Life is so good, it gets better every day

Very Important Bug

Caleb pointed a very important bug on #nzlinux, of which I’ve logged.

GUADEC Talk

I submitted my ‘101 Things to Know about GNOME’ talk to the GUADEC organizing committee. With almost 150 days to go until GUADEC, I should have enough time to come up with such a list, but input is welcome.

JDS Shirt

Okay, so I still haven’t seen a JDS shirt. Hell, it’s been a while since I saw a GNOME shirt. Mary, what gives? Do we have to do *another* release?

Rosetta

I see the folks at Canonical have announced and released their Rosetta project. I seriously hope this suceeds. Rock on.

The Lost Odd Sock

With Yahoo! doing desktop search, and Apple giving previews of Spotlight with the catchy phrase ‘Find Anything, Anywhere. Fast’, I see that Microsoft’s markedroids have come up with a ‘Find anything, anywhere fast’ slogan with their latest desktop search beta preview. Nice work, what’s the bets Apple have already trademarked it? Have yet to see a differentiating killer feature out of all the desktop search products out there – perhaps there won’t be one.

Why I Love New Zealand, #48

Apart from their women and other very pretty scenery, their fish and chips are utterly fantastic. Slightly disturbingly, most fish and chip shops double up as a chinese takeaway. I still haven’t grown in love with the battered sausage, which will make Mark cry, and I will never grow up being a Watties kid but I’ll happily accept a crumbed Hoki and a scoop of chips.

What I’ve Been Doing

A few weeks ago, Carolyn and myself had a quiet weekend exploring Wellington, availing of the cheap Air New Zealand flights. Wellington was a pretty cool place, more so when the sun shone. It was nicely divided up into different cultural areas – everything from the arts, shopping, pubs and restaurants to hippie Cuba street. We took a look at the waterfront and Oriental Bay, up the cable car to see the Botanic gardens and the ‘Sun dial of human involvement’ [which sucked], Te Papa and did a bit of Christmas shopping. We met up with Mike who took us up along up into the Hutt valley and along the west coast, which was quite beautiful. But it really pissed down on Sunday, with high winds – enough to shut down the airport. Nice city, but I get why a lot of south islanders [ok, at least people from Canterbury] wouldn’t dare to live there. Some photos are online.

This week a cold has hit me for six, and spent much of the past couple of days sleeping. I blame the weather for being spectacularly crap.

Sun Java Studio

Todd announced that a new Java Studio Enterprise was available. Sounds good until I saw the system requirements. No Java Desktop System? Alarm Bells? Looks like I’ll have to wait until my desktop arrives so I can run Solaris x86 – although after nearly 5 months waiting, I’m not quite sure of my chances.

Standing on the Shoulders of Java

I’ve only written a handful of Java code in my life, and most of it was during various Java labs in university. I’ve recently embarked on a project based on Java. We’re leveraging code that came out of Sun Labs. It’s proving to be an interesting, if a little hairy, learning experience.

First of all I figured that I had to relearn Java. Ooof. Fortunately I found The Java Tutorial which proved to be pretty useful, and with some background in GObject it was a nice easy learning curve in an isolated environment. I could easily compile the sample applications and work through them, step by step. Great.

Then I discovered what I can only call ‘The Java Complexity’. Oh my god, Java is BIG, and reading through the code already written for said project above made that even more obvious. I had to start looking at things like ant and jcloak, not to mention half of the standard API. Are people expected to remember this stuff? As funny as this sounds, it seems infinitely more complicated than your standard autotool and C based GNOME APIs!

Still, the project has to get done and I must learn. I’m terrified at every corner though. I thought having a look at Netbeans or Sun Java Studio might help me, but it feels like they’re just another variable on the stack right now which I don’t need. So plough on, I go…

And I find out that ant is not installed on my machine. Some SuSE packages don’t seem to help me here, since I have jdk-1.5.0_01-ea installed. So time to rebuild an RPM. I find some SRPMS and look at the spec files thinking ‘Hell, this should be easy’. The Red Hat one terrifies me. The SuSE one is workable though. And then I discover the ‘setJava’ script and /etc/java profiles. Crack.

Sigh.

So my startling discovery has led me to come to an uninformed opinion that Java just doesn’t feel ready for Linux right now, and certainly not JDS. It’s hard to accept, as a developer who currently doesn’t care about anything more than building and developing his application, the reason why there are multiple versions of Java right now. It feels that we [Sun] have failed in that respect by creating the root cause by a non-free Java. I originally started out with the goal of having a developer environment up in minutes, with all the various components installed – ‘plug and play’ comes to mind. Today has shown that is not the case, and I’m no closer to writing the lines of code that matter to me. We have much work to do.

Update: So I discover Netbeans has an ant module which helps quite a lot, thanks!