Rhonabwy

I spotted this on the http://groups.google.com/group/django-usersDjango-users mailing list. Dave Hodder has made available update syntax highlighting files for VIM. - available at http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1487
I’ve no idea if any yet exist for emacs, but there’s defiinitely a nice set available for TextMate.

Jens nails it:

Regarding attempting to write desktop apps with Java:
compared to any decent Mac app, the results look like a Soviet tractor built on a Monday.

JDD writes some more about Java and the Mac (I missed his post from yesterday until after I’d written my own), and I really like his commentary about market places and “what’s valuable”.

I watched an interview with Steve Ballmer that I spotted through Digg that was captioned something like “Steve Ballmer laughs at the iPhone”. During the interview, he laughed at being ask the question (at least that was my interpretation of the event) and then went on to cite how it would be a failure because it doesn’t address any business needs. Duncan nails it back (I have no idea if he saw that interview) with “the iPod doesn’t have a business need”.

We’ll continue to use Java, no doubt, as it’s a great back-end statically typed language for servers. For the need it fills, it works very well. That need isn’t mine - I opt for tools that will get my work done farther and faster just by myself, or with only a little other help. Python and Django most recently (server side work), but the Cocoa/Objective-C desktop application frameworks for the Mac as well.

I started to look at Flash to be honest, but I haven’t delved in past reading about the ActionScript 3.0 frameworks. Not quite ready to dive in there yet - too many other things on my plate to concentrate at the moment.

Cabel has seriously outdone himself with this one. He posts about a few bugs in Saints Row, but it really doesn’t hit home until you watch the Musical (!!!) that he put together lamenting the bugs in the game.

Completely brilliant and inspired, not to mention funny. A recommended watch for that sunny Sunday (or Saturday) afternoon when you need something to make you smile.

Two nights ago, I crashed into bed with my mind racing. It was 12:30am, my eyes weren’t focusing anymore, but the “voice” in my head was trying out all sorts of things that I wanted to get up and write about. Now I can’t remember much of it, which is really darned annoying. I’m going to take a stab at this anyway…

I know that it started out with some musing about how I felt “trained” out of talking about the things that I find interesting. They make piss poor small talk, and most people’s eyes start glazing over. That’s kind of annoying, but other than a really good ice or snow storm, I mostly don’t get much interested in the weather. Politics is just a disaster, and I don’t know a damn thing (nor care about) sports. Yeah, I’m in a chit-chat/small talk sort of hell. To be clear, I’m not into the “ooh, look - my CPU is bigger than your CPU” sort of technical mishmash, I instead prefer a good conversation on the benefits of optimizing against developer or processor time. The issues of heat vs. performance and how it’s becoming a force to be reckoned with in progamming, or what makes up a good UI element. But that is all pretty much an aside.

A week ago I gave a presentation at work that I worked myself into a frenzy over. In retrospect, it went very well. I’ve received some impressive kudo’s for it. And yeah, I can still see all the warts and flaws. For the insatiably curious, it was on using Maven 2 as a build tool and how we should be transforming our use of Perforce from old habits.

I started working on the talk back in September. I hate to admit it, but wanting to do well on the talk put it off for literally months. It’s a little bit about momentum. I knew that the talk would be a big push on momentum of using Maven, I want it to succeed, and I was worried that if I screwed it up, it would have the inverse effect. People would think the idea of using Maven internally sucked, and I’d have rolled this development-process-momemtum to a horrific and grinding halt.

In December, I scheduled the talk to force myself to stop putting it off. I thought maybe 10-15 people would show. Over 40 signed up. 30 actually showed - it was standing room only for the last few. I’d spent hours and hours rehearsing it, editing it, trying it out. I think I completely redid that talk 3 times. I read nearly every post on presenting by Kathy Siera and Damian Conway that I could find. It helped. I was still quietly (or not so, to some of my friends) paniced. I knew I still had a fatal flow of too many messages in my story.

In the end, being interested is what I think made the presentation work. And that is what (somehow) ties back to first comments - that I like and am interested in things other folks find not-so-interesting. I believe that simply by being interested and knowledgable in the subject, it lends a fair amount of credibility that I happily took credit against. I don’t think the intracies of automatic transitive dependecies in builds and making the development process better with it is going to be a common cocktail party topic - but hey, over a good beer it’ll do fine. Thank god I go out drinking with other Mac programmers periodically, or I’d never get to talk about the geek stuff without someone glazing over.

Daniel Steinberg’s article entitled Java to the iPhone: Can you hear me now? is getting some link love tonight, me included.

