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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?

So ok, I really like looking at new interesting NoSQL databases. Up until yesterday I felt Riak was the most interesting one (have also coauthored Phriak - a Riak binding for Pharo Smalltalk) but after an evening of discussing choices of key/value backends for the Oak project I decided to “google a bit” and stumbled upon HyperDex.

After the conundrum with my Intel 320 SSD I did some googling and decided to invest a fair chunk of money in a really good SSD - the Samsung 840 Pro, 512GB. The 840 Pro seems to be the king of the hill right now and it’s only 7mm thick which is what I need for my X220 (although people have shoved 9mm drives into it with a bit of force).

As a long time Squeak/Pharo (Smalltalk) developer I have accumulated a set of packages that I have written or co-written and that have been published open source for others to use. Since quite a few years SqueakSource has been the natural hosting place, but it has reached the end of the road and it’s high time to move on.

When I bought my Lenovo X220 - which I have been extremely pleased with to date - I chose an Intel 320 160Gb SSD disk with it, in retrospect a BAD MISTAKE. No idea why I didn’t find the warnings plastered all over the net at the time, and the problem was even acknowledged by Intel as early as july 2011. The disk has been working fine since april when I got it, until the last day of 2012…

In a customer project right now I need to be able to work and evolve code fast, with a relatively complex model. And by fast I mean that I want to cut away as much as possible of the efforts related to persistence. Generally this is what OODBs excel at.

So… I kinda got tired of Wordpress. A bit too much for me, I want something more lightweight that “just works”. I also stumbled over some blog that had just moved over to Octopress and made it sound like “da shit” for coders. So be it! And so far so good.

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.

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.

These days I am, as usual, torn between several interesting technical projects.