Johnny's Software Saloon

Weblog where I discuss things that really interest me. Things like Java software development, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Macintosh software, Cocoa, Eclipse IDE, OOP, content management, XML technologies, CSS and XSLT document styling, artificial intelligence, standard document formats, and cool non-computing technologies.

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Location: Germantown, Maryland, United States

I like writing software, listening to music (mostly country and rock but a little of everything), walking around outside, reading (when I have the time), relaxing in front of my TV watching my TiVo, playing with my cat, and riding around in my hybrid gas/electric car.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Apple launches "fun new" Mac mini, iPod boombox

Apple launches "fun new" Mac mini, iPod boombox:
There are two models, one with a 1.5GHz Core Solo CPU (which isn't
listed on Intel's
Core
Solo page) and a Core Duo T2300 model at 1.67GHz. The Core Duo
model sells for US$799 and includes a SuperDrive and an 80GB hard
drive. The Core Solo unit is US$599 and has a DVD-ROM/CD-RW and 60GB
hard drive.

Sounds pretty exciting. Just what people have been waiting for since last June - and did not expect to see until next June!


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Sourceforge does Subversion

Sourceforge has enabled Subversion support for all projects.
Now you don't need CVS anymore, Subversion really has become "a compelling replacement for CVS".


Hey, at last!

Been waiting for this for a long, long time!

This moves CVS one step closer to being replaced by Subversion.

read more | digg story

Monday, February 27, 2006

Data on Deadly Dates?

Another murder came to light this month of a young woman, 27 this time, who was killed on a Baltimore highway while on a date with a man she met online.

Initially, the number of these incidents involving a certain site did not seem particularly high.

However, now there seems to be a lot of repetition. Being alone or riding off in a car with someone you have never met in person before seems like a dangerous strategy.

Probably, nobody knows how many dates are the outcome of online versus face to face meetings. I have not seen any figures trying to correlate the two in the news reports, and I suspect that is why.

At this point, it is still pretty hard to put the online factor in perspective.

In the previous incidents, there were all kinds of warning signs the guy the woman was going out with was not a grade A candidate.

In this case, however, things were different. The woman was not out with a guy that was much older than here - slightly younger, in fact. He was a college student. He had no previous criminal record.

Probably the only clue something in his behavior could turn violent is his personality. That is not something you can look up in a book or in a document.

You have to meet someone and get to know their friends first before you really know them. And that is kind of a Catch-22.



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Listening to the news, for a change

Paying attention to the tech news for software architects is not only a good idea - it is essential.

Just look at the landscape of software today compared to 5 years ago.

How many software decision-makers and programming experts are still not aware of Borland's announcement earlier this month that it is getting out of the programming tools market that has been its main thrust since its inception in the mid-1980s?

How many IT managers do not know there are better programs out there for free in many cases than the constantly varying set that comes with new computers, and the ones that cost oodles of money?

I have found 2 very good podcasts of late for keeping up with software industry and related technology news.


  1. C–net

  2. Diggnation



They are available from the sites above. Or, you can do what I usually do, and listen to them on your TV via the Yahoo software for the TiVo players.

The cool thing about this is I can be studying a programming book while I listen. I can't really focus on both things at once, but I can just sort of monitor the podcast until they talk about something I am interested in.

Podcasts still haven't gotten to the point where you can tick off what particular items you want to listen to yet. You listen to shows on an episode-by-episode basis.

The C-Net podcasts have had some of the most informative and stunning news stories for me so far.

The Diggnation podcasts are a lot more interesting, with more personality from the presenters and a brisk coverage of a lot of items in a less-than-one-hour weekly show.

Small wonder their stories are the most interesting, since they are picked from their Digg.com web site - which tracks the most interesting technology news stories! It works.



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Friday, February 24, 2006

Flood of Hundreds of Intel-compatible apps for Macintosh

Less than 8 months after Apple announced plans to transition to Intel microprocessors in its Macintosh product line, nearly a thousand Universal Binary applications are listed on various web sites.