I don’t think there’s any real epiphany here, more like a “yeah, that’s right” sort of forgone conclusion in my head that just makes sense. While I think Daniel has a bit of nostolgia for the old bird (that would be programming language Java, in case you’re not following), the truth of the matter is that Java never did shit on the desktop. Or more appropriately, that’s all it did. Even with the dramatic and amazing efforts of a lot of people - the reality of java on the desktop was a clunky, often-slow, and non-repeatable-between-OS interface that never really looked like anything other than a clunky interface.

I suppose you could call this post “Why flash is going to kick java’s ass on the desktop” just as well - because it’s not even related in many respects to the iPhone, except for a comment that Jobs as reported by David Pogue. Would you spend the resources porting java to the iPhone. If it was my choice, no way. Java still does some things well, but to me it’s moving into the real of “bank software”. Compiled server software? Sure, yeah. Probably over C++ in my book (but there’s always room for C if you need the down and dirty speed). But productivity for the developer? No, sorry - not anymore. More flexible languages like Python, Ruby, even PHP are taking it down. They’ve optimized significantly more towards “developer time” over performance. Java did this over C and C++, but it’s been surpassed.

But move to the desktop, and you’ve got even more specific needs. The rules disappear and the options explode for what you “want to do”, and a language that’s both tedious and relatively indeterminate (in terms of what you’ll actually GET in performance and visuals) isn’t going to last long. Flash, I think, will take it down at the end. Shoot - just look at Flash 9/ActionScript 3. A flash “movie” looks the same on a Mac as a PC as a Linux desktop. That’s the win, right there. It might be a pain in the ass to code towards - I personally prefer Cocoa/Objective-C for desktop apps, but then I can’t get a result on Windows and Linux with that. I can with Flash. It’s predictable. It’s growing, and not just in WS*craptola API’s. It will be interesting to see how Adobe plays out it’s hand here (I actually have little faith they’ll do it intelligently) - but I still expect Flash to suceed in spite of anything Adobe might actually do.

If I were Ray Ozzie, I’d be worried about Flash and what it’s going to do to my desktop. Or how I could use it… one of two.

Will Flash stand up to a large desktop App (Can you even imagine MS Word in Flash???). Maybe, maybe not. I’ll bet not. I’ll bet the small-pieces-loosely-coupled concepts of Unix are finally making it around as well though. And that it won’t matter. That having a reliable expectation of what the interface will LOOK like will ultimately be more important than the 600,000 features you don’t use.

Spreadsheets in a web browser - that must have been Bill Gate’s worst nightmare about 10 years ago. And they’re here. Any they’re not awesome, but they ARE disruptive. They’re somewhat functional, cost nothing, and will undoutable get better. It’s done mostly in Javascript with some clever server side function. Javascript is (more or less) ECMAScript. Flash 9 is ECMAScript as well. Connect the dots.

In the end, I real Daniel’s piece and thought. Yep, makes sense.

I went to the Seattle Weblogger Meetup this evening - first time in ages. It was a small crown - Jack and Anita, Jules, Clark, a young lady named Monica who’s starting a blog with the PI, and a fellow named Paul that I didn’t end up talking with, even though I was there for two hours. Strange…

I don’t know if they’re all this small now - the craze having died down a bit perhaps - but it was a nice informal chat environment. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed just getting out and talking to folks.

No pictures - by the time Karen got me out of bed, dressed, coffee’d up at El Diablo, and over to the counter balance, they’ve all gone. A few cars were trying to go up (and down) the counter balance, but otherwise it was pretty clear that nothin’s movin fast out here today.

We geeked out something serious this weekend. It’s the culmination of waiting and planning for (me at least) over a year. We have a new TV, and Karen has her first laptop.

The TV first (since I’m writing). We got a Panasonic TH-42X600U 42″ High Definition Plasma TV. A year ago when we were looking, we considered even bigger TV’s… but they didn’t fit in our house! So today it came, we got a little off-the-air HDTV antenna (and actually get pretty good reception), and of course hooked it immediately up to the XBox. Tonight’s inaugural movie will be… Hero. Very colourful movie with visuals that, well, demand a good showing.

If anyone wants a 34″ CRT television, our old one is looking for a good home (since it’s current owners don’t want it any more).

And no, we’re not going to get cable OR satellite. Thanks - for what we want that’s not online or on DVD’s from Netflix, I think we’ll just get it off the air (local football games on the rare occasion, for example).

And Karen now has a more powerful computer than I do (again..). We just got the latest MacBook Pro for her. Dual boot will probably be coming soon to that machine, while mine stays (relatively) pure using Windows only in a proper sandbox (VMWare Fusion, for example). It will be interesting seeing how much cooler her laptop runs than mine (I’ve a first generation MacBook Pro). Beyond that, they’re externally identical… so who knows how long she’ll actually have the faster computer.

Hey, that’s cool - Django has a review and mention of the DjangoBook in Wired’s Monkey Bites column.