I’m such a sucker: now I’ve bought the Steve Jobs biography for Kindle, to be delivered tomorrow. I hope the book is great. I borrowed my last book of the kind to someone, but I don’t know who. 
Oct 232011
Oct 222011
It’s great seeing that Play 2.0 is on its way. Play is my favorite Scala playground, but it’s always felt like a second class citizen there. With 2.0, it’s a first class Citizen, and they’ve even thrown Akka into the mix. So, as with anything I’m especially interested in, I’ve signed up to submit two bugreports.
Oct 182011
Ok, everyone, let’s all calm down. There’s been so many blog posts and podcast debates all over the net about what’s wrong with Dart. The only problem with Dart, the way I see it, is that Google is too good at marketing: too much hype before we got to see the product.
The way I see Dart, it’s another language for doing client-side web application programming. Luckily, it’s not another Flash or Silverlight with its plethora of languages. It would like to be a part of the browser, but for now it contends itself to being a language that compiles down to JavaScript. That puts it together with CoffeeScript and Objective-J, to name but a few. See a long list here. As you can see from the list, this is nothing new.
The only problem with Dart is that everyone had their hopes up for the perfect language that would contain all their pet features. And of course, the set of preferred combinations is probably as big as the number of developers in the world.
What I find to be one of the strong points of Dart is that it uses the actor model as its concurrency model. I remember it well from my days at uni, thinking it was a model leading to waaay to much overhead. Surely, the Smalltalk guys must be mad! But as time has given us more power, I’ve come to believe that this is a great model, which has lead me to Scala and Akka. Although GCD is very powerful, I find myself looking into using actors in my language of choice, Objective-C, all the time.
So where does Dart go from here? Well, that depends on what kind of backing it has from Google. Google hasn’t been very clear on how well the Dart support is grounded in the organization. But if it gains a good community of libraries and evolves a good community, it could become the preferred way of writing Android apps, letting developers re-use code for their web-app and mobile app. If not, it could become shelved like Go.
Personally, on this front I’ll brush up my ancient JavaScript skills and look more at SproutCore the next couple of weeks, probably along with CoffeeScript. Then in a month or two, if there is any momentum going for Dart, I’ll probably write something where I can exploit Darts actor model and see if we become good friends. 2011 will be interesting still. 
Oct 172011
Yes, the 4S is a great video camera. The 5D still has the edge, but also the bulk. This device is going to be great.
iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison from Robino Films on Vimeo.
I’m working with Xcode & Jenkins, and as part of that I’ve filed https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-11370 for pre-scm-buildstep
The clang-scanbuild-plugin fails on install, so for that I’ve added https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-11372
Oct 162011
My inlaws’ computer hard drive died the other day, so I offered to help them buy a new Windows computer at the local shop. The specs were easy: Windows, Core i5, 4GB RAM and ~500GB drive.
Going in, I expected lots of extra sell-ins. And there were. What I found to be a very funny options, was to have them de-install all the extra crap-ware that comes pre-installed on the system. That’s funny! They get probably a few bucks from the software guys to have that pre-installed, and then they get a few bucks from the customer to de-install the software. That must be a great deal for them
Oct 132011
To quote Jan Eggum: “Kor e alle heltane” (where are all our heroes, for you non-norwegians). Dennis Ritchie passed away today. That is Richie as in &R in K&R C, or The Book. Without Dennis, I’d probably not known my good friend Dag-Erling. I’d probably be writing Pascal. I’d probably given up on computing after having led the DemOS project in assembler and Pascal. Dag-Erling would not have been a FreeBSD committer. I would not have written my thesis about the FreeBSD project. There would be no Mac OS X, or iPhone. At least not the way we know it. There would be no /dev.
It was a sad moment when Steve died, and although Dennis was allowed to live many more years, it is too soon to see another giant in our industry go away. I am deeply thankful for what he has given our community, and for what he has given me, and most of the people I know in our industry.
There have been many obituaries, but the one I liked the best is written by Poul-Henning Kamp at Version2 (in Danish).
Oct 132011
It is curious how the economy is described bad all over the place, yet the tech sector is growing and growing. The mobile phone app business is exploding, and Google today announced a 33% jump in revenue to $9.72 billion. This disconnect has been going on for a while, and doesn’t seem to have much of an end. Tech just isn’t stopping to watch governments that overspend struggle or bankers who made arrogant bets sweat.
So I make my “arrogant” bet: keep working hard to innovate in tech. The mobile revolution today is like the early days of the web. And this is even before the rest of my house is connected and all my life becomes GPS tagged. We have an amazing decade in front of us. Let’s keep doing great work, with attention to detail and love for our customers and craft, hopefully without any investors starting new bubbles, and let’s make great things happen.
Oct 122011
Looking through the page source for iCloud.com I couldn’t but help how much SC was all over the place. That rang a bell. Apple has been helping out the SproutCore project before, so could it be that iCloud is based on Sprout Core? I bet it is Time to put in that work to learn SproutCore that I had planned on doing a few months ago.
Oct 062011
Dear Steve,
you have shown us that we don’t understand what we think we understand, and must redo what we think is done, in order to go forward. You’ve tought us not to accept mediocracy, not from ourselves and not from the world around us. Strive for passionate perfection, every day, with love. Love for what we do and those that surround us.
Rest in Peace
Get it here