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A review - the first, perhaps - of British Sea Power’s new album Open Season is up at TMN.

I just pre-ordered my copy!

I love it when I find a little gem in Gentoo. PORTAGE_NICENESS lets you nice the emerge process so that you can continue to use your workstation whilst updating your system.

<pre><code>
localhost root # PORTAGE_NICENESS=15 emerge -uDv world
</code>

More details at the wiki.

Against my better judgement, I’m releasing my Growl plugin for Firefox. This software is nothing more than a Hack. Be forewarned that it requires a Firefox nightly build (here) and Growl 0.6. Unfortunately, there is no way to set the minimum version requirement to 1.0+, so if you try running this under Firefox 1.0 you will just get an ugly error. With all that being said, enjoy:

Download: [growl.xpi] – Requires Firefox Nightly Build

Forecasts should be coming soon to the Quicksilver Weather Plugin.

What I really wanted to do was use XSLT to reformat the weather data, but there just wasn’t a feasible implementation. libxslt support exists, but dynamically loading it from a Framework proved extremely difficult (if not impossible). I’d completely given up - hoping that Tiger will have better XML support - until I read that Sherlock has a built-in XQuery engine!

Unfortunately, the data it returns is not toll-free bridged to native Cocoa types, but my requirements aren’t too complex. In fact, I’m really just returning a block of text wrapped in place-holder tags. The biggest hurdle has been learning XQuery! It’s not particularly difficult and studying it (and XSLT) has certainly opened my eyes to better ways of dealing with XML.

All that being said, I’ve got XQuery working and the data formatted, I just need to start integrating it into my plugin. Hopefully, I’ll have something to test soon!

O’Reilly has a terrific interview with 37 Signals’ Jason Fried. I want Jason to come to my office and repeat the following paragraph to all of the Project Managers (some of whom are PMI-certified and all of whom are infatuated with CMMI) and IT decision-makers:

The way I look at it is this: I want developers to be comfortable with their development environment. I’m a designer and a business guy, not a developer. I’m not going to push PHP or Java or whatever just because I’ve heard of it. I’m going to defer to David on this. And if David chooses Ruby, then Ruby it is. It’s all a matter of trust. If you don’t trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application? Trust is critical here. And, further, why would you dare impact your developer’s morale by throwing him or her into a language where he can’t be as productive or as satisfied? You only get good work from people who enjoy doing the work. I’ll take a happy average programmer over a disgruntled, frustrated master programmer any day.

I think that sums up my feelings quite perfectly.

I’ve done this countless times and saved my company tens-of-thousands of dollars in licensing and (worthless) support costs.

I started doing this when it became clear that WebLogic 6.1 did not work as advertised and I’ve never looked back. The only argument I ever hear in favor of BEA is that they provide support (again, at a cost in the tens-of-thousands of dollars). To which I respond: one, I’ve used BEA’s support (including their on-site Professional Services) and found it wholly lacking and, two, JBoss provides support services in addition to offering a better product!

Update: Coincidentally, my first day taking over a new project: the first production release had to be called off because app deployment is bringing the server down—though it worked perfectly and is configured identically in development. Guess which app server is being used… WebLogic.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

My iPod Shuffle is so strange. In shuffle mode, I may go for days without ever hearing a particular song, yet within a matter of hours the same two songs will be repeated… in the same order!

Life is Random? Freaky is more like it.

My Growl hack extension for Firefox works with nightly builds since they fixed the bug that prevents NSIProcess from passing arguments. Plus, the new version of growlnotify that comes with 0.6 allows for the title, message and icon to be passed-in as arguments. Unfortunately, this fix won’t be generally available until Firefox 1.1.

In the meantime:

The Farm has a lengthy, but very interesting overview of innovations in today’s Web Application domain. It touches on everything from XMLHttpRequest to Ajax.

The thing that is most interesting to me is that “HTML as the new API” sure seems to fulfill many of the promises that Java (and applets, in particular) failed to deliver. I’ll re-quote what I think is the heart of the matter with regards to web-based applications:

With web-based software, most users won’t have to think about anything except the applications they use.

It’s easy enough to do - there are so many varied and powerful tools and technologies - there is no reason not to do it (where applicable).

Some recent discussion about Java, .NET and Ruby gave me pause to think about why - even whilst completely enamored with Ruby - I’m fine with being (primarily) a Java developer. I’ll repeat it, because it’s worth repeating: I prefer Ruby or Python (or, heck, even Perl) to Java. I find Java cumbersome and, frankly, generally pretty boring. But, I enjoy being a Java developer. And there’s a reason for that: with Java I can be effective; quickly and comprehensively, effective.

The main reason I find I can be so effective is because there is a lot of quality Java software out there and a lot of it is Open Source. Now, I know that is equally, if not more true for Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. But, in the generally accepted Enterprise Domain, OSS helps set Java apart. I couldn’t imagine developing Enterprise apps without access to the source and community that comes with OSS. Examining, patching, reusing and modifying code from Open Source Java projects is something that I do regularly—this isn’t just for the sake of argument.

If you consider the other big player in Enterprise software development, .NET, I couldn’t imagine developing in that world! It’s Microsoft’s Way or No Way. Last year, Microsoft took a group of developers - myself included - from the company I work for out to lunch. They tried to sell us on giving up Java for .NET. They presented an excellent case. C# is fantastic. Visual Studio is excellent. But it’s all pretty much equivalent to Java/J2EE. It’s a draw, a stalemate… more a matter of preference than anything else. Except for one thing: OSS.

So, why Java? Well, it’s a good mix between Open Source flexibility and Enterprise legitimacy… even if it’s not as cool as Ruby.

<pre><code>
irb(main):001:0> ["Java",".NET"].each do |lang|
irb(main):002:1* puts lang > "Ruby" 
irb(main):003:1> end
false
false
</code>