Time to try learning Lisp again?

I’ve been reading Steven Levy’s book, Hackers. The book has really reminded me of the thrill I got learning to program computers back in high school. I first discovered computers in junior high, when I found the school’s Apple II. This computer was used by an advanced math class I believe. Similar to Hackers, I hung out there even though I didn’t belong. I even tried to arrange borrowing it for the weekend. Somehow that didn’t happen. My family didn’t have much money so I couldn’t afford a real computer. Eventually though I got a TI-994A computer. It was kind of cool in that it was a computer which could also accept cartridges (ala Atari 2600). It had a tape drive which I used to store programs.

Anyway, I’ve reading Hackers which talks about Lisp programming. I also came across Paul Graham and his new Arc language (yet another Lisp spin-off). This has got me thinking I should learn Lisp again. In case you’re wondering, Paul Graham is the guy who thinks Lisp is best as compared to the popular Java/C# languages (Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham). I don’t agree with him, since I’m into Java, but of course, its not very informed since I’ve never done any serious Lisp programming. Back in the early 90′s, I played around with Emacs-Lisp since I was a heavy XEmacs user (I still use it). I still have Lisp 3rd edition by Winston and Horn. At the time I found the book not great at teaching me the language.

After coming across Lisp references again, I’ve got the Let’s Learn Lisp bug again. I went searching on Amazon for appropriate Lisp books and found that most Lisp books are old. That Lisp 3rd edition published in 1989 is still the most recent edition. Not too many good books. Paul Graham has published two well-reviewed books: ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp. The latter book is available as a free download from his web-site.

The other question is which Lisp implementation to use. I found this survey but there does not seem to be one which says use me. If anyone has any suggestions on books or implementations to try, let me know.

IntelliJ IDEA price increase beginning of the end?

JetBrains is increasing the price of IntelliJ IDEA as indicated by this email I received in early February. They try to rationalize the price increase by saying the price has not changed in five years, etc. Let me just say that I love IDEA. I still think its the best Java IDE and I use it nearly every day. I went out and bought myself a copy for my own personal use even.

However, no tool stays on top forever. A friend of mine recently switched from IDEA to Eclipse, with the big reason that Eclipse was free and IDEA was no longer so superior. I have not upgraded to the recently released version 7, because I could not justify the upgrade cost. I continue to use version 6.

Now comes this price increase. I take this as a bad sign for JetBrains that their revenues are not enough to sustain the company. Raising the price on one hand seems to make sense. We’ve added all of these new features in the last few years. We haven’t raised the price in a long time. The dollar is weak. Yada Yada Yada. However this thinking is a trap. The previous price point of $499 was low enough that companies can justify its cost (and even for individuals such as myself). The tool makes developers so productive that it easily pays for itself. However, IDEA has a serious competitor, Eclipse, that continues to improve and its free. Companies find it hard to justify paying money for a tool when they get a high quality one for free. Now, raise the price and it becomes just that much harder to justify. Factor in the yearly upgrade cost to keep the tool up-to-date and you start losing customers.

This looks like the beginning of the end for IDEA’s dominance. JetBrains will lose more customers to Eclipse. As a result, they will feel pressure to raise prices again. Hopefully I’m wrong and the company will continue to thrive.

Greetings,

At JetBrains, we feel we provide a great value to the marketplace. In spite of the
continued decrease of the US dollar, we have held the IntelliJ IDEA price unchanged
for the past 5 years. To maintain the same level of quality in our product and
services, we now find it necessary to increase the IntelliJ IDEA regular price from
$ 499 to $ 599.

The new IntelliJ IDEA license price of $ 599 will be effective from February, 15th,
2008. Any IntelliJ IDEA license purchases made before February, 15th, 2008 will be
honored at the current price of $ 499.

