Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Now this is neat news: http://www.sdtimes.com/news/043/story1.htm

More info here and here.

Quick update a few hours later: IBM has started eclipse.org to provide for another open source-esque programming IDE to compete with Netbeans. They talk some rubbish about Eclipse being a portal and Netbeans being a little too Java-centric, but what's interesting to me is the SWT or Standard Widget Toolkit. When you hear "Java", I'm afraid you might think "Seeeeeelow", and you're right, in part. Swing, the platform independant, "lightweight" user interface toolkit, can be just that. I recently made a quick app on my iBook with a single form that has a JTable in with maybe 6 or 7 cols and hundreds of rows. Talk about your molassas when sorting or rearranging, etc.

AWT is Sun's Abstract Window Toolkit that builds off of native peers. But the ways that you access these widgets are the same no matter what OS you're using. Direct AWT use is discouraged by many Java powers that be (new look and feel for each OS, since you're using the natives -- Sun wants Java apps to look "Java"-like, or at least not native-like, I think) but AWT won't go away (and programmers can, if they want, con't to use AWT directly) because Swing's objects extend AWT objects.

IBM has performed an end run around Sun and made its own GUI interface that doesn't build off of AWT (Swing is highly customizable, and Sun wants you to start there). It talks to natives directly in a method that's apparently less-stringent and with less overhead than Sun's AWT. This increases performance of GUIs (all that's really slowing Java apps)... training started again - bbl.

From the Mac Java list, one poster wrote the following:
"IMHO, Swing is the biggest mistake Sun has made with
Java - there's not even a close second. And Sun is so stubborn, they
won't countenance anything else. Witness that they have refused to
allow any Eclipse/SWT sessions or even BOFs at JavaOne in March."

If that's the case Sun better stop slinging stones at M$ from their proverbial house of cards. (I know, I was supposed to go with glass houses, but I get so danged tired of the same ole proverbs spoutin' out over and over. At least mix the metaphor, you know?)

Well, the prolificness of my blog has slowed down somewhat. I had what I thought was a pretty decent post to /. modded down from 2 to 4 to 1 that I'll link to once my DNS lets me back to /..

Been working on Java projects at home. Quick thoughts.

* Netbeans runs very well on a 1.8 GHz P4. Less good on .5 GHz G3. ;^)

* Sourceforge has some great ideas in the very very early stages, but ultimately isn't too useful to me. For instance, I'd like to make a good email client, but I'm not rich enough to do it for free. This makes Columba less than a good idea b/c it's GPL'd. Other bits, like a IRC client in Java, are started, but things like RelayChat and friends, though thankfully under MPL, usually have the following line in their description: " * Development Status: 4 - Beta"

This makes Sourceforge a good place for people to come together to find software they'd like to work on (on which they'd like to work), but less good as far as someplace to go for open/free/Free code that is immediately ready to drop into your app.

This sounds selfish, but my beef is that it's typically quicker for me to write code I trust than for me to clean up someone else's. If sf had good, ready to deploy code under LGPL, I'd be happy to use it, credit it, and, when I needed an extra feature, enhance it. B/c sf has both non-LGPL (or MPL, etc, but I think LGPL is the best license for making sure people return their improvements to your code) and, largely, beta code, the amount of useful, implementable solutions and improvements that come out of passive collaboration (what sf is all about, I think) due to sf is much, much lower than it could be.

Course the only way to fix this is to fix beta code or to LGPL yours. Guess I'm just too selfish, as I said before, to jump on that bandwagon just yet.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, January 31, 2002
Gee willickers, Wally! Spent I don't know how long today figuring out why I couldn't get something like this to work in Mozilla when pasted into a page like this. Turns out, at least without tinkering, it doesn't. What's wrong? Well, after thinking about it for a while and playing with relative vs. absolute positioning for links, menus, etc, for about an afternoon, I finally went with the "Chunk out bits of the offending page until you get your answer." The offending line was the very first thing in the whole page, the doctype: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd"> I don't know why that'd freak out Mozilla, but it sure did. Blast out the tag and poof, everything's back. Makes me wonder what doctype the scripts I was using were implicitly following. Sheesh. Anyhow, hopefully I'll soon have one of those groovy dhtml menus ready for anyone who wants it soon. Can you believe places are making you pay for code that does this now-a-days? Just because the people who license these things have freheekin big "API libs" sitting behind the menu, people apparently think they can't write something as useful from scratch. Course if I'm getting waylaid by a doctype... Ultraedit's in the tray now. It was on the start button menu list before. posted by ruffin at 1/31/2002 04:37:00 PM

posted by ruffin at 1/31/2002 12:33:00 PM

Wednesday, January 30, 2002
More random interesting reading. Here's a quote: Any scripting language can be boosted to .NET-competitive status simply by making SOAP 1.1 and XML-RPC support a standard part of the install and docs. Hardly any technical work is needed. In other words Python is already a worthy competitor to .NET. Anyone developing in Python should know they don't have to budge an inch to be part of the new network. Same with every other scripting language and environment. There's no reason to switch or freeze or wait. Get unconfused now. posted by ruffin at 1/30/2002 11:09:00 AM

Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Uh-oh. Looks like the magic of true web logs have given the folks at the website I panned yesterday the referring page attrib, and they busted me for jumping to conclusions. Now much as I hate sharing personal email, I thought I'd make things "right" and quote a bit of my reply as to why I condemmed skippingdot.net (colon slash slash slashdot dot net) to an existence in dotnet land: Note that skippingdot.net does not use asp.net or any other .net tech in making their site. I was teeotally in the wrong there. Here's how I jumped to conclusions: * You have what looks like that calendar asp.net control everyone and their brother is writing an article about. Sheesh. Like that should decide that someone should use asp.net over php [or friends]. * Your menu on the left side of the page is spaced out pretty wacky in NS 4.7 (on Win2k, actually). I'm attaching a screengrab. That's a pretty common bit from asp.net programmers. "4x isn't 'uplevel'; screw it." * Iirc, Python is on the .net list. So that recommendation doesn't get you out of the woods yet. :^) * The "clincher" for the .net paranoid: Your site's title image is really freakin out. I've seen that happen in 4x from examples that show how to make an image on the fly with .Net. AH-HA! Guilty! I was going to try and figure out what the suffix was for your files, but got lazy and condemmed you to hell anyhow. Sorry about that. Just goes to show, when a blog falls in the woods, it does apparently make a sound. posted by ruffin at 1/29/2002 09:19:00 AM

Monday, January 28, 2002
Whew, this blogger interface isn't up to snuff in Mozilla. Anyhow, wanted to save this quote from Joel on Software, though I had to go to Google to get the archive when I went searching for it recently. Looks like Joel's down for the time being. The points ole Joel makes in this article really are key -- distractions like Blogger can slow down programming (although I was in the flow when I thought about getting this quote blogged. :^D). The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone. posted by ruffin at 1/28/2002 06:44:00 PM

Case in point: 1.2. What is Jython? Jython is the successor to JPython. The Jython project was created in accordance with the CNRI Python 1.1.x license, in order to ensure the continued existence and development of this important piece of Python software. The intent is to manage this project with the same open policies that are serving Python so well. And there's Pippy (Python for Palm), Tkinter (Tcl/Tk), ... Crimminy folks, can't we all get along? Enough spam for today. Sorry bout that. posted by ruffin at 1/28/2002 05:03:00 PM

Can't decide if quotes like: "VB Takes A Lot Of The Arbitrary And Unnecessary Crap Out Of Programming" "Python Takes ALL Of The Arbitrary And Unnecessary Crap Out Of Programming" ... from this article mean I should laugh or stop wasting time and check out Python. Yes, that's the same article I was whining about below. The problem seems to be you could waste your whole life checking out all the pseudo-programming langs (often called "scripting langs" to save you the trouble from posting flames to alt.die.die.die about how they aren't programming languages at all) or you accept that you don't have the absolute best choice for every possible use out there and start learning how to push those 0s and 1s. The next problem if you choose the latter (as I assume you are, or you'd better get back to hunting) is that you'll spend the rest of your life wondering how much time you wasted using your almost-lang o' choice. posted by ruffin at 1/28/2002 04:59:00 PM

Another website in .NET that doesn't like NS 4.7 Course now that I look, neither does mine. Time to use a table for the blog template, I think. posted by ruffin at 1/28/2002 12:22:00 PM

Saturday, January 26, 2002
If you're a Mac OS X internet developer, well, Apple has a whole slew of articles for you. From php to Perl to postgres, little quirks about OS X are explained by the big boys for you. posted by ruffin at 1/26/2002 07:55:00 AM

Friday, January 25, 2002
(08:48:40) RandmoAIMer1: .NET is the Napster of distributed application programming. by this do you mean that people will be sharing and swapping bits of code in the same way that they shared and swapped songs on napster? or do you mean, rather, that it will become a hit with the common man (or weekend programmer) by word of mouth and be a symbol of a shift in the view of programming (to distributed applications) in the same way that napster changed how people viewed music and sharing things online? or do you mean that in the way that napster brought mp3 to the masses that .net will bring distributed applications to the masses (i.e. they will buy them just like they buy vb shareware now)? (08:48:58) RandmoAIMer2: Yes. (08:48:59) RandmoAIMer2: :^) (08:49:03) RandmoAIMer2: That takes too long to write. (08:49:21) RandmoAIMer2: Well, it could [mean all that] until the courts shut it [in this case MS] down. :^) Lots of parallels. posted by ruffin at 1/25/2002 03:57:00 PM

Thursday, January 24, 2002
.NET is the Napster of distributed application programming. posted by ruffin at 1/24/2002 11:50:00 AM

