Well my new PowerBook G4 is up and running and it’s amazing how much difference in speed there is compared to my old 400Mhz clunker. I’ve only got 256MB of RAM in the new one at the moment (the old had 384MB) which I’ll upgrade once my bank account recovers a bit, but things absolutely fly! I just tried our latest product which does some pretty intensive stuff with XML and is a bit on the slow side on both my development machine at work (700Mhz Celeron believe it or not) and my old powerbook.

It seems that Leo Simmons and my plans to acquire powerbooks isn’t working, I went out and purchased a 15″ PowerBook for myself. Sorry Leo, but you can’t have my crappy old 15″ powerbook, it’s most likely going to my Nan. Though if someone does give me a shiny new 17″ powerbook you can have my shiny new 15″…

It appears that my back to back rants pretty much completely took over Planet Apache the other day. er, sorry about that… I’ll try to use my “extended entry” box a little more in future…

In response to this, I have a few things to say. Firstly I thought the original article was very much on target – opensource software *does* suffer from poor user interfaces and it is typically because it’s so difficult to get a cohesive UI out of a widely dispersed group of people, from different cultures and in different time zones. The particular issues I had with that particular response: The newly designed save and open dialogs are a great example of the simplicity the GNOME project seeks to achieve.

Jono Bacon comments on how XUL could be great for providing more interactive web applications. My take on it: he’s gone off the deep end. I just don’t get what the current obsession is for having to run everything in a web browser these days. This framework not only brings the web browser out of the dark ages in terms of the potential for interaction, but the Mozilla developers made the right choice and picked XML as the language for specifying user interfaces.

It appears that there is an epic battle unfolding right in my own back yard. Firstly, let me explain my philosophy on gardening: if it grows, it’s meant to be there, if it dies, it wasn’t. I don’t pay any attention to my garden, there’s enough shrubs and low level cover that they’ve managed to grow up enough to smother most of the nut grass the landscapers so brilliantly put in before I moved in here.

Kathy Sierra writes about being a loner and how it makes pair programming very frustrating. I can see her point – some people enjoy being alone and don’t like feeling crowded by others. That is different to not being a team player – loners can be very good in a team, but they do run into trouble when the team happens to be using pair programming or is just a very “in each others back-pocket” type of team.

Okay, I have to ask – why the sudden massive interest in JXTA? It seems to have taken over all the weblogs on java.net and most other places I look around. Maybe if I actually had a clue what it was really about I might be excited about it too, but I just haven’t had time to look into it. Sigh.

I can’t resist picking apart this comment to my earlier post. It’s easy to look at the code and modify it, but it’s not as easy to actually test that code. You need to mess with bootclasspaths and things like that. How is this different to an opensource version of Java? You would still have to set up all the correct bootclasspaths and make sure you had things in the right place for it to work.

I noticed this on Java.net. In it, Eitan Suez suggests that having open source J2SE libraries would rapidly increase their quality because of all the developers contributing patches. The major problem with this argument is that the source for the Java standard libraries is already available and in fact is included in pretty much every J2SDK. It’s right there, in a format that can be used to create patches against and submit them to the publicly available bug parade for java.

Jim Winstead has posted a couple of entries on character encodings (1, 2). Some good info in there. My three big tips for dealing with character encodings is this: 1. Know your character encoding and make sure you’re using that encoding everywhere. No look again because you probably missed a place where you didn’t think about encoding. Particularly don’t forget that printing something to System.err or System.out in Java uses the platform default encoding and so characters that can’t be represented in that encoding become question marks.

Leo Simmons wants an apple. He suggests that someone buy a nice shiny new 17″ powerbook and send him their old ratty 15″ powerbook. I happen to have an old ratty 15″ powerbook and would love a nice shiny new 17″ powerbook – I can even justify it. I can’t however afford it. So let me offer some mac hater a chance to show just how much they hate Mac’s in three easy steps.