(Looks like I’m back in the conference organization game again! After a few years of lots of travel and then a few years of lots of family responsibilities, this year I co-funded the Mobile Era conference. It looks like it will be a blast!) If your experience is anything like mine, most of the interesting projects around you are having a larger mobile component this year than last year. I think this trend will continue.

“Show frequently what you’ve done to someone who cares” Are you working in the way you are because it’s a good idea, or just because someone told you to do it? I increasingly hear experienced professionals at Agile conference bemoan the blind adherence to the techniques of Scrum without understanding the principles and values that make it work. I also encounter many software professionals who are overwhelmed by the amount of things that they are asked to do.

I recently read The Git Book. As I went through the Git Internals parts, it struck me how simple and elegant the structure of Git really is. I decided that I just had to create my own little library to work with Git repositories (as you do). I call the result Silly Jgit. In this article, I will be walking through the code. This article is for you if you want to understand Git a bit deeper or perhaps even want to work directly with a Git repository in your favorite programming language.

For those of you who already use PuTTY: Here’s a little improvement that’s surprisingly little known. Probably because it is very hard to explain. But I’ll try. Here is how you can avoid starting programs, entering login information or indeed typing passwords when you use PuTTY: Download Putty installer from the PuTTY Download Page. Make sure to grab the “Installer” Install Putty Start PuttyGen from Start -> PuTTY-> PuttyGen Generate a new key and save it as a .

It’s not secret that Apple likes to control their platform tightly. As long as their dictatorship is a benevolent one, whether you find this objectionable or not is a rather uninteresting question. But lately, the question seems to be less and less academic: Google’s Voice Application for the iPhone got rejected and two existing applications (GV Mobile and Voicecentral) were removed from the AppStore! This is an extremely nasty thing to do to the developers.

This Norwegian language post describes my response to the report from a task force exploring a common IT-architecture for the public sector in Norway. Den norske regjeringen har besluttet at en felles IKT-arkitektur for offentlig sektor ville være fint. Jeg fikk greie på arbeidet på tirsdag, og har lest rapport til den store gullmedalje. Jeg er fortsatt ikke helt sikker på hva som menes med “felles IKT-arkitekt”, men jeg kan se omrisset av mange store evighetsprosjekter i dokumentet.

Anders Nordås wrote a blog post where he talks a little about how he uses his beautiful moleskin notebook. I will pick up his challenge and write about my favorite tool, Post It notes. As many who know me are aware, I always have a pad of Post-It notes and a pen in my left pants pocket. I use the sticky notes for todo-lists, note taking in meetings, planning talks and doing brain dumps.

If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hosting. One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly.

I have just one thing to say: w00t! Failing unit test Unit test succeeds Thanks to Litrik de Roy Litrik used my C code to control the lights of the Dell XPS computer and integrated them into an Eclipse plugin. Coolest plugin EWAR!!one!! See more about it on the project blog. Comments: [Stein Kåre Skytteren] - Jan 10, 2007 Wow… I just got to have one of those… :-) Johannes Brodwall - May 12, 2007 Hi, hong.

I have exported the XPS light control source code into my subversion repository. The software is currently set up to build with Cygwin. As an added bonus, I now have added a target that creates a dll so the code can be reused more easily. How to use: xps\_lights>_make all_ rm -f *.o *.dll *.exe gcc -mno-cygwin -Wall -c -o xps\_led\_control\_lib.o xps\_led\_control\_lib.c gcc -shared -o xps\_led\_control\_lib.dll xps\_led\_control\_lib.o gcc -o testexe xps\_led\_control.

I got the following addition on my Dell XPS LED code from David Pritchard. The new version of the code has a “-touchpad” argument. Specify “-touchpad 1” to turn the XPS 2 touchpad light on, “-touchpad 0” to turn it off. Here is the updated source code and executable. The executable should work without Cygwin now. (Note to self: Use “-mno-cygwin” gcc option to strip out the dependency)

My newest computer is a Dell XPS thing. It’s a huge monster of a laptop (really a gaming laptop, good for the performance). It comes with external LED lights on the top, sides and bottom. These lights are normally only configurable though a custom program. Since I got the PC, I have been dying to find a way to control these LEDs from a script. Finally, today, I found out how.

Jason Zhicheng Li has written a blog article about Spring configuration. It is called the 12 Best Practices for Spring configuration. Best practice #1 was “don’t use autowiring*. That got me thinking: I feel very ambivalent about autowiring. Initially, I thought it sounded like a great idea because it reduced clutter, but then people like Jason convinced me that it was not. The more I think about it, the more usure I am.

Any reader of my blog should not be surprised by the fact that I think software patents are pretty bogus. So y’all will forgive a little rant brought on by the examining the (pretty bogus) eolas patent. Here is the introduction to the patent, taken from eolas “technology” page: The Web Application Platform Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document

For a long time, I have been plagued by comment spam on my blog. To battle this problem, I have now installed a Movable Type plug-in that verifies that posters are not robots. This will hopefully improve the situation. The plug-in is called scode. It displays a number in an image that the user needs to type to verify that he is not a robot. The plug-in was a bit of a pain to install: My version of the perl GD image creation library did not support PNG, so I had to use GIF, which took some time to find out.

Just a little reminder list to myself. Check out this Java technology before next Java project: Pico Container eXo portlets Hibernate

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The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like: addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { list.Add(new ListItem()); } Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use variables from the scope. This is a much needed amendment. Why was it not there from the start? (whine, whine)

Attributes. Keeps getting better ’n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably overused, though) Not EJBs! Getting rid of the defunct EJB model saves a lot of headaches. Better UI. For the user, that is, not the developer!

Open Source Community. The number of excellent open-source tools for Java is staggering. Look at HSqlDb, BeanShell, Eclipse, Recoder, JGraph, Tomcat, JBoss, and many more. More importantly, the Java community has proven much more interested in doing it the open-source way. Eclipse. Already mentioned, but it deserves a point of its own. Eclipse is a better IDE than VS.NET! Checked Exceptions. Less Native Code & more code reliability. .NET still has some weird crashes.

This is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for in C#. I am still some ways away from having looked at it as thorough as I would like, but it looks very good. Basically: Attributes that are processed compile-time with any code you like. This is the basic building blocks for AOP.