Roads Less Taken

Did my daily swoop over Slashdot, Lambda and a few other places, noticed that I am not the only one seriously questioning the current evolution of Java. A simple language? Eh, not.

Quite interesting to read what people have to say about it. Obviously we all have different perspectives on what is complex and what is not.

Also been trying to get vsftpd to work on my Debian Sarge box. Bleh. After tons of digging it appears there is some issue with PAM, perhaps I should have looked in the issue tracker of Debian, but I gave up on it. Going to try using pureftpd instead, with virtual users of course - I would never open up regular accounts on ftp. :)

Hmmm, time to go and buy some nice wine for the chicken barbequeue tonight.

Hrmph. I wanted my blog to be at goran.krampe.se but I couldn’t figure out how to do that easily using apache. Ended up with goran.krampe.se/blog using ScriptAlias in my httpd.conf, but so be it.

And now a good name… Well, "Roads Less Taken" refers to the poem called "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost which describes how a traveler in a forest decides to take one of the two roads in front of him - "the one less traveled by".

I think that sets the mood for what I would like to write about in software development on this blog, namely that you can gain a lot by choosing "Roads" (think tools, methods, interests and techniques) that are "Less Taken" (not among the most popular that everyone else uses). Daring to be different and choosing the right tool for the job.

My favourite programming language is Smalltalk, which definitely is not mainstream today even though it did hold the second place of the OO market with more than 30% back when C++ was king of the hill. The specific Smalltalk that I am quite involved in is Squeak and again some people may have heard about Smalltalk, but they sure haven’t heard about Squeak.

My private OS of choice is Linux and I use Debian on servers and Lunar-Linux on my laptop. Lunar definitely isn’t mainstream, but very rewarding. A late discovery of mine is a brilliant SCM tool called darcs which is quite different.

The above tools and more will be discussed on this blog, and I have now managed to get it working with a Wordpress style. Neato. Over and out.

Soo… a blog. Got one too. :) Like all the rest. I chose RubLog, partly because I am a Smalltalker at heart and Ruby is IMHO pretty close and because I like the simplicity, variety in markup and general feeling.

I use darcs to edit it, which is much nicer than CVS.

Well, over and out for now.