In stark contrast to the Windows platform, which has not seen a new version out in 5 years, less than 8 months after Apple announced plans to transition to Intel microprocessors in its Macintosh product line, nearly a thousand Universal Binary applications are listed on various web sites.



read more | digg story





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Thursday, February 23, 2006

The old legacy heave-ho number

I really went to town cleaning out my home computer room last night and this morning.

When Borland bailed out from the programming tools business a couple weeks ago, that raised the issue of getting rid of my C±+, Java, database, and productivity tools from them. After all, it seems unlikely I will be doing any work in the future using their products.

Way back in April 1991, I bought my first Borland product: Borland C++ 1.0. I kept buying software from them throughout the 1990s. I was a pretty loyal consumer of their end-user and developer products during that era. For a lot of that time, Microsoft as well. I bought their MSDN OS/SDK subscription for about 5 years, a couple versions of their C±+ compiler, and 3 versions of Visual Basic Professional.

I learned a lot. I already knew C but it enabled me to learn C++ and OOP years before most of the other programers I know did. I did the book reading side of it in the late 1980s but the hands on stuff, starting in early 1991. I each time I bought a product, I dutifully took it home, skimmed through the manual, learned its features, used it, and really put it through its paces.

Back to programming. I took to OOP in C++ something fierce. I wrote my own MVC framework around 1993 in a a newer version of Borland C++. A real MVC. I really worked hard in C++. I really studied hard at OOP, OOD, OOA, and design patterns.

Professionally, I used Borland C++ from 1991 to 1996. The I used VC++ professionally from end of 1996 to 2002. By end of 1997 most of my programming was done in Java. However, parts that had to be done in C++ came up with great regularity. I always coded those in Visual C++.


Every time they Borland out with a new version, I upgraded. The Each upgrade really made a difference. It also came with its own CDs, books, and license agreement.

I decided to stay up late tonight and get rid of that stuff. Spring will be hear soon and I did not want to keep that old stuff around anymore

I was thinking that I might have to work on an old MS–Windows system at some point. However, I think I am safely past having to ever work on anything older than Windows 2000 now. It never really happened. Sure, not always the newest version. Back I never went far back again on my systems. And, by the end of the turn of the century, companies were accustomed to buying the tools they needed. So, I didn't have to buy the development tools I wanted to use to write our products in. They already had them.

So, that old 90s C++ stuff that had gone the way of the dodo at last got put out for the trash man to haul away this morning.

As I dug into cabinets in my computer den, I came across a lot of really old software. I mean really old software. It was like a trip to the twilight zone. Or memory lane.

Turns out, I also had some archaic C compilers for the Macintosh from the early 1990s. It was hilarious. The last time I enjoyed programming in C was in the 1980s. I have hated programming in C instead of modern languages since around 1992.

Along with that stuff some mid 1990s era hardware and software. Check out the list of what passed off to the trash man this morning:


  • OmniPage Pro 9.0 (for Windows 95, 98, NT) - bought for $90 in 1999

  • EasyCD Creator Deluxe v3.5 bought for $100 in 1999

  • a Norton software product for Windows 95

  • Active Office for Microsoft Office 95 and 97

  • Partition Magic 4.0 (unopened, must not have anted that upgrade)

  • Turbo Tax for year 1996

  • Timex Data-Link watch software from mid-1990s

  • MS-DOS 6.0 upgrade bought in 1993

  • Spear of Destiny, a 1992 DOS-based game from id Software

  • Lotus Oranizer 1.0, a PIM for Windows 3.1 - I used it heavily from about 1993-1995: I managed myself and all my products I was responsible for with it

  • Borland C++ 3.1 bought sometime around 1993 (I still need to track down and get rid of BC++ 5 if I still have that 1986 relic)

  • Home Design software – compatible with Windows 3.0 and 3.1

  • QualComm for Windows (guaranteed upgrade to Windows 95)

  • AfterDark 3.0 - a screen saver in a shipping envelope postmarked August 1994

  • a hand-held scanner - from back in early 1990s when a tabletop scanner cost several hundred dollars, instead of under a hundred

  • Quicken 2.0 for Windows - from 1992

  • DesqView/X from 1992

  • HP NewWave 4.0 from 1992

  • Borland C++ 2.0 - purchased 1991
  • - came with 7 manuals and I not only saved them, I saved the shipping box so I could keep them all together
  • Sidekick 2.0 - purchased in 1991 - I think it came with my Borland C++ 1.0 (my first C++ compiler I bought myself on my first C++ job)
  • Unix World April 1990 issue that I got some someone I worked with that was throwing it out that same year

