I’ve decided very late in the game to update my “Web 2.0″ credentials by giving Facebook a second chance, and start micro-blogging on Twitter (blogging here will continue as usual).

For those not familiar with Twitter, it is simply a service where you regularly have to answer the question “What are you doing right now?” in less than 140 characters. In other words, an effective way for the voyeurs out there to keep track of what I’m doing.

You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/wfaler

A LOT of organizations have a build manager for their software development, or even in some cases a dedicated team for build- and configuration management.
To me, this is a big, red flag that the organization is doing something seriously wrong.
In todays age, with all the build tools and other tools for automation that we have at our disposal, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to have a dedicated team for building and configuration management.

I can understand that organizations need to have a defined process, and maybe an “owner” of certain environments (such as a production. staging or testing environment), and that people shouldn’t deploy on an ad-hoc basis to such environments.
But that is still no reason for having a whole team of people dealing with a build - a reasonably organized and talented development (or maintenance) team should be able to create a build script and process whereby building a software release is as easy “pushing a button” and then providing whoever is deploying an application with a file to do so.

If you feel the need to add people just to manage a build and configuration management system, take a step back - more likely than not, you could just pinpoint the problem and find a way to automate the relevant process.

I think it is common knowledge that Windows Vista is the most useless pile of shit that Microsoft has crammed out of its nether regions since Windows ME.

But for every day I am forced to use it (at work on my laptop), it dawns on me even more:

Last October, Vista automagically deleted everything in my home folder that was created prior to a specific date. I did not delete anything myself, the files just vanished from the face of my hard drive.

In the last few days I have come across a new problem: I have a bunch of folder in my users home folder that are locked to read-only. No amount of changing permissions changes this. I can’t edit the files, I can’t delete the folders, I can’t add to the folders. The folders are simply locked and completely uneditable.

Tonight when I get home, I’ll take my chances with Ubuntu’s disk trashing bug and install it. Nothing could possibly be more crappy than Vista, hence I will risk burning my HD rather than continue using Vista.

I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone, but I recently updated the software to 2.0, so I could download apps from the app store, and I found the one application to rule them all, the one application that has persuaded me to eventually get an iPhone once they become easier to come by:

NetNewsWire, and RSS reader. Why is it so good? Well, it is available for Mac as well (and there is a compatible, but not as good Windows client), and it does what I have always been looking for: it syncs the read status of my feed across devices over the internet. In other words, if I read a feed on my iPod or Mac (or even their web client), it will turn up as read in the other device.
Seamless syncing of feeds, perfect!

I have already found the app useful on an iPod touch alone (combined with that of my Mac at home), syncing over Wifi.

But for an RSS junkie like me, being able to read my feeds anytime, anywhere is brilliant. Enough for me to get an iPhone very soon.

I am currently lamenting my lack of time, for anything. Besides my 9-5 engagements, I have so much I want to do:

• Develop and improve Wicket RAD (where most of my time outside regular working hours is spent currently).
• Learn Objective-C and Cocoa (I have a few ideas for Mac and iPhone apps that I’d love to implement).
• Work on my Amazon EC2 and S3 API’s and features (not much, if any time spent there currently).
• Continue reading up on Bayesian classifiers and other data filtering and selection algorithms and tools.
• ..actually have a social life from time to time (with the “todo’s” mentioned above and the drain on energy it means, it’s hardly surprising that I am single again since a few weeks back).

For now though, the priority remains Wicket RAD, although I’m hoping that I will soon have one or two more people contributing to it, so I won’t be the lone developer working on it anymore.

I know it’s not very nice to highlight-, poke fun at- or ridicule other peoples mistakes, but this one was so bad, I couldn’t help myself.. A colleague of mine came across this piece of code earlier today (somewhat obscured to protect the not-so-innocent):

try {
    Class clazz = Class.forName(”com.someorg.Foo”);
    Object o = clazz.newInstance();
    Method setBar = clazz.getMethod(”setBar”, new Class[] {int.class});
    setBar.invoke(o, new Object[] { baz });
    return o;
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

..it is wrong on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. Every line is a glaring mistake.
Whatever is wrong with:

Foo foo = new Foo();
foo.setBar(baz);


The original code at the top instantiates a specific class, invokes a specific method through reflection, all of it hardcoded, why oh why would anyone ever want to do that? (Note: I haven’t even mentioned that the Exception just gets swallowed into oblivion, maybe or maybe not visible in some log somewhere..).

I will be holding a presentation/introduction to Wicket RAD at the next London Wicket User Group meet-up on the 6th of August at 6:30pm. The meet-up is held at Google UK’s head office, which is very close to Victoria Station in central London.

There will also be a couple of other interesting presentations, and the events are usually very enjoyable, and for those who want to, there are usually beers in a close by pub afterwards.

Details and a registration form for the LWUG event can be found here.

Read more on the Wicket RAD wiki about this release.

There is also a new, simple “getting started” guide on the Wiki. More documentation to come..

This should be getting closer to a more API stable core for a future “1.0″ release, there is still some cleaning up and refactoring to be done in the core API’s, but for someone using the bean annotation driven generation, this should not have much, if any impact from this version on (we hope).

Wicket RAD now has an official website/wiki!

It is still a bit short on content, but at least it is up, and gives an indication of the documentation goodness to come!

Wow! Having dual 24″ screens with a powerful Mac running VMWare is way, way cool!

I can run Linux or Windows in fullscreen mode on one of the screens and jump between the screens seamlessly, which in itself is powerful (need Windows or Linux for something? Use it in it’s own screen, and it’s like having two computers in one)!

For me personally, this implies I won’t pollute my Mac with a bunch of development applications I need - for instance, for my MySQL needs, I will simply have a Linux VMWare image that I bot up that has MySQL installed on it, and for development, I will be calling that from my Mac.

Brilliant! Virtualization on the desktop is no longer nice in theory but unworkable in practice, it’s now working, and working perfectly.