Qte.dk

I stumbled upon a small article on newsforge about what the linux distribution your are using indicates about your personality.

I must say that some of the points are dead on, I however have a few extra comments on some of the distributions based my personal experience.

Debian - it seem as if many of the debian users has chosen it to be cool and because all their other cool friends use it. Many of them have just as much trouble with the package system (supposed to be the best part of debian) as the rest of us do if not more, so why even bother?

Gentoo - Having supervised a friends battle with gentoo (reinstall after reinstall) for the last year or so, and listening to him explain why he use gentoo matches exactly with the article's description of a common gentoo user. They are willing to spend countless hours compiling and re-compiling every single program in hope of getting a 1% better performance, but I have not noticed any difference performance wise compared to my mandrake installation. When it comes down to counting time gained from the performance boost, I would prefer spending the week of compile time coding on one of my projects.

That is it for now - more random thoughts will most likely come soon.

I noticed a feature missing the other day when setting up this blog, permanent links to each blog entry (/blog/archive/%entryid%).

Now the RSS feed contains a link to the permanent url, hopefully this will make it easier to referer people to a specific entry.

On a side note I am currently a bit sick, so I hope I will be well in time for the big Fundanemt team feast tomorrow - maybe drinking some Baileys and sleep a bit will help.

Apparently it did not take long for the sharp (get it - haha, erhm) eyes of Kristian to spot my little blog entry about the new Java release and he posted a critical response on his blog. Guess I have to write a counter-response, so here goes.



Although before I begin, I have to say that I, compared to others I know, have a more broadened look on certain things and am not reluctant to see the good sides of products (being OS', programming languages, editors etc.) instead of only the negatives. Kristian (he brought this on him self) and many others are mainly focused on the negative and refuse to see the positive sides of other products, or even worse see the negative sides of their favorite and beloved products.



The original post was written mainly to information Kristian that many of his original concerns about Java have now been addressed. Now when Kristian (and others) attack SUN's reasons for adding generics, boxing, properties etc. makes me speculate whether Microsoft evangelists find it ok when Microsoft include features from other products but apparently not the other way around?



I must admit that Microsoft has done a good job designing the .NET framework, more than with the C# language. Especially I am fond of the XML library, which comes in handy in our current university project. When it comes to the C# language the admiration is not a big. It seems to me that the C# designers got so excited about making C# the language for everyone, that they included too many features from Java, C++ etc. Features like operator overloading is nice to have, and clearly included in hope of having C++ developers move to C#, but in reality operator overloading make it harder, compared with methods, to determine the exact functionality of a code block. Operators often fail miserably to be sufficient descriptive about what they do, as developers choose them as a quick way of operating on an object instead of sticking with the clean OO design. Finally it is beyond me why anyone would use them, given that they can not be used in other .NET languages such as VB.NET.



That is it for now, however if I know Kristian he will most likely be back soon with even more babbling :-)

I bought a copy of the Alt om Data magazine last week to read the small box in their CD section about Fundanemt. If only they had waited for the 2.1 release before writing about it, but I guess we will write a press release once we get there, and hopefully some of the magazines will write about us again.


Anyway, back to the magazine, I read an article about the new Java 5.0 (Tiger) release and the new features SUN had thrown into the package. After reading the article and browsing the web it occurs to me that Java beat C# to the punch when it comes to the new feature everyone requests in both languages "Generics" and when Java 5.0 at the same time adds features as

• Boxing - Primitive types can now be assigned directly to e.g. Integer, which comes really in handy when using generics.
• Foreach loop - although implemented using the old for keyword it functions the same was as in C#
• XML - one of the things I missed most in the previous Java versions was core support for XML, and now it is here - no need for using external packages.

On top of those features, SUN has polished the engine so it has lower startup time and

Guess I will have to look more into Java when we are done with the C# project at the university.

I am taking the day off from university on wedensday, to spend the day triaging and squashing bugs with other members of the fundanemt development team.


We will try to focus on closing some of the bugs that are blocking the 2.1 release. Last time I counted, the number of bugs having to be fixed before 2.1 being released was around 50, but luckily most of them are quite small.

Personally I will try to close all the bugs related to our websites, set-up a new developer site for our phpdoc, cvs stats, translation tools etc. and finally upgrade the mantis bugtracker to a newer version.