Hm, almost a year since my last entry here, me bad. Short and difficult year even if I managed to produce the my best software till now still leaves me unsatisfied. Anyway if you care for some free software check out the first public releases of the SpaceMapper project, mn8 and DataStore.

BTW logic, that would be in mn8

    define FooBar [
        static : main ($args typeof Series) [
            $response = $args/2/
            $response.setContentType("text/html")
            print "<h1>Foobar!</h1>"
        ]
    ]

Oh, this just wasn't my day. After sleeping 3 hours I woke up at 6 AM to get some coding done and get out a few items from my todo list and when I boot my laptop my dear Linux wakes up with lots of reiserfs warnings. That didn't looked good, not a bit. I had a few hunches before (twice the contents of a directory was gone, with only the subdirectory structure remaining intact, and a couple of very strange and unusual reboots lately).

Made a backup (it's a bit difficult if your home directory gets over 1G) and tried to a soft fix (-x), the fix seemed to go ok, but the warnings where still there. Tried a rebuild-tree (worked perfectly on two occasions before on other boxes) and screwed up totally my file system. So at the end spent all day installing fresh Linux.

There could have been no worse time for this to happen as Monday I have a milestone and any bit of time is more valuable than gold. As usually the loses where only personal (a couple of config files and personal documents) because in a funny way yesterday I struggled not to leave the company before I make the big commit. Lucky me I did it ;)

Oh well, that's life, you win some then you lose some. My old Linux served me well for more than half a year, and reiserfs is a great files system. Life goes on :))

Qbert: I will try to answer a couple of your questions about Java and Linux. I work for a small software company doing (recently) mostly Java programming, both CLI and GUI applications. All the developers choose Linux as development platform, and let me tell you developing Java on Linux is great (did I mentioned that XEmacs + JDE rulez).

How about running ? Well, do I keep an eye on the open source alternatives to Sun's Java I don't find them very usable yet, so for the moment we are left with Sun's and IBM's implementation. Both work very well, and in the recent time I started noticing that there are some serious performance improvements. Sometime I even have the feeling that on Linux Java is more speedy than on the Win test box. Java (at least the CLI part) on Linux servers is reliable. We run about 3 Java daemons on our servers which provides the support for continuous integration through CruiseControl and they work 24/7 without many incidents.

What about the GUI? That Java GUI (swing) sucks it's a matter of taste. I also was reluctant to running Java GUI applications, till one day. I considered to be a shame to call myself a Java programmer and have bad feelings about Java GUI without even bothering to try them. So I gave them a try. They work and most of the time can be a pleasent experience. The great memory consumption and high startup times will be solved IMHO in time. Also there is a lot to be done in the field. We are also working on a GUI application right now, and we used a couple of tricks in it. First we use SkinLF, so we are not forced to Metal any more (plus we can use Gnome and KDE themes) and a bit of antialiasing our application looks and works great. To be honest I preffer a Java application instead of no application and I preffer a god Java application instead of a bad native one.

IMHO the facts about Java and Linux are promissing, and if GCJ is going to work, we'll achieve two big goals (Open Source Java and native applications written in Java).

Well, coding, coding, coding, not at the speed I planned or want but features are comming along. I discovered one thing about myself today. I don't like changed code, it makes me feel bad, like it's not pure anymore or I don't trust it, even if I revise it line by line. When the feeling is to overwhelming I write a test case just to make sure! What the hell is wrong with me ? Or maybe is just my ego whom doesn't like it that the code I produced is not perfect the first time. Yeah that must be!

Read an intresting article at the CIO Magazine. The idea is that most CIO's are not happy with the commercial software these days. The amount of money spend is just colossal, and the results are I think well known by most of us, I think all of us had a few bad nights about the crap managers pulled on us just to get the piece out in time, without consideration for testing, quality and so on.

Now I have this idea troubling me for some time. Why not make an coalition of OS developers (or teams) and start producing Open Source software for specific enterprise areas. The money would come from sponsoring, in fact most of the CIO's interviewed would be favorable to an Open Source solution, in fact many companyes could group together to sponsor such an software. Sure, support is needed, but let's face it if they pay us we will provide the support to. Another issue, that might be a good idea to sponsor local LUG's, which could act as local support.

The advantages are obvious, quick bug fixes, solid code, interoperability. No more huge maintenance costs (think about $400,000 for only one company) and most important no lock in. Sure it might take a year or two till the software would actually be usable, but I would see it as a good investion.

The disadvantage, who will pay us for our daily job ?

Among other things today was the day when I recovered a lost soul. A friend of mine told me once how sick is of Windows and all the problems he have with it. In one of it's visit he noticed that what we are running doesn't look like Windows, he was shocked to find that there are other OS'es available.

So today we installed Mandrake 8 on his computer. I don't know if he will manage to resist the big switch (if he manages to hold on for two weeks he won't switch back). But to be honest doesn't even matter if he will remain with Linux or not, what matters is that he now knows that there are alternatives and that is what matters. BTW, he is a small business owner and he is quite committed to switch all his computers from Windows to Linux.

There where a couple of funny things in his reaction when we installed it. First he didn't really understand how is possible to only allocate 8 G of space for an OS and don't worry about future applications. Well it's amazing how much can go in 8Gigs and how much space will still be available ;). Also after playing with all the window managers and all the applications (well not quite with all) he was wandering how can Microsoft make money selling that crap when there is this piece of software which is so "easy to install" and so "sweet" (his words :) . Well, Linux wasn't always like that, I just remember 98 or 99 when I was trying to install Debian for the first time, and after a whole week I still didn't manage to get all those dependencies right and I switched to Slackware.