I got my new laptop at the weekend and, obviously, the first thing that I had to do was get Linux on there. I have to say I’ve been a bit suspicious of the direction Linux-on-the-desktop has been heading of late. Having already tried Ubuntu 11.10 (aka “Oneiric Ocelot”) for a while on the missus’ machine I had some reservations about shoving it on my new one. In the interest of science, I tried out a few alternatives to see what the state of the art is these days.
Last weekend, I had the whole weekend to get started on my project. No prior engagements, no visitors, no chores to attend to (well, not many). So, I knuckled down and got started. Right?
Not so fast. Didn’t you know I want a new laptop? My trusty Acer Aspire 5672 is showing signs of fatigue after nearly six years of loyal service. That’s good going. All that’s gone wrong in those five years is a dead memory stick and a slightly wonky webcam that I don’t use anyway. I’ll be very impressed if the next one lasts anywhere near this long.
So what have I been up to, apart from spending most of the weekend getting the missus’ laptop running smoothly with Ubuntu 11.10?
I’ve been investigating JIRA and GreenHopper for potential use at work. They look nifty, but still not sure if they’re what we need.
Last night I reflashed my N900 which took a lot loner than expected. But boy has it paid off. So much nippier. It had begun to grind to a halt. I’ll go easier with the random plugins this time around.
Basically, 100% distraction now for almost two weeks. Five out of five on the Dave Distraction scale.
So, having lost a week to SpaceChem, you’d think I’d be diving right back in to the mystery project. Well, no. The latest distraction is that the new Ubuntu 11.10 is out and I’ve been promising to fix the missus’ laptop for a long time. Fingers crossed, the latest version will solve all the problems we’ve had with 10.04 on her wee Toshiba netbook without me really trying!
What an exciting Friday night, eh?
The latest distraction would be SpaceChem, a superb indie game. Challenging, educational and seriously addictive. Kiss goodbye to your spare time…
At work we’ve got a lot of legacy code. Some of it is very new, but still legacy, going by Michael Feathers‘ definition of code without tests. Our newish policy is to not introduce any new code that isn’t under test, but it proves a lot harder to do than we thought. Not only technically, but from a motivational point of view too. It doesn’t help that the tools for unit testing in C++ aren’t as clever or abundant as for other languages, especially when it comes to mocking objects. We love the tools like NUnit and Rhino Mocks for C#, and so get spoiled rotten, then have to go back to C++ and are subsequently brought back down to earth.
This week I’ve been mostly distracted engaged in looking into Heroku and Neo4j.
Heroku is an interesting looking continuous deployment / cloud platform that’s just introduced Scala as a supported language. It looks very slick. You push your git changes up to Heroku and it compiles everything and deploys all in one go. Looks like it would do as a starting point for some free scala hosting at least. Not sure if I would be willing to pay for the privilege though, yet. I’ve looked at CloudBees in the past, who do a nice free/cheap deal for open source projects, and incorporate a hosted Jenkins continuous integration suite too.
Neo4j is a Graph Database. I’d never heard of those before, and they seem very apt for the project I’m thinking of. Previously I’d been exploring MongoDB as a database, but a graph db sounds like it might fit the bill even better. I’ve really only got experience of MySql and SQLite, and want to know more about what all the fuss is about with this so-called NoSQL movement that encompasses Neo4j, MongoDB and a lot more.
Then there’s the inevitable time-warp that is InfoQ videos and YouTube. I think I want to know everything before I get started.
Notable presentations this week on InfoQ are “Can the Kanban Method Avoid Becoming another Management Fad?” and “The Begginer’s Mind“. The former takes a bit to get going, but it’s quite insightful. It’ll make you think a lot about your behaviour in the workplace. Are you as professional as you think? Probably not. The latter presentation is interesting in terms of making you think about your current skill set, and how you learn new skills. I felt a bit sorry for him at the end though when nobody had any questions.
So distraction level 3 I think. The videos are more for work, while Heroku and Neo4j are fairly relevant to my spare time project. At some point I’ve got to choose the technology, stop procrastinating, and start writing some code.
This project I’m thinking about started off in part because Google Maps was annoying. I think it’s probably the worst Google thing I’ve used. I’m talking about the “My Places” feature once you’ve logged in. Maybe I was pushing it too hard with around 150 places on one map, but it gets very frustrating. The text you’re entering for one “pin” appears in other pins randomly, colours of pins change, the style of the pins changes depending on whether you’re logged in or not (i.e. it looks fine to me, but when I publish the map, non-logged-in people see different shapes and colours), the kml file generated is a bit crummy, no sorting, and the list goes on. Continue reading
