This new TiBook is some serious fun. It's been two insanely late weekend nights of finding my way around, loading up my main tool set, and getting a feel for the system. And while various apps still have some rough edges, it's been quite a while since I actually enjoyed playing around with a computer, other than getting some work done.

The eye candy Mac OS X provides you with isn't distracting nor (dis)functional, but it offers you with a good-looking work environment with some serious power underneath the keyboard.

The disk speed is quite regular, as is the perceived CPU speed, but since I loaded my TiBook with 1 Gig of RAM, and the (virtual) memory management is up to par with Linux'es, I can open up plenty of apps without the system feeling slow.

Entering the Switchers world, one has to become familiar again with the shareware software distribution model, since quite a few of the must-have tools are one-man-shop endeavors which require you to pony up some dollars to have a fully functional registered copy. So far, I subsidized Ranchero Software (NetNewsWire), BareBones (TextWrangler) and IndigoField (Proteus). I don't mind spending money of software, especially this class of tools. It's the kinda stuff you don't want to write yourself, that you however still expect to port any feature you might possibly dream of, and for which there exists no services-for-pay business model. Quite different from the open source business model, where infrastructure-class products are shipped for free, but the author expects to make some money on the services for installation, support, or customization.

I just bought and installed NetNewsWire, since that seems to be the thing to do after buying a Mac. Now, when can I expect HTML editing in the Weblog Editor?

Well, I'm a switcher since a couple of hours, and it's been sorta fun. Finding my way around a new OS, especially one I've never really worked with, brings all sorts of surprises with it. So far, it was fun, and the kids sure like the form factor of Dad's new toy. On the This could have been better-list however are: iCal sucks since it bombs out when trying to import a Mozilla calendar file. And the Mail client that comes with OSX 10.2.6 isn't even worth bothering with, since it slows down to a crawl when trying to open my IMAP mail. So I installed my default internet clients from my PC: Firebird and Thunderbird. Even with the low version numbers, they seem to hold up well. Safari looks kinda nice, but not worth the change from Firebird IMHO. And the Wifi range definitely could be better. And I already managed to crash the Finder while accessing a Linux-based SMB share. Nevertheless, it sure beats the PC in terms of coolness, and now that I switched my shell from tcsh to bash, I'm feeling almost at ease.

Well-linked websites rate better in Google searches. There's nothing new with that, of course, and spammers are aware of this. So what happens if you host a popular Wiki, like the Cocoon Wiki? Quite a while ago, somebody was inserting links in our Wiki that, at first sight, were perfectly innocent except for being slightly misplaced. Since one of the linked websites (http://www.apache-stuff.com/) however was abusing the Apache brand a fair bit, I started browsing that site, and found out it mostly consisted of pages grabbed from other places, without any credits or eventual copyright notes. Even worse, plenty of the innocent looking hyperlinks on that site were obviously pointing to p0rn sites. So I started removing references to that site. It was clear that the person injecting these links in our Wiki was trying to become part of the Google interwiredness mesh, increasing the chances of getting a good Google ranking.
Since I just got the good news that I could go and fetch my newly purchased TiBook tomorrow, I went browsing Mark's interesting DiveIntoOSX Wiki. Knowing Mark's other venue, I'm pretty sure he has great Google rankings. So it was a bit to my dismal that I found out that same spam linker had been injecting links in that Wiki as well. Even worse, Google learned me that a lot of other Wikis are being infected by this spam linker. If you maintain a Wiki, make sure you are not listed here:

• apache-stuff.com
• css-stuff.com
• pythoninfo.com

Looking at the results of these searches, the people behind this spamming sure knew their stuff. There's links to Wikis, links embedded in comment forms, and much other stuff. Beware.

Now we're getting there. The service engineer arrived, popped in a new harddisk, listened to my worries about the motherboard being the potential culprit of all this, called his supervisor, and will (normally!) be back tomorrow with a new mobo as well. So after two years of intensive (but caring) use, I'll be left with a new and shiny TiBook, and a mostly refurbished (well, the disk and mobo at least) Evo n600c. Any takers?

... but the light approaching ain't that of a runaway train. Let's see where we are.
The Compaq laptop is still broken. The service engineer still hasn't come to check out. This morning, dear colleague Marc called the CarePaq helpdesk, but apparently got switched to the Dutch (as in: Holland) desk, and they couldn't help him. They promised to call back however, which, of course, they didn't do. After I got in the office, becoming slightly pissed off with this situation, I called again, and this time a friendly girl named Tine got on the phone. She was the same girl who activated my case in the system. She put me on hold for a couple of minutes, just enough to open a terminal window to check my mail on the server I'm abusing as temporary workhorse - more on that later. She came back, explaining me she couldn't get hold of the person responsible for the scheduling of field visits, but she really, really promised to get back to me as soon as she got news for me. I explained her this situation was becoming annoying, and that I would call her back myself two hours later. That's about it from the Compaq front so far.
On the TiBook front, while being on hold with Tine, I saw an email from Peter from the local Apple store. He basically said he had managed to shuffle things around, and that I could come and fetch my new TiBook tomorrow afternoon. I had called him yesterday, telling him about my state of aggravation with my old laptop failing on me the day after ordering the TiBook. And he had promised to look into it. Well, he sure did.
Conclusion so far? Number of promises I got from Compaq until now: 3. Number of occasions they could effectively live up to them: 0. On the Apple front the balance is 1 on 1. Cool.
Update: immediately after typing the last paragraph, Tine called back. She explained me that her manager had contacted the field service, and that they would be calling me back to schedule a visit. I explained her that this visit was supposed to have happened yesterday already, and I asked her if she could provide me with further contact details of the field service desk. She explained me that she wasn't allowed herself to contact that desk, that only her manager could possibly do this, and, should there be any problem, I could get in touch with her again. Tine is simply adorable: while her organization is messing up her ability to actually help people, she invites these people to call her and explain that to her. She must be a very loyal person.

