Computing on Roads Less Taken

Ubuntu Just Works

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine is having a less optimal experience with Linux, and I realized I could jot down my experience for the last few years.

I have been using Linux on my desktop for a long time now, about 10 years I think. Early I played “distro jumping” and used Lunar Linux for quite some time on my older Zepto laptop.

But at some point I just decided that, nah, source distros are huge time sinks. Not necessarily because they have issues, but because they are fun to tinker with. I also felt it was “smarter” to know a mainstream Linux well, so I decided to go for “least friction”, and moved to Ubuntu. When Unity hit I did contemplate using something else, at least an alternative shell, but decided to just “hang in there”, and now I tend to like it. Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS , it was pretty eventless.

ESUG in Annecy Day 4

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It starts off with Cincom, Arden Thomas presenting their roadmap. He had a slide mentioning Jules Verne and I must ask him if he is aware of the influence from the books of Jules Verne - as Dan has explained, the ballon and the island in the classic Smalltalk logo comes from the Mysterious Island book .

ESUG in Annecy Day 3

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Day three blurred a bit for me - lots of mingling and hacking intermixed with some nice presentations, but I missed quite a lot, I admit, like the presentation on new native UI stuff in VisualWorks and the tODE stuff from Dale Henrichs.

ESUG in Annecy Day 2

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Another day in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

Only writing about stuff I attended :)

ESUG in Annecy Day 1

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here we go! Time for a week of Smalltalking fun in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

While ESUG this year is not super big, I think around 110 people or so, there were still quite a few arms raised when checking how many were here for the first time. The organisation seems impeccable, as always - thank you Stéphane Ducasse, Herve Verjus, Laurent Laffont and of course all volunteers!

Enough chit-chat, let’s get on with the talks…

New Languages After 2000

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I am sitting in a gate on an airport waiting to go to ESUG so I felt I should finally get this article out the door. In a presentation earlier this year I asked what has happened in the programming language area since year 2000? Not much I felt and I couldn’t really name any interesting new language when thinking about it. But then I decided to look more closely and I can conclude I was at least partly wrong :)

So prepare for a long (too long) article digging through a whole bunch of languages trying to come up with the answer - Have any interesting programming languages appeared since year 2000?

(And at the end, how is the Smalltalk community doing?)

RethinkDB - Yet Another NoSQL?

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

15-18 years ago my passion was in OODBs. As a Smalltalker GemStone was one of the most fascinating to work with, but as we all know OODBs never got really popular, despite their fantastic qualities. But the new NoSQL databases in many respects offer OODB-ish characteristics, although they of course also bring a whole new menu to the table.

In my eternal quest for “database bliss” my next stop is RethinkDB , but let me tell you how I got here.

Going virtual from CLI

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently when I automated a development process I looked deeper at managing virtual environments and ended up using two really nice tools complementing VirtualBox in a slick way - Vagrant and Veewee . A lot of us use VirtualBox of course, but getting a new Ubuntu box up is still a bit of blablablabla… What if it could be done all from the command line and easily automated?

Literal arrays vs JSON vs STON vs Tirade

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:11:22 +0000

Recently there were a range of threads on the pharo-dev mailinglist discussing the textual format to use for Smalltalk source code metadata. The discussion veered off from the specific use case but basically four different formats were discussed and compared, of which one I am the author. And oh, sorry for the formatting of this article - I need to change theme on this blog for better readability.

Going Lenovo...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 01:02:06 +0000

When I started my own company about a year ago I ended up buying an ASUS G73JW gaming laptop - I took a deliberate decision to focus on raw power for decent money and totally ignoring portability. Generally it has served me well, although it does tend to make a lot of fan noise, at least under Ubuntu. It might work smoother in Windows, but I seldom boot into Windows.

Needless to say though it is a real ton of bricks (8.8 lbs = 4 kg) and including the truly fat power supply it simply weared my back down during 2011. I have been carrying this beast in a backpack every day - and my body eventually said “enough dammit!”. :)