Archive for February, 2006

Missing the point 25

Posted February 21, 2006

AIGLX, wow, what a shiny waste of time. When will you guys realize that what’s missing in Linux is not cool visual effects but solid applications and hardware support. That’s where you should shine.

Who cares if I can play a video on the edge of a cube when there is no decent Video Player on linux (but plenty of competing crappy ones) or make my window fade away like a paper napkin caught in the wind (when there is no decent RSS reader, application launcher or enterprise groupware solution). RedHat, wake up, grab the mono rpms and start building apps.

That should be your secret project.

Update: Healthy discussion in the comments section.

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Mac OS X for developers ? 6

Posted February 14, 2006

Wanted to make a quick note before I forget but I noticed recently that more and more developer tools (Java mostly but even Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby for example with Komodo) are made available for Mac OS X:

This is a change since Mac OS X was not considered a developer OS a few years back (saw many try to get JBuilder 4 running on Mac OS X). It’s probably due to the fact that many IDEs are now written in Java but certainly because many developers have adopted Mac OS X (hang out at O’Reilly’s OSCON for proof).

I hope 2006 sees Mac OS X emerge as a great Mono developer platform with Gtk on Aqua, XCode opening up, Cocoa# growing, and solid runtime support for Mono on Intel architecture.

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Put something on, please 4

Posted February 9, 2006

What do you think of that t-shirt ?

I was tinkering with my cafepress store yesterday and I came up with this design, what do you think of it ? Please comment. Be nice.

1 person likes this post.
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Nothing brings down real estate prices like a good old fashioned gang war. 3

Posted February 9, 2006

Zillow.com. Kind of crazy.

And this is just magic http://3639551848/

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Novell Summer Collection 2

Posted February 6, 2006

Don’t be surprised if you see a few homeless people sporting sweet Novell shirts this summer in Boston.

I went through all my soft wear this week-end and will be bringing two dozen Novell shirts to the salvation army this week.The unlucky ones will be wearing the spandex tan conference shirts we all hated. Note that I didn’t get rid of any of the Mono or XimianTees, most of those looked cool.

P.S. Is Planet Novell down since the layoffs ?

P.P.S.: Triggered by a conversation with Aimee about Gaspard Hauser (and one of my favorite poems, by Verlaine), a little book recommendation for today, if you liked Perfume (if you haven’t read it, it’s a fantastic read), pick up a copy of Moravagine. I had to read it in lit-class in high school found it captivating.

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Life of a product manager 0

Posted February 3, 2006

Dilbert has this ability to very often be spot on. I felt that way, many many times as I accompanied a sales bot to go meet a potential customer. Once I got a sales award, woo hoo !

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Web Developer Extension for Firefox 2

Posted February 3, 2006

I ‘rediscovered’ it recently as I was showing it to people around the office. There is simply no way around it, if you ever do edit HTML/CSS/JS, it is the single most useful extension available for Firefox.

The screenshot here does not do it justice (Display Element information, a.k.a. Ctrl+Shift+F) because that’s just one feature and there are a whole lot more. You have to see it, install it, use it.

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Bzz 1

Posted February 2, 2006
It’s official, after happily working there as a consultant for a couple of months, I have accepted a full time position as director of engineering at BzzAgent.

I couldn’t be more psyched, the company is exciting, the people I work with refreshing and fun as are the industry we’re in and technologies we use.

“And there was much rejoicing.“

If you’re curious about BzzAgent, check it out and don’t hesitate to sign up. Also, we’re looking to hire Java specialists and QA engineer like, “yesterday”. Email me your resumes !


BzzAgent

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It is the pen that gives immortality to men 2

Posted February 1, 2006

Well, it’s a week full of good news. I’d like to make official something I’ve been dying to tell you since we signed the contract this summer. Joe Hummel, Geoff Norton, Niel Bornstein, Brian J. Sletten and I are co-authoring a book about Linux Application Development with Mono with Addison Wesley as our publisher.

Here is an excerpt from the preface: “It should be clear to you now, why we chose to write about Mono in the context of Linux development. You will not find a lot of literature on that subject, especially when desktop applications are concerned. So while we have chosen to focus on Mono in the context of creating desktop applications, we will not dwell on C# or .NET class libraries or any general .NET knowledge you can find in other books. This book will introduce you to the Mono platform, its specificities and exclusive libraries. While it mostly focuses on how to build desktop applications, you’ll find tips and tricks for migration of existing applications, use of existing Java and .NET libraries, frameworks and even lesser known programming languages you might want to try out.

We’ve assembled a team of .NET, Mono experts and open source enthusiasts to author this book. We each are passionate about the subject, experts in the technologies and have a vested interest in seeing new applications written for Linux. ”

We’re on track and the book is scheduled to be published in 2007. I also signed up as a series editor for a few Mono books but I can’t tell you about much about that yet…
Suffice to say that it’s a fascinating thing to be lead author as well as series editor and I am learning a lot.

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