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I finally sucked it up and bought a Mac. I knew about how smooth the system was, but in all my years have never had one as my primary machine. I ordered a refurbished Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 with 512MB and a Combo drive. Certainly not a powerhouse but I decided that if I wind up loving it, I’ll order a more substantial box and relegate this one to media center duty.

Within the first hour of use (not including all the OS upgrades), I was using all up and running with a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse. I also had my Nokia 6682’s contacts synchronized with Address Book via Bluetooth. iTunes was playing my music library, Front Row was playing DVD’s (from across the room with the Apple Remote) and I was surfing the web with Firefox.

The out-of-the-box experience is first rate. Nothing else out there compares. Windows has a lot of good hardware support but as of Windows XP MCE 2005, it still didn’t play DVD’s without a third-party coded installed. And Bluetooth? Good luck!

There are things I haven’t adjusted to yet. Avidly using, supporting and administering every version of Windows from 3.0 forms some pretty strong habits.

• The mouse acceleration curves are just wrong and you can’t adjust them. Things like MouseFix are out there, but leaving this parameter off of the Mouse control panel widget is just inexcusable.
• The side buttons on the Mighty Mouse are so hard to press, they might as well not exist. Other than that, the thing is fantastic.
• Checkboxes and buttons don’t get focus. For a keyboad-centric user like myself, this is a big deal. The typical username/login/remember combination of just about every website now requires me to go touch the mouse. Suck. This isn’t in every browser, though. Safari and Firefox behave this way, but Camino (which uses what looks like the native checkbox widget) allows focus. Go figure.
• The keyboard is nice, but dammit, can’t they make an ergonomic one?

If anyone has advice for these gripes, I’m all ears.

I came across something disturbing recently and I want to get my two cents on the table because this isn’t the first time it’s come up. Several components in the project I’m assigned to store various configuration attributes in text files. Whether they’re name-value (properties) files or XML data, this is a good choice because it allows the customization of application behavior without code changes or redeployment … if you do it properly.
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I’m typing this post from the Gnome blog post client installed on my laptop which is now running Ubuntu Linux. I took the plunge a few days ago after getting the itch to try an alternative OS. I knew that if I did a dual-boot, I’d bail out and revert to Windows in a few days. So, I blew away the entire disk and let Ubuntu 6.10 have its way.

So far I’m pretty pleased. The out-of-the box suite of applications is more than adequite for the average user, and it’s Linux, so the power user will never be left wanting. The only stumbling I’ve done is on multimedia codecs. So far I have yet to get anything resembling Internet-type audio/video to play, but I’m not sure I’ve done everything right. Flash 9 beta is installed so all my favorite rich-clienty sites work well (Google Finance, YouTube, etc). No MP3 or AVI joy yet though.

I’ll wrap this up and hope it posts, with the thought that I’ll do a more in-depth review soon.

Not much else to say about this sweet plugin.  It lets you view any webpage using IE without leaving Firefox.  Kickass.

Well I’m in Vegas for the 2006 JBoss World expo. I just ran into Marc Fleury in the elevator and he was wearing his Red Hat Fedora. It’s going to be an interesting week.

The dev shop I manage really has no choice but to be agile.  With lightning-fast changes in priorities, there’s no room for wholesale planning beyong a couple weeks out.  What’s missing, however, are the tools to make this all work.

Sure we do the best we can with JIRA (a fantastic traditional bug tracker) and MS Project (a not-so-fantastic project management tool), but there doesn’t seem to be a good selection of tools to mimick an agile team.

I want creamy visual objects that represent features which can be moved between developers.  I want a view of each developer’s workload for the next week, month and year.  I want to know in 10sec what’s going out when, and which tasks are the limiting factor.

The closest thing I’ve found is VersionOne, and I haven’t had a chance to fully evaluate it yet.  If anyone has any clues, I’m all ears.

I finally got a little time last night to check out Ruby on Rails. I have been hearing the hype now for over a year and I was pretty certain it would live up, and I’m here to tell you that it does. As a J2EE developer I respect OO design and and well thought-out conventions. Ruby embraces both and delivers a slick little setup that lets you get a data-connected webapp running in minutes.

The nice part is that with one install, you get the Ruby language along with Gems, the package manager. Gems works a lot like Yum does for linux, and with one gem command, you get the complete rails package, including a little webserver called WEBrick. RoR passes the 10-minute test with flying colors.

I followed along with one of the recommended tutorials before I hit the sack, and I found myself lying in bed running through use cases for my new score. Damn I’m a geek.

Most seasoned Struts developers I know (myself included) are masters of the html:* tags, using and extending them liberally in just about every web application they design. Spring MVC has been on the forefront of challengers to Struts, and with its sensible design, endless flexibility and excellent documentation, it isn’t difficult to see why. But Spring’s MVC left the building of HTML form controls up to the developer and his own devices. This was a big issue for me and the one that has kept me from rapidly adopting the system for use in my own apps.

In their 2.0 release the Spring team has given the community its wish, and provided a JSP form tag library. It’s been added to the manual, but here’s a key term that might pique your interest: convention over configuration.

The Spring crew has taken lessons learned from the wildfire of support for Ruby on Rails and employed them in their J2EE kit. Bravo. Time (and other ‘me-too’ projects) will tell if this is really what J2EE needs to stay on return to the cutting edge.