The IntelliJ IDEA upgrade price remains unchanged until the next version 8.0 release
of IntelliJ IDEA (Q4, 2008). If you would like to ensure a fixed cost of upgrades to
future releases of IntelliJ IDEA, you may want to consider the IntelliJ IDEA Upgrade
Subscription plan that allows you to subscribe to the next two major releases of
IntelliJ IDEA- versions 8.0 and 9.0- now for only $ 450 that is 25% off the combined
price of two upgrades:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/buy.html#commercial_maintenance

If you have any questions about the IntelliJ IDEA price change, please do not
hesitate to contact us at sales.us@jetbrains.com or at the numbers below.

Best regards,

JetBrains Sales Team

Installing Subversion server on Leopard

I do software development for a living. I also like it as a hobby. At work, I am a fanatic about version control (code shall be checked into CVS or SVN). At home, I want version control as well for my home coding projects. Several years ago, I setup a Linux server running CVS. Sadly that server died along with the hard disk, teaching me two valuable lessons. (1) Do Backups, and (2) Put Servers on a UPS. The server died when our power kept cycling on and off during a thunderstorm.

Anyway, I have been needing to setup a new version control server ever since. At work, I started using Subversion, so it was natural to want to use it instead of CVS this time. Instead of Linux, I wanted to setup it on my iMac (which is alway on). However, for Tiger (OSX), it was more work than I wanted to spend to set it up. So I did nothing. Now however I just upgraded to Leopard and so investigated again. Good news. With Leopard, the needed software is included and with up-to-date versions: Apache 2 (with DAV) and Subversion 1.4 (as part of OSX Developer tools install).

I found two good links which I used for my install.

• http://arpablo.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/setting-up-a-subversion-server-on-os-x-leopard-2/
• http://www.sonzea.com/articles/subversion-trac.html

Here’s what I did:

iPhoto 08 alone is worth upgrading to iLife 08

I just installed iLife 08 and I love the improvements to iPhoto. Enough to make the upgrade worth it just for them. Organization with Events is genius. Each time you import photos from your camera, iPhoto creates a new “Event which is like an album and contains all of the photos from the import. Its easy to split an Event into two or merge two events together. Organization of your photos becomes automatic. My previous method was to import photos and then create an album for them — usually grouped by month. Now this is really unnecessary. Essentially what Apple has done is provide simple, automatic photo organization that just makes sense! Did I mention you just click on the Event to give it a name; also extremely easy.

Events also have an interesting display feature. If you mouse over an Event in the display, the photo changes. Keep moving and see more pictures. A little strange but it works.

The other great feature is Web Galleries which works in combination with .Mac. You can share an album as a Web Gallery. The look and feel is very similar to iPhoto. The main gallery page shows all of your albums along with its name and a picture. If you mouse over, it shows other pictures. Clicking on the picture displays a web page with all of your pictures and a nice set of controls to navigate them.

I’ve found two annoying things with Web Galleries. (1) No way to change the sharing options. You need to reshare it to change things like viewable by permissions, or whether people can upload or download photos; and (2) a bug where it seems to lose the name of the album. I managed to create a web gallery with no name. If I try to delete it, iPhoto crashes. Sigh.

Leopard Thoughts

I wrote before how Leopard was gathering dust because I did not feel compelled by the new features being touted by Apple. Now that I took the plunge. Here’s my post-Leopard thoughts.

Leopard at Last – Smooth Installation

I finally dusted off my Leopard box and installed it on my iMac. The install went well, but did take some work. The iMac is our family computer at home used mainly for web browsing, email, and iLife applications. Since the computer is always on, I also use as a server for our internal wiki and for running DNS for our network of computers and printers. Because of this, I needed to make sure that I understood all of the configuration changes I’d made and made backups of configuration files plus any other important files.

Because my internal hard disk was nearly full, I bought a large external hard drive (how’s 1TB) and made backups of lots of files. Things like my iPhoto library, iTunes library, important Document files, etc. Basically anything I’d hate to lose. What’s that? Shouldn’t I be backing this stuff up already? Well, yes that’s true and for the most part I have. However, I wanted to be sure that truly everything I cared about was backed up for sure. Plus I had this large (well extremely large) hard disk, so space was not an issue. Once this was done, I was now ready to face doing the actual install.