It's 4PM local time here, and the laptop service engineer hasn't yet showed up. A phone call to Compaq's CarePaq center learned me that they will show up between 9AM and 5PM, so I'm getting a bit worried. They couldn't provide me with more information on who was to be expected, nor when, and having read this saga (linked by Tom), I'm not the slightest bit at ease.

If all goes well, the service engineer of Compaq should be in today, so hopefully by the end of the day, I'll be able to reinstall a working W2K configuration to keep me going until the TiBook arrives. Just mail, Java and Eclipse will have to do it. I also closed down our company website since today is the big protest day against software patents in Europe, and if the Compaq guy shows up early in the morning, we might as well hop in the car by noon and drive to Brussels.
I brought two books with me, so if sitting behind the weary screen of our trusty Linux server becomes boring, I can settle down in the office sofa. Reading email from a terminal window really causes me a splitting headache. Yesterday, I also asked for a quote from a data recovery company, and they told me it's 150 EUR (minus shipping) for a firm estimate, and then 700 EUR upto infinity to actually get the work done. We're talking about two years of data, so it might be worth its price. Also, my 1.5 Gig picture collection is gone. I was planning to move them to a DVD once I got the files moved to my TiBook with SuperDrive. Ha! ;-|
Thanks for all the tips and nice emails I received. Knoppix didn't help, though, since it failed to recognize the hard drive as a valid block device. The noises emerging from the disk are now also becoming really worrisome.

OK. So the Matrix is definitely upon us. After placing my order for a TiBook yesterday, my not-so-trusty-anymore Compaq Evo n600c laptop decided to stop booting, figuring he would be going out of service anyhow. So here I am, stuck with a failed harddrive, and the friendly lady from the Compaq CarePaq center unwilling to confirm they will be doing any effort at all to rescue my data. As we have seen a few weeks ago, CarePaq service is pretty good at replacing faulty components on-site, but won't go through the trouble of mounting the tiny laptop drive as a second drive on a working machine in order to rescue data. Since it's a read failure in one of the Windows boot files, I'm confident that the rest of my data is still there - but the rescue of these data files is in the hands of the service engineer who is supposed to show up tomorrow. I'll just keep fingers crossed, since I can't do much else anyhow.

I'm a clueless lemming and have just ordered a 15" / 1GHz / 512 MB TiBook. Unfortunately, the local Apple store seems to be running short on stock, and there's another 2 weeks of extra waiting involved. Oh well... almost there!

Dear Ms. Spielman, I am completely disgusted by your perspective. I would suggest the same policy to be applied to women in the computing industry for that matter. While I agree with you that companies should never outsource their core business, and try hard to please their customers, I am pressed hard to find a rationale for your ideas about foreign workers except for rabid nationalism. In the 1930s in Europe, it was the same kind of doubletalk that led an entire nation of perfectly sane people to believe they could salvage their economic situation by eliminating people based on their religion and ethnicity.

Due to my harddisk failing on some bad blocks, my laptop was in deep dodos over the night chkdsk'ing and fixing stuff. Besides a lost evening of work which was solved by watching the Animatrix DVD, this morning Mozilla failed to boot up properly, so I started shuffling around mail files and I'm now using Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird as my default web and mail client. So far, they are holding up pretty good, and the migration, if tiresome, went quite well.

So I'm sitting here with my beloved in the garden, while she is browsing through the holiday pics, and the background noise from the harbour nearby is adding to the thick warm atmosphere which has been resting as a blanket upon us for the last week of our holidays. This week, Belgium was going through some heat wave with temperatures above 30°C, which is quite hot when there's no sea nearby to cool down the nights.
It's been a nice long holiday, 5 weeks with the kids and everybody together, going to France for two weeks, and some time to warm up and wind down before and afterwards. It brings a sense of detachment to daily business life, something which will be bound to change in the next few weeks. Hopefully, temperatures will go down now, since our offices have no airco and from the rumours overheard from Bruno and Marc who continued working throughout July and August, it has been a challenging act to keep brain cells working through this kind of heath.
We had many friends coming over to our holiday residence last week, also visited quite a few of them, or shared part of our holiday with them, and it was nice to grasp the fine life of good food, some bottles of wine and pleasant and restful conversations, sometimes well into the late hours of the day. Knowing ourselves, our working year challenge will be to preserve