In a world gone mad..

it’s like the matrix reloaded.. something went wrong.. when the antenna guys added the new v2 preprocessor.. trying to move closer to j2me polish? integrating the same bad decisions.. amazing how things go sometimes..

i’ve been working with an older antenna version for quite some time now. i don’t see a reason to upgrade. or let me put it another way: i see the need to replace antenna with something else. or new. or maybe add a v3 preprocessor to it.. :)

i’m not saying antenna or j2me polish are bad tools. looks like they are good if you want tools that integrate tightly with your IDE. but i want something else. clean preprocessing directives. clean API. made for command line and/or ant use.

in my rage :) i totally forgot to mention a few things. for example this: in my world i’d like a preprocessor to understand

#if true

without me having to define anything. simple things like that.. i also simply don’t like defines that look like

#ifdef something:defined
or
#if something:defined

instead i would argue that

#ifdef something
or
#if something

should suffice. and i would also argue that it is a good practice to keep names of defines all uppercase. and reserve lowercase to other things. like for example built-in values or variables..

as you can see this is a lot about me not liking something. nothing else.. i guess..

well, my two cents only..

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 12:57 pm under Development,J2ME,Rant
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After reading some (in theory :) useful comments on Symbian development here, I thought adding my own two cents could make sense. Here we go:

DO Use Python S60 to write applications.
DON’T Use the Symbian C++ SDK for anything.

Oh how much anger do I feel when looking back to my Symbian C++ programming days.. :) The most horrible SDK I’ve ever had to work with.. Of course, in the last four or five years the SDK has improved quite a lot. Especially the Eclipse-based Carbide IDE seems to provide a rather good development experience.

Anyway, I’m happy that I was able to move on to Python S60 and J2ME development.

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 2:30 pm under Development,Mobile,Rant
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Finally some intelligent words on software piracy: Ignore Software Pirates Check out the /. comments, too.

I personally think that copy protection and fighting piracy implies you have a shoddy product and you’re trying to get as much money out of it as you can. Ok. Oversimplifying a bit.

Now take another useless comment like this from the Tetris father.

Of course this is a high level system discussion. But putting wealth and prosperity over freedom (of any kind – and for god’s sake, FOSS is about freedom :) is plain and simple stupid.

Anyway.. the world we live in.. funny..

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:40 pm under Development,Rant,World
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Found this one on The.Pirate.Bay: The Emotional World of Farm Animals

Right now it’s still on Google Video. You can find some more videos there from the same user. Fucked up world.

Sometimes it feels really good to be part of this intelligent and highly educated race.. :/

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 7:08 pm under Rant,World
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Two amazing things about this /. article: Interview With Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge

First: I nearly lost hope in face of all this stupid surveillance, IP and enforcing copyright crap going on world-wide. Let’s hope Sweden will save our freedom! It looks like Rick Falkvinge knows what he is doing. Let’s hope there are some more wise men around who stand up against the big companies. Being in Germany, it’s weird to know that everything I’m doing right now in the Internet, every web site I read, every link i click, every post I write, is logged by my ISP and available to “authorities”. Good job, Germany! Yes, you got me. I’m an evil terrorist trying to copy Hollywood movies and sell them for big money. Woohoo.. :)

Second: Read through the /. comments. There are really people who don’t get it. How brain dead must one be to think that all that is going on in the last few years with software patents, DRM, enforcing copyrights will help us? It’s like starting a war after a terrorist attack. Doh..

Make fucking love – not war.
Give – don’t take.

:)

Amen,
tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 11:05 am under Rant,World
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If you haven’t read Zed’s rant, yet, do so now: Rails Is A Ghetto

Here are my two cents..

I never got into RoR myself. Looked at it. Saw some weird stuff. Dropped it. When I had to write some “web services” I wrote my own stuff. No Mongrel at that time. Later, when Mongrel was around, I had to work with it. And, well, it was ok. But I saw things I didn’t like. But I guess if you could see my code, you’d puke.. :) So what the heck..

But what about Zed.. He’s funny.. The rant is funny.. But I did not really get the ‘smart’ part. About smart people and everything.. Wouldn’t someone ‘smart’ see it coming all along? Now he doesn’t exactly say he’s smart (or that he’s not).. But I’m saying: It’s a funny rant. But in a way it’s also redundant. Look at the Rails community.. That’s enough.. :)

I currently enjoy writing Java code for the J2ME platform. How sick is that? Pushing my second (commercial) mobile project out the door. Woohoo. 2008 – The Java Year. LOL. Looking forward to Android already..

Whatever.. Happy New Year, I guess..

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 11:08 pm under Development,Rant
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just a funny thing i stumbled upon today:

Throw your Mac out the Window/

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 7:59 pm under Rant
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Maybe you stumbled upon LINA. It got quite a bit of press coverage the last few days/weeks.

Now some more details emerged. Let’s just say “a few issues remain”.. :)

But here’s a funny and already pretty stable and mature alternative – at least for Windows. Run coLinux with a Gentoo or Debian image and the CygWin X server in “coherence” mode.

Nothing beats a nice xterm with bash. Especially not the Windows “shell” crap.. :)

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 7:35 pm under Rant
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No point in picking out this one dude with his very intelligent article. The whole concept of ‘media’ is based on pushing intelligent articles out to the intelligent masses.. But here it is anyway.. :)

Cruelty and the kitchen

Who decides, and how, which cruelties are acceptable, and which not?

Doh. How about no cruelty, stupid?

Man, how I wish I could change this world. Really change it. Twelve monkeys style. Sigh.

Filed by The.French.DJ at 2:14 pm under Rant,World
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After my previous post I started reading through the many comments to this post:

What you’re not getting about Ruby

Here’s my take at a definition of good vs bad developer:

* A bad developer will moan about not having the compiler tell him about an undefined variable when working with a dynamic language. A good developer will just use testing and other appropriate tools to make sure the code is correct.

* A bad developer will moan about 20.minutes.ago and argue that 20 should be an argument to a ‘make minutes’ functions because this is how 99% of all developers expect it to be. A good developer will embrace the simple, concise and clean new way of writing code and use discipline to not let this grow out of hand.

Meta programming is a topic in itself. Here the good, the bad and the ugly are sometimes hard to differentiate. I would argue that some of the meta programming stuff going on in the currently important (and hyped) Ruby libraries (RoR et al) is going too far. But somehow it’s OK. Because those guys involved are OK with it. Overall, however, I would argue that a truly good developer would not overuse meta programming. “method_missing” is a powerful but dangerous beast.

One more definition of a bad programmer: Someone who uses PHP. Check this example. Posted in response to the 20.minutes.ago Ruby example:

<?php
$d = strtotime("20 minutes ago");
?>

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:47 pm under Development,Rant
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