was harmful (as in, there is no such thing as multitasking), I thought that what he had to say was interesting and probably right on the mark. At the same time, though, I was quite enamored with the idea of instant messaging and chat as a valuable tool for collaboration in the workplace, especially as Jabber was bursting onto the scene.

So I blithely ignored Joel’s advice. I also ignored the steady stream of writing about the tyranny of email. And you know what? I’ve begun to regret it. Email’s great, but I’ve allowed myself to be controlled by it.

Live and learn. I now check my email only a couple times a day and am on IM on only when I’m not coding and can tolerate interruptions. When not reading email, I close the application. I’m not nearly ready to go to the extreme that Sterling Hughes has, but already I’m getting a whole lot more done and feel better about my day.

A look at XCode: Apple’s Answer to Visual Studio. I’m unlikely to use it anytime soon, but it looks pretty cool. This tickled my fancy:

Distributed builds. Using Apple’s Rendezvous networking, a workstation will check for other compilation workstations on the network that can build some of the needed modules. If it finds any, it ships the code over and awaits the return files

Nifty. And even cooler: it comes “free” with the operating system.

But I don’t do development where XCode would be useful, certainly not on my mac. So I’ll most likely fire it up, play with it a bit, and never look at it again. Kinda like I did with Project Builder. Great stuff; I just have no immediate use for it.

I’m on the verge of switching to Eclipse, though, especially as it looks like I’ll soon be using Java at work. About damn time. With EPIC (Perl plugins for Eclipse) and PHPEclipse (I give you one guess what that is), I’m about set.

With a project code-named Royale, Macromedia is targeting server-side Java developers. They’re really pushing the idea of rich Internet applications, especially in the enterprise. With MX, J2EE developers got Flash Remoting, and now this. Is anyone biting?

At least we can expect another highly amusing roung of “Macromedia’s trying to turn the Web into its own proprietary playground!” bitching and moaning.

BufferTabs, a jEdit plugin that lets you switch between buffers using tabs rather than the default dang-blasted pull-down menu. That pull-down menu has been my biggest complaint against jEdit. Being able to switch easily between files is a deal-breaker: it’s so important that I’ll stop using an editor if I can’t do it. Tiny frustrations add up.

Yes, I know I can use the keyboard. But when my hands aren’t on the keyboard, I really like tabs. And when I’ve got more than just a few files open, cycling through all the buffers to find the right one is annoying.