Now this is neat news: http://www.sdtimes.com/news/043/story1.htm More info here and here. Quick update a few hours later: IBM has started eclipse.org to provide for another open source-esque programming IDE to compete with Netbeans. They talk some rubbish about Eclipse being a portal and Netbeans being a little too Java-centric, but what's interesting to me is the SWT or Standard Widget Toolkit. When you hear "Java", I'm afraid you might think "Seeeeeelow", and you're right, in part. Swing, the platform independant, "lightweight" user interface toolkit, can be just that. I recently made a quick app on my iBook with a single form that has a JTable in with maybe 6 or 7 cols and hundreds of rows. Talk about your molassas when sorting or rearranging, etc. AWT is Sun's Abstract Window Toolkit that builds off of native peers. But the ways that you access these widgets are the same no matter what OS you're using. Direct AWT use is discouraged by many Java powers that be (new look and feel for each OS, since you're using the natives -- Sun wants Java apps to look "Java"-like, or at least not native-like, I think) but AWT won't go away (and programmers can, if they want, con't to use AWT directly) because Swing's objects extend AWT objects. IBM has performed an end run around Sun and made its own GUI interface that doesn't build off of AWT (Swing is highly customizable, and Sun wants you to start there). It talks to natives directly in a method that's apparently less-stringent and with less overhead than Sun's AWT. This increases performance of GUIs (all that's really slowing Java apps)... training started again - bbl. From the Mac Java list, one poster wrote the following: "IMHO, Swing is the biggest mistake Sun has made with Java - there's not even a close second. And Sun is so stubborn, they won't countenance anything else. Witness that they have refused to allow any Eclipse/SWT sessions or even BOFs at JavaOne in March." If that's the case Sun better stop slinging stones at M$ from their proverbial house of cards. (I know, I was supposed to go with glass houses, but I get so danged tired of the same ole proverbs spoutin' out over and over. At least mix the metaphor, you know?) posted by ruffin at 1/24/2002 09:28:00 AM

Thursday, January 17, 2002
Never EVER name a Javascript variable the same name as one of your functions. posted by ruffin at 1/17/2002 05:56:00 PM

Has anyone written code for Mozilla to support NS 4.x layer tags yet? We don't have to obey standards anymore; we can write them, ya know? posted by ruffin at 1/17/2002 02:29:00 PM

Wednesday, January 16, 2002
When it rains... Best ever comment in a piece of html code: <!-- this interface laid out by the w3c sure as hell doesn't work in internet explorer. it's also not implemented in mozilla, so to be honest, unless you are using a super browser i haven't heard of, or the browsers have progressed since now, you won't see much. but it should work in the future if someone implemenets this. --> posted by ruffin at 1/16/2002 04:03:00 PM

Well, the prolificness of my blog has slowed down somewhat. I had what I thought was a pretty decent post to /. modded down from 2 to 4 to 1 that I'll link to once my DNS lets me back to /.. Been working on Java projects at home. Quick thoughts. * Netbeans runs very well on a 1.8 GHz P4. Less good on .5 GHz G3. ;^) * Sourceforge has some great ideas in the very very early stages, but ultimately isn't too useful to me. For instance, I'd like to make a good email client, but I'm not rich enough to do it for free. This makes Columba less than a good idea b/c it's GPL'd. Other bits, like a IRC client in Java, are started, but things like RelayChat and friends, though thankfully under MPL, usually have the following line in their description: " * Development Status: 4 - Beta" This makes Sourceforge a good place for people to come together to find software they'd like to work on (on which they'd like to work), but less good as far as someplace to go for open/free/Free code that is immediately ready to drop into your app. This sounds selfish, but my beef is that it's typically quicker for me to write code I trust than for me to clean up someone else's. If sf had good, ready to deploy code under LGPL, I'd be happy to use it, credit it, and, when I needed an extra feature, enhance it. B/c sf has both non-LGPL (or MPL, etc, but I think LGPL is the best license for making sure people return their improvements to your code) and, largely, beta code, the amount of useful, implementable solutions and improvements that come out of passive collaboration (what sf is all about, I think) due to sf is much, much lower than it could be. Course the only way to fix this is to fix beta code or to LGPL yours. Guess I'm just too selfish, as I said before, to jump on that bandwagon just yet. posted by ruffin at 1/16/2002 12:08:00 PM

Sunday, January 06, 2002
Been working on another online game server browser in Java in my spare time (a frontend to qstat), and ran across this in part of an exception dump to System.out recently while developing on my iBook, OS X.1.2: at com.apple.mrj.internal.awt.SimpleComponentPeer.reallyDoThePaintOrUpdate(SimpleComponentPeer.java:407) "reallyDoThePaintOrUpdate"? Is that a joke? I mean I have some pretty silly method and variable names, but that very nearly takes the cake. There was more before and after, and this was an error that came when repainting a JTable, but this part of the error is specific to Apple's implementation of Swing/Java (afaict). A little too cutesy. posted by ruffin at 1/06/2002 11:06:00 AM

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