Martin Pool gives an informative pros and cons list of Ubuntu Linux versus a number of other OSes. I’d like to jump off on a tangent. Martin gave a plus ot Ubuntu for: Less Macintosh historical baggage. Mac apps can be in the wierd state of running but having no windows open: GNOME designers just know this is silly. OS X suffers some friction between the Mac and Unix parts, in e.

My Queen CDs are here! Yay! I ordered “Queen – Greatest Hits I, II & III” a week or so ago after getting hooked on both We Will Rock You and A Night At The Hip Hopera and it’s finally arrived. I’m in the process of dumping into iTunes now (Apple lossless encoding so even the purists should be happy) and will then commence burning a copy of the CDs to listen to in the car (CDs don’t tend to like the extremely high temperatures cars get to around here).

A little while back I said duplicate code was the biggest codesmell I knew of. I was wrong. There is a level of smelly code that goes well beyond duplicated code, in fact it goes well beyond anything a professional programmer would ever do. That is the smell of code that doesn’t have JavaDoc comments. From time to time every programmer will get lazy and not bother to add a comment for something but every so often you come across a code base that seems to have a systematic policy of removing any JavaDoc comments that might prove useful.

It appears the java.net crowd picked up on my labeling some of them wingers – the response has been much more polite than I would have expected (or deserved really). The most well reasoned response so far is from Chris Adamson who points out the history of Java releases lagging behind on Mac as a reason for people to be worried. Before I go into Chris’s comments, let me point out that there are two main groups of people:

Oliver Hutchinson commented on my last code duplication entry: Another way that duplication sneaks in is when people reimplementing something for which there is already a perfectly good library. For instance, your example of arranging dialog buttons in the appropriate order for the platform is taken care of very nicely by the JGoodies forms library. Actually Oliver, this is the perfect example of when you should duplicate code. There are a few reasons for this, the most obvious one being that JGoodies depends on Java 1.

Well David is right. Queen Fans do love A Night At The Hip Hopera. Definitely worth a listen and props to David for bringing it to my attention.

Benjamin makes some good comments about code duplication and software design. I think by and large I agree with him though I do think that less code duplication implies better design, it’s just that there are also other factors which may be more important as well. The critical thing about eliminating duplicated code is to identify duplicated code based on it’s requirements, not on what it looks like. For instance, today I added a new method to our UIUtils class (GUIs are the most common place where duplicate code is created unnecessarily), the method took as parameters an OK button and a Cancel button, created a panel and put them in it in the appropriate order for the platform.

What’s the thing that most stands out as “gee, this is going to bite me later” code? For me it’s without a doubt code duplication. I really hate seeing duplicate code even if it has slightly different behavior (it should put the common behavior into a parent class or utility methods etc and then just have different code where the behavior is actually different). Every time I see code duplicated I just know that a bug will turn up in it at some point and it will wind up only being fixed in one of the copies.

Sun released Java 1.5 (or 5.0 or something) yesterday and today suddenly there’s a whole bunch of people complaining that Apple hasn’t yet ported it to Mac OS X. What the? People do realize that porting the JVM takes time right? Apple don’t get the final source code from Sun until Sun finish it (oddly enough) and Sun only just finished it. Sure Apple has had access to prerelease builds from Sun (and similarly Apple Select and Premiere developers have access to a seed release of Java 1.

I’ve had it. I officially declare that I am not part of the open source community. I am in no way associated with it at all. I may just happen to use open source projects, I may just happen to contribute stuff back from time to time and I may even have an apache.org email address but please don’t associate me with the open source community. So to Marc Fleury, Michael Tiemann and Jonathan Schwartz you can have open source – I don’t want it anymore.

Ted Leung came out with an interesting comment in relation to the mass of communications mechanisms: I need a whole display just for communications! In fact, that’s precisely how I use a second monitor when it’s available and how I use my laptop when I’m at work. The second monitor is there just to run the various IM clients, IRC clients, mail and iTunes. Typically I also have NetNewsWire open on the second screen to handle the mass of news/blogs/comics feeds.

Since someone got me thinking about copyright and related stuff I stopped and thought about which creative commons license I’m using for this blog. I was previously using the Attribute Share-Alike creative commons license, but have now changed to the Attribute license with no requirement to share alike. That seems to fit my views on how copyright should work and how I want this blog to be used fairly well. I did consider public domain but it would annoy me if no attribution was given and I don’t see any real reason to allow it given I would be annoyed.