Blue Sky On Mars

Derek Slater, talking about Apple’s iTunes Music Store announcement made an entertaining statement:

My favorite part of the release is Steve Jobs saying, “The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use.” Funny, I don’t find that revolutionary at all, given that I’ve burning copies of CDs for the last 5 years.

Les Stroud raises the interesting question of whether static typing and other software engineering efforts have failed. Here is my commentary on the subject:

I’m not certain if static typing came into existence for aiding software engineering or for performance reasons. Dynamic languages tend to be slower than the statically typed ones, but modern computers are fast enough that it really doesn’t matter.

I would certainly hope that more tools will come along to assist in the development process. Doing modeling and big design up front was intended to help ensure that we end up with good, well-designed pieces of software. But, I personally think that test driven development is a lot more effective at building a system that will survive all of the changes it will go through.

You can say that the rise of TDD is the result of the failure of earlier attempts at improving software engineering. I think it’s more a sign of the evolution of software engineering itself than a sign of the failure of software engineering. I’m certain that TDD won’t be the last word on the subject.

The music biz sent IMs to thousands of song swappers who had copyrighted songs available for download from their Grokster and Kazaa nodes. I greatly prefer the industry taking such technical steps to stop song swapping to taking legislative ones. Ultimately, I think the steps are pointless and the industry should really start giving people want they want. I don’t think free music is really what people are after… they’re after supporting the musicians by buying music at reasonable prices. I don’t think the general public (myself included) cares very much about the industry middlemen.

On the C-JDBC - Home page, you can read more about this new open source package that is designed to bring clustering and replication to any database. Pretty nifty idea, really.

Yahoo! News - Ex-Iraq Info Minister Gets TV Job Offer - There you have it… Internet popularity can bring you job offers! Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf has at least one fan site due to his indefatigable belief that Iraq was and would always prevail in the conflict. According to the Yahoo! article, even Bush said:

“He’s my man, he was great,” Bush enthused in an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw. “Somebody accused us of hiring him and putting him there. He was a classic.”

Drupal is a flexible, powerful program. They bill it as “Community Plumbing” and provide a whole slew of features, either built-in or as plugins. It supports many of the common weblog features and adds many uncommon ones: the ability to share authentication, the “collaborative book”, the RSS news feed reader, and on and on.

My decision to switch to Movable Type is certainly not based upon lack of features in Drupal. In fact, I decided to switch because Drupal has too many features and too flexible an architecture for me.

MT was very easy to setup and is extremely ease to use. It doesn’t have a collaborative book or forums or news feeds. It just does blogging, and it does it gracefully. The blogging interface is nicely laid out and the relevant section of the decent user manual is a click away. Comments don’t require users to become members of the site and are easily integrated. Templates are trivial to edit and can be edited on the web or as external files. The bookmarklets are a great timesaver and will doubtless lead me to create many more blog entries. Trackback is a cool feature that is tightly integrated (not surprisingly, since SixApart created the initial spec).

I’m sure that everything I’m getting out of MT can be done with Drupal, but with MT it’s very easy to do those things and I didn’t have to spend any real time getting it up and running. Since I’m a geek, you’d think I’d go for the most powerful tool. But, I want my blogging to be effortless and MT gives me that.

One last bit: the Drupal folks have worked hard on performance and provide a sophisticated caching infrastructure to allow a Drupal site to survive a slashdotting (as Kernel Trap has had to in the past). MT gets around this altogether by rendering out everything people are most likely to see as static HTML. I’m certain a typical Apache can push out a whole lot of static HTML and the only likely problem would be if thousands of people wanted to comment all at once, since that’s still a perl cgi.

If you’re looking to set up a web community, particularly one revolving around a piece of software you’re releasing, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Drupal. If you’re looking to run a weblog and want a tool that stays out of your way, MT is definitely a good choice and I can see why so many people out there are using it.

Slashdot | Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4, new iPod - I linked to the Slashdot story, because the standard press release-derived articles don’t disclose the most important part to me: this service uses AAC files with DRM, not MP3. Sigh. I figured that would be the case, but why can’t they come to grips with the fact that I and many others will be happy to spend up to $1 a track for high-quality, no-hassle MP3 files?

Also of note: Apple has announced upgraded iPods and a new version of iTunes (with a Windows version on the way by the end of the year).

Eric Sink writes about the .NET Abstraction Pile in SourceGear’s Vault product. This is a nicely written article that highlights some of the issues that programmers face every day. The issue of complexity that comes with abstraction is a large motivator for the XP rule of “Do the simplest thing that can possibly work”. Don’t add that complexity on before you actually need it. Eric’s experince with their SOS Collab product sounds exactly like the kind of problem that comes up when you try to overengineer and get the most perfect and flexible solution.

I’ve been reading about O-R mapping tools recently, and have read a lot of positive comments about Hibernate. A major competitor to Hibernate is Jakarta OJB, which adds layers of abstraction in order to support ODMG and JDO interfaces. Many of the positive comments about Hibernate have praised it for being simple and fast, which is exactly the effect one would expect you would get by stripping away a couple of layers.

I find it interesting that he has moved from Java to .NET and found that .NET is “Java done right”. I’m definitely keeping my eyes on .NET, particularly as Mono gets up to speed. I’m not certain which layers of abstraction were contributing to their bug list, though. Java itself does not imply much of anything in terms of layers of abstraction. If he’s talking about Swing, certainly Swing has many layers. For doing web apps in Java, you can choose to go with few layers (HttpServletRequest, anyone) or many.

Pierre’s Web is Pierre Omidyar’s weblog. He made some interesting comments about BlogShares. Since BlogShares is a fantasy market, it doesn’t hold a whole lot of interest to me right now… but, Pierre’s opinion on this is interesting, because of his status as a founder of a huge market. His weblog is located at the site of Ginx: Nickel Exchange which is another potentially large market in the making.

Sony Ericsson : Accessories : download my pictures from T68i by bluetooth @ Esato - I was wondering if there was a way to usefully use my phone’s digital camera. Apparently, with Bluetooth there is!

Here’s an important part of the tip:

Most of these Bluetooth Adapters use the WIDCOMM drivers/software.

So to enable sending images FROM your phone TO your pc over Bluetooth, firstly MAKE SURE you have the very latest software for your adapter. Then open regedit.exe and do the following:

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Widcomm\BTConfig\Services
Here there is a list of profiles supported by your PC
Find the one for ‘Infomation Exchange’
Do this by looking in each folder.
For me, there were folders 0001 to 0007, and the one I was after was 0004. (You can tell because there is a value called ‘Name’, with data ‘Information Exchange’)
In this key, change the DWORD string ‘AcceptOther’ to hex value 1 - it is 0 by default.
Close regedit

ENJOY !