  • MacRecord box (empty) - purchased in early late 1980s or early 1990s so I could record my own voice on Mac Mac Plus computer

  • a Logitech mouse from 1987 - I think I used it on my Z-100, the one I threw away a decade ago

  • HyperAccess for Zenith Z-100 - it's a terminal program for Windows

  • Microsoft Windows 1.0 for Zenith Z-100 - I rushed out and bought it when it was released in 1986 - only to discover that, unlike my 512 MB Macintosh, it could not do overlapping windows, just divide the screen into panes; though it did display colors on the screen, which the Mac could not.

  • MS-DOS 2 for Zenith-Z100 (copyright 1986) - I must have bought this a couple years after I rented my first apartment and I am not sure why I bought it with me 4 years later when I bought my own place, since I already had DOS 3 for my Z-100 at that point.

  • Semantec Utilities for the Macintosh - bought this in 1988 and we managed to wreck my hard drive

  • Consulair 68000 Development System (formerly Apple's MDS) - I bought this 68K assembler in 1988 for $60, and Apple and everyone else dropped this microprocessor family over a decade ago, so it has been pretty useless for over ten years

  • Warlock by Silicon Beach Software (an early graphical adventure game and construction set for the original Macintosh)

  • Accessory Pak 1 Graphics Tools Featuring Paint Cutter for the Macintosh (copyright 1984)
  • Apple MacDraw [original version] (box with floppies) that I bought the same time I bought my 512 MB Mac in 1985

  • Apple HyperCard [original version] (box with floppies) I bought for my Mac in the late 1980s

  • Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II/II+ computer - purchased in 1983 with money saved from my summer job at a computer store



It is safe to say that by the end of the 1990s, these programs would not be useful on even the most legacy computing environment. In fact, half of them by the early 1990s were not of any use to me.

More embarrassing still, some really old books.

  • Data General's ECLIPSE MV/8000 Principles of Operation - rescued from someone who was throwing it out an an office I worked at in the late 1980s, because it was the 2nd minicomputer I had programmed professionally back in the mid-1980s

  • Intel IAPX-432 architecture reference manual (stamped PRELIMINARY in bold letters across the cover) - copyright Intel 1981



The lesson to be learned is, if you don't move to a new house every few years - still get rid of your old computer stuff every few years. You really are not going to go back and use it again. Trust me. I proved it.

My other conclusion is, software is ephemeral. Even though you think it is an asset when you buy it, it really is not one for long. It either enables you do to something for a little while - or it doesn't. Either way, do not hang onto it.




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Monday, February 20, 2006

Added programming items I am consuming to blog sidebar

I have updated my sidebar for this Blogspot weblog of mine to include list of programming books I am consuming.

The list is complements of the AllConsuming.net web site. It is pulled from the master list, which is on my own consumption list there.

I set the list in the sidebar to show just the items that have been tagged with the keyword "programming".

Visit AllConsuming.net if you want to learn more. If you sign up, they provide a snippet of HTML you can paste into your own blog(s) to include your own little summary of what you are consuming.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Borland announces plans to give programming tools heave-ho

This was the big surprise in the computing/programming field for me this week. Borland announced they are bailing from the IDE business.

Borland has changed product lines significantly several times during its lifetime.

  1. They entered/exited Mac market (Turbo Pascal for Mac, Reflex database, etc.) in the 1980s.

  2. They entered/exited MS-DOS market (Sidekick, Paradox database, Quatro Pro, etc.) in early 1990s.

  3. They entered/exited MS-Windows productivity applications (Paradox for Windows, Quatro Pro for Windows) in late 1990s.


Last week, Borland announced their intention to add more software to their former products bone yard. The entire set of Borland IDEs - Delphi, C++ Builder, C# Builder, JBuilder, etc. They say they aren't discontinuing them - they intend to find another company to buy them off of them.

