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.

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

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:

(1) Create Subversion repository parent in /usr/local/svn and a local repository named project1 in /usr/local/svn/project1.

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/svn

$ sudo svnadmin create /usr/local/svn/games

(2) Configure Apache so it has read/write access to the repository. Apache runs as user www.

$ sudo chown -R www /usr/local/svn

(3) Configure Apache to support SVN by editing httpd.conf

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Add to LoadModule section

LoadModule dav_svn_module     libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so

At end of the file, add this include

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-svn.conf

(4) Create httpd-svn.conf file we’ve included above

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-svn.conf

My file which requires all users to authenticate

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /usr/local/svn

# how to authenticate a user
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion repository"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/subversion.auth
# only authenticated users may access the repository
Require valid-user
</Location>

(5) Configure Authentication by creating an password for user shawnb

$ sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/subversion.auth shawnb

The passwords are essentially passed in plain text over the connection. The recommendation is to use HTTPS, but I am using this on an internal network. Maybe later.

(6) Stop and start Apache server using apachectl or by un-checking and checking the Web Sharing checkbox in System Preferences > Sharing.

To access SVN, the URL is http://localhost/svn/project1. The configuration is using SVN ParentPath configuration which means that you can have multiple repositories in /usr/local/svn (e.g. project1, project2, etc). Note: project1 is just a dummy name; please replace with

(7) Finally, add the tags/branches/trunk directories to your SVN repository ‘project1′

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.

Spaces: Love it. This was the feature that sounded most useful to me, since I’m a UNIX guy and liked having this type of feature for Solaris and Linux. I especially like the way you can specify certain applications open up on a specific space. My family essentially shares a single login (because of iLife), so I like the fact that applications like Terminal or Mail open up on spaces that are not the main space. Also great is how clicking an application icon (e.g. Firefox) in the Dock automatically switches you to the space its open in. Very nice touch.

Time Machine: I’m not using it; although I may in the future. It wants a dedicated backup hard drive which must be greater than the internal hard drive size. I have an external Seagate drive which I have been using for backups using Apple’s Backup program. I planned on using this, but it was too small (only 160MB). Before I switch over, I want to better understand how much control the user is given. I don’t want it to waste time trying to backup large video files that I have.

New Dock: same difference. As others have commented, the new way of indicating the application is open is very subtle, although I don’t hate it.

Stacks: I do like the Downloads icon sitting in the Dock. I also added an Applications and Documents icon as well. Pre-Leopard I used to have an Applications alias sitting in the Dock which could then be right clicked to display the Applications folder contents. However I thought that was very non-intuitive to setup.

Finder: The new Cover Flow viewing mode in the Finder I don’t find that useful. Maybe it will grow on me.

Boot Camp: No comment yet. I do not use Boot Camp on the iMac (using Parallels). It is installed on my son’s MacBook.

Dashboard: Dashboard was a hyped feature for Tiger. Having been a user of Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets), I never really liked it. Clicking on the Dashboard icon and then waiting for the widgets to load was annoying. I ended up removing Dashboard from the Dock and switching back to Konfabulator. Well, sadly, Yahoo Widgets does not seem to work with Leopard. sniff sniff. So I’ve ditched it and am now using Dashboard.

Under the Hood: One of the best things about Leopard is what you don’t see and which was not hyped to me. The upgrade of all of the underlying UNIX applications and utilities: apache 2, php, named. Because of this, it was easy to install a subversion server, but that’s another story.

All in all I give Leopard a thumbs up. I have not experienced any problems at all using it. Waiting a while after the release allowed me to avoid the pain that others experienced.

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.

However, all of my server changes — DNS, MediaWiki, mysql — were not running. This is because my changes in /etc, /var/named, /usr/local were not preserved. I was prepared for this and needed to configure these in Leopard. In addition to my own recent backups, all of the system files were preserved in /Previous Systems directories as I indicated above.

Some changes in Leopard:

(1) Leopard includes BIND 9.4.2 which means I no longer needed my own version I built and installed in /usr/local. Instead, I just needed to copy over my changes for /var/named and /etc/named.conf.

(2) /System/Library/StartupItems moved in Leopard. For DNS, I had created a BIND directory there to have NAMED automatically start at boot time. Instead, the BIND directory needed to go into /Library/StartupItems.

(3) Leopard includes PHP5. Again I could just just Leopard’s version instead of my own version. Great!

(4) Leopard has Apache 2. Not much difference here except for /etc/httpd is now named /etc/apache2. To enable PHP5, I needed to uncomment the LoadModule PHP5 line in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.

(5) MySQL installation was in /usr/local. I need to copy the files into the new /usr/local directory. I then ran into a problem when trying to use MediaWiki. The error was

Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock'

The problem is that PHP5 is configured to look for mysql in /var/mysql/mysql.sock. Here’s what I did:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql

sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

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:

• Java class -> C++ class
• Java package -> C++ namespace
• Java interface -> C++ class with pure virtual functions
• Java method returning a newly created List -> C++ list passed in a method argument (ugh!)

The elegance of Java as compared to C++ becomes obvious

1. Methods are cleaner. Returning a List as opposed to passing it in as an argument.
2. Interfaces are clear and straightforward. No messing with abstract base classes and pure virtual functions.
3. No need to avoid dynamic memory allocation. In Java, just do it. With C++, you really want to avoid it, because if you allocate the memory, you need to worry about deleting it (memory leaks). Responsibility for deleting objects needs to be assigned and documented.
4. IDEs are better. I was a hard core XEmacs user until 2002 really. Emacs was a very basic IDE for me. It provided multiple windows for editing code, syntax highlighting, compilation, and error highlighting. Nothing could sway me until I saw the refactoring capabilities of JBuilder. Emacs could not match that. In fact, that is one of the advantages of Java.
5. IDE Refactoring kicks C++’s butt. Visual Studio really seems primitive to me compared to IntelliJ IDEA.
6. Development is just so much faster in Java. The IDE is better. The classes available in the Java standard library dwarfs what the C++ STL has. Date class? Nope. In C++ as in C, developers spend huge amounts of time writing again and again the same low level code. In Java, use the standard JDK library. If its not there, you can probably find an open source project which has what you need. Download the binary jar file. No need to download and compile the source code.
7. Exceptions. C++ has them, but there’s no nice base class to extend them all from. Makes catching exceptions rather difficult.

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.

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!

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.