Before diving in, I did what any self-respecting person does these days. Do some research using Google! I went looking to see what options and problems I might run into. The main thing I found that was suggested was (1) backup your stuff (see above), and (2) do an archive and install instead of an upgrade. Archive and Install will save a copy of the OSX installation in /Previous Systems.localized. This includes the following directories based on my install:

Applications    System        etc        private        var
Developer
Users         mach.sym    sbin         Library        bin        mach_kernel
usr

The advantage of this over an upgrade is that you get a clean installation of OSX system files. No extra junk. Not as important as with Windows which has the dreaded registry. When Leopard has been installed, the installer will then copy over the above files into the new directory structure. This includes Applications and Users directories for sure. I’m not sure about the other ones. The Users directory contents will be copied at the end of the installations so nothing ends up in the /Previous Systems.

My installation worked perfectly and I encountered no problems. All of my applications worked fine with only a single exception: Konfabulator aka Yahoo Widgets. Sadly it appears a version that works with Leopard does not exist, which seems to indicate Yahoo may be abandoning it.

Thinking in C++ again after Java

I’ve just been writing some code in C++ again after many years of mainly doing Java development. I originally learned C++ early on starting in 1990 when I was at Bell Labs. I was lucky that my project was an early adopter. As a developer, I was thrilled to use C++ after doing C. I found that writing code in C resulted in ugly code; so easy to write spaghetti code. C++ was great; classes allowed organization and encapsulation. I loved it. I used it throughout the 90′s.

When Java came along, I was thrilled to see its syntax was very like C++. I used it a reasonable amount in 96 and 97 along with C++ and C. From 2000 on, I primarily used Java. Fast forward to late 2007, after switching employers, I find myself at a company where C++ and C# are more prevalent than Java.

Most of my C++ programming was before it was standardized. Standardization took forever, almost 10 years, completing in 97. Exceptions, STL, and namespaces were mostly all new to me. Of course, having done Java programming, these concepts were not new.

I’ve been converting a Java library I wrote to C++. In many ways, the conversion is straightforward:

Not drinking the kool-aid

A friend of mine (another developer) recently argued with me about which was better, Eclipse or IntelliJ. He was convinced of Eclipse’s superiority no matter what I might say. He said that “once you drank the kool-aid…” For me that is a big problem. The tool should help me do my job the way I work; not force me to work the way it wants me to.

My recent experience using JBoss IDE based on Eclipse 3.1 and my teammates use of it had convinced me that it was no contest. IntelliJ was just better and made developers more productive. However my friend strongly argued that the most recent version of Eclipse, 3.3 was good. Not having used it I could not say anything. Certainly, the JBoss IDE was weak – no support for JUnit 4, Subversion plug-in slow and annoying to use. IDEA is just sooo much better. At that point we basically agreed to disagree

Fast forward to last month. I had lunch with an old colleague from the team that had gotten me on the IDEA bandwagon. I had just started using Eclipse and quickly made a convert to IDEA. Now this friend had been a big IDEA fan and knew all of the shortcuts, etc. Well, he surprised me. At the new job he recently started, the development team had been using Eclipse. To justify converting to IDEA, he did a real comparison. And he chose Eclipse over IDEA! He said that IDEA had been better but that Eclipse had closed the gap enough that the cost didn’t justify. Some reasons he gave were more intuitive keyboard mappings, multi-display support, long IDEA startup times, …

I will have to take yet another look at Eclipse, but I do not expect to be thirsty for kool-aid.

iPod Touch – the good and the bad

I bought an iPod Touch about a month ago. I couldn’t resist it. I tried. Really. I could not get an iPhone when they came out (although that was probably a good thing). AT&T service in poor in our area. We are stuck with Verizon. Sigh.