The announcement made quite a splash. I heard the news yesterday, while listening to the CNet podcast on my TiVo - via that Yahoo services feature for TiVo. Not sure if this is the right page, but there are a few podcasts listed on this CNet Podcast Central page.

I woke up predawn and was actually listening to the CNet podcast before I even got out of bed. After I heard that news, I few down the hall into my den to read the news on the web and go find Borland's press release. Sure enough, it was true.

I listened to Java Posse podcast episode #31 this morning while I was having breakfast. Great podcast episode and the series is pretty good in general.

I was a pretty avid consumer and user of Borland products in the 1980s on the Mac. In the 1990s, I bought their productivity and office tools on MS-DOS and then MS-Windows. Basically weaned myself off the last Borland product I still used - JBuilder - in 20003.

If they made that announcement three or more years ago, it would have been very traumatic for me. It would have thrown a kink in my programming.

As you can see from my timeline way up above, though - I have been through wave after wave of Borland selling me products and upgrades for them - and then suddenly dropping the product or selling it off to another company. In the latter case, the products were still dead anyway within a couple years.

Anyway, it was kind of like hearing from the folks that your childhood friends married and moved out of the area you grew up in - years after you got out of college and had gone off somewhere else to live. Yeah, you aren't going to see them anymore - but you weren't going to anyway. Still, being forced to recognize it and accept the implications they will not be in your future again is kind of sad.

Reading Borland's web site yesterday, I noticed they just shipped 2006 versions of their IDEs a couple months ago. People who bought those, which were not cheap, must really be worried. It sounds like Borland is still supporting those products, at least until they find a buyer to take them over.

Switching from one Java IDE to another, I can say from experience, is usually not that painful.

In contrast, switching C/C++ environments - and the implied change in compilers, can be a huge PITA. It shouldn't be, but C/C++ compiler writers and programmers live in this dreamworld where each pretends that they do not know what the other is doing. C/C++ does not define standard byte-order, scalar byte sizes, physical arrangement of bitfields, etc. You also have different MAKE utilities and different makefile syntaxes to deal with, different linkers, different symbol name hashing, etc.

Anyway, I am amused at how many times Microsoft-only programmers were using very behind the times Microsoft C++ compilers, and justifying it by saying that Borland was going to go out of business any quarter now. Well, they didn't. I used Borland's tools whenever I could, which was most of the time, from early 1991 through mid-2003.

When I finally let go of Borland, it was not because Borland died underneath me. It was because something better came along, and I switched to it. As much as I liked JBuilder, Eclipse ran much faster on large projects in 2003 that JBuilder did. Further, Eclipse quickly added fantastic refactoring and QA features.

When Vista comes out, Java programmers are probably going to have a lot easier time adopting it than C++ programmers. While Windows APIs will no doubt be changing, Java APIs will almost certainly not be disturbed. Those guys who stuck with programming Win32 API and C++ in the 1990s, when most IT development went to Java, are probably going to be busy next year changing things.

I think the lesson is, do not let an unreasoning fear or FUD make you deny yourself better tools, better productivity, better portability, easier support, and so forth. Whether the technology involved is an IDE, or a language - you need to make a rational decision.

That's what I did, and my horse did not get shot out from underneath me. By the time the horse got shot, it was not my horse any more - as far as JBuilder goes. With Java, which I think will still be supported for many years - I think Java will outlive Win32!




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Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Announcing TestNG 4.5


Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Announcing TestNG 4.5:


TestNG 4.5. features a lot of bug fixes..., a
few new minor features..., and a new look for the Eclipse plug-in

I guess I will have to give this a hard look.


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Mustang version of Java racing toward beta release

Good news is that Mustang version of Java racing toward beta release:

(InfoWorld) - Web 2.0 and expanded support for scripting languages are expected to be key themes of the planned Mustang version of Java, which is due in a beta release later this month.



I look forward to the release of Java JDK 1.6 and its improved ability to integrate Java programs with scripting languages.



It is gratifying to see the number of releases that Sun - like Apple - manages to get out without the problems that have come to be expected in other quarters.



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Will Java & C# Overtake C/C++ in 2006 | Peerside

An interesting question has been asked again.



