Ubuntu 7.10 on Thinkpad X.61 - Delightoids and doldrummers

Summary : its the best personal computing setup I have ever had

Latest lows

wxDownload spontaneously combusts sometimes

trackerd sometimes hogs serious CPU time.

Latest highs

Google desktop works great. How did I live without this sort of local search?

xournal is wonderful!

Same Gnome. When in an airport, bored to tears, intensely tired, with no easy access to popable bubble-wrap and a bout of RSI, this game is a great mental chewing gum and works fine with the pen interface.

Most significant change to my browsing environment recently = Download Them All! addon to Firfox. What a great tool.

Command line near history

Following Bill

216 cd
95 ls
36 sudo
19 svn
19 mv
11 emacs
10 nautilus
8 java
8 file
5 ./yEd3_0_1_1.sh

XTech talk

XTech 2008 is approaching fast and I'm really looking forward to it. The title of my closing keynote is Orangutans, Oxen and Ogham stones. Mulling the movable Web. For more details, turn up :-)

New Realities

The New Reality. Now that has a ring to it. It just might catch on as a buzzphrase. My 2 cents contribution to what New Reality looks like.

Paths to the New Reality

You need to do the following...

• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that "scripting" is sloppy, un-professional, cavalier. Lose the condescending notion that real programmers compile programs.
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that the only professional way to manage data is in a relational database and a fully normalized database at that.
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that REST is just a toy for the simple case and that professional programmers use Object Oriented Web Services
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that synchronizing activity is the only sane way to manage a distributed system. Don't even think about trying distributed ACID transactions
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that statically compiled apps will scale better.
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that you can know a priori, the bits of your application that will be performance hogs
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that you can know today what your application will need to look like tomorrow. And lose the supposition that front-end technology will stand still for any reasonable period of time.
  
  
• Lose the demonstrably false supposition that careful planning is the way to make waterfall development work.
  

Python is the new Basic

So says Dave Winer commenting on Google Apps.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language.. Yummy.

Flexible software is error-enabling software

"any sufficiently advanced end-user action is indistinguishable from an end-user error"-- Flexible software is error-enabling software