I got it at online at Best Buy. Last one left said their website. I went to pick it up an hour after I received their automated confirmation email. At the Customer Service desk, their sign said $10 off it you do not receive your item in 3 minutes. This was Saturday night. Finally picked it up Monday evening. Needless to say I got the $10 off. Boy do they suck.

Anyway I got it finally. Thankfully no problems like some I’d read about online (“negative black”).

The Good

Overall I love it. Its small, light, and thin. With the 16GB model, I have plenty of space for music, video, podcasts, and pictures. The touch screen is wonderful. I love flicking my finger and scrolling thru albums, lists, whatever. I was an early adopter of the original iPod back in 2002. Same thing then, the iPod (and iMac) just seemed so cool that I had to have them. The scroll wheel was such a pleasure to use. Absolutely so contest with the other device that I had bought my wife (an early Archos product which my wife hated and gave up using — I couldn’t blame her).

However its not perfect– after all its the first version of the product. Here are what I don’t like.

The Bad

My biggest complaint is the volume controls. It really needs external buttons for the volume. I have trouble being able to adjust the volume quickly. So far it seems that double clicking the button will cause the volume to display (even if “locked”). However I have not been able to make that happen consistently.

Another problem is the photo display. I wanted to show a photo to someone and turned the Touch so it displayed the photo in landscape mode. Great! I then handed it to the person and the Touch changed the display back to portrait mode. Argh! I find it difficult for myself to get the Touch to switch to landscape when I want to; explaining to someone else who is unfamiliar with the Touch is even harder. (I have similar difficulties with Cover Flow). Apple needs to make this simpler and lockable.
Last complaint is the Video time scroller. It is impossible to control with any accuracy. I want to be able to move forward or backward a small amount in time. “What was that he said?” Let me back up. Oops too far. Let me just move it forward a bit. Argh! Fine let me just use the Chapter button to go back and listen to everything again. The slider works ok for the volume control, but not for the video. Ideally, the time section would expand to allow finer grained sliding.

What’s Missing

I used to have a Palm Pilot. The Touch reminds me of that in terms of size. I find I bring it places and wish I could take some short notes on it. The iPhone has this! Another nice to have would be PDF display. Email and Google Maps — hello! it has wifi. I’m sure they will appear eventually.

Oh and where are the games!

Leopard gathering dust

I bought a copy of Leopard, the latest OS X. However I have not been in any hurry to install it. The obvious reason is that its a brand new version of an operating system. An even more obvious one is that I’ve seen some reports of problems (some even comparing it to Vista (yikes!)). That it does not “just work”. Apple has since released the first set of patches for Leopard, but I’m still reluctant.

The real reason for my reluctance is that the new features are not enough to go thru the pain of installing it on a system that is working quite well. Tiger came with Spotlight and Dashboard as the hyped features (that interested me the most), but they were disappointments to me. Spotlight’s location at the top right of the screen is not convenient; plus its difficult to click. I find I hardly use it. Dashboard I found to be a memory hog. I ended up switching back to Konfabulator (aka Yahoo widgets).

Let’s take a look at the new features in Leopard and my excitement or lack thereof:

• Boot Camp: Great new feature. Already using Beta version with Tiger on my son’s MacBook. The main reason we were willing to buy him a Mac (and because it was Intel-based of course). He likes the Mac but he likes to play Windows games. Boot Camp was perfect. It should help sell many more Macs to people in the future.
• Time Machine: I’m likely to use this feature. I’m already using Mac’s Backup program to an external hard disk.
• Spaces: I love this type of feature on Solaris/Linux. Wish Windows XP had it.
• Eye Candy: including redesigned Dock, Stacks, semitransparent menu bar, and updated Finder. Now I generally like eye candy but not if it hurts usability (see more below).

I’ve been disappointed in Apple lately. They seemed to have forgotten that a great UI does not mean continually adding eye candy. Examples in Leopard seem to be the new dock. I’ve not a big Dock fan anyway. Its nice for launching the common programs you use. However if you have more than ten programs, its usefulness degrades.