Will Java & C# Overtake C/C++ in 2006 | Peerside:

Will Java & C# Overtake C/C++ in 2006
The annual TIOBE Programming Community Index measures the relative popularity of different programming languages used in software development relative to the previous year. What I find most interesting from their results is not the overall rankings but rather the changes since 2004. From that perspective Java and C# are leading the pack sig"

Late last year, it was announced that Java projects - for the first time ever - outnumbered C++ projects and C projects on open source development site SourceForge. Now, this year, it is looking like their may be more pages concerning themselves with Java out there as well.




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Monday, February 06, 2006

Modified template on this blog today

The CSS that originally came with this weblog's template was really strange. It has been bugging me a while.

Finally, I could not take it anymore. So this evening I have finally changed it.

Now, my code samples will display with a dashed border around them, properly indented. Block quotes will display with a little gray revision-bar like marker to the left of them.

It looks like I need to get rid of the double-spacing of list items, too. I am going to save that for another time.

Usually, I like to leave things alone as much as possible. That way, if they ever make improvements, I can just grab them and run with them. In this case though, I just could not wait for that to happen.

I was tired of looking at other software savants' blogs and wistfully thinking, I wish mine looked that cool.

Mine still does not look that cool. But at least it does not look completely whack either.

It should look pretty decent once I am finished with it!

Handy way of mapping values in Ruby

There is something I like about Ruby that you can do in some languages but not most languages.

Here is an example:


grade = case points
when 94..100 then :A
when 83..93 then :B
when 75..82 then :C
when 65..74 then :D
else :F
end


You can do something very similar in LISP using the COND function and in MUMPS using the $SELECT function. Most languages do not have something this convenient.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Using mdfind2+XSLT to display Spotlight search results in NetNewsWire

Toxic Software's excellent Mac programmer has created a nice tool for doing a search using Spotlight - and getting the results in a nice repurposable XML format.


Then, to make it accessible from NetNewsWire, a friendly-yet-powerful RSS/Atom feed reader I own and like a lot, he wrote an XSLT script to convert search results from his XML format to standard Atom format.


Then, he provided a shell script that invokes the search and pipes it through the XSLT transformer using a standard XSLT transformer.


Toxic Software (Blog):
this little gem. mdfind2 is a replacement for Apple%u2019s mdfind command line tool. This version adds one feature that mdfind doesn%u2019t have, you can specify the --xml switch on the command-line to output the results (including full attribute values) in XML


This is great stuff. I honestly find it refreshing to see that the programs-as-components and filter-pipelines ideas that Unix promulgated in the 1970s and 1980s has not died or reached a plateau. It is still growing and becoming more powerful on platforms like Linux and now the Apple Macintosh.


Whereas in the 1980s, people would have been perfectly content with a text-based user interface for something like this, in 2006 bolting the search output to a GUI display is no problem.


Pipelines are one of my favorite architectural design patterns. Combined with layering, they are powerful tools for solving complex problems with solutions built out of simple components.


Wednesday, February 01, 2006

MacTipsCafe.com - Dock Tips and Tricks

Nice trick! Command-click on a Macintosh OS X application's icon in the dock finds that application's file for you in the finder, opening its window if necessary - and selecting it for you.



Quite the little shortcut!



Here is more info on that:



MacTipsCafe.com - Dock Tips and Tricks:
Command-click application: opens the folder that holds that application
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I made this discovery by accident this evening. I looked around on the web, and sure enough - it is a known feature on the Mac.



When I first moved up to OS X from PCs and old Macs in 2002, there were to many shortcuts to memorize everyone. So I just learned the basics and a few others along the way. I might have to go back and look at some of those keyboard/mouse shortcut lists again. There might be a couple more tricks I never picked up.

Bush grants Silicon Valley's wishes

MercuryNews.com | 02/01/2006 | Bush grants valley's wishes:
President Bush elevated the issue for the nation Tuesday, announcing a decadelong ``American Competitiveness Initiative'' that would pour $136 billion into scientific research and the promotion of math and science education.

This is excellent news for everyone in the technology field and good news for anyone involved in the US economy.



Much of today's quality of life that we take for granted stems from the inventions and discoveries Americans of previous generations. Their creations also helped strengthen the economy of their generation.



Now it is up to us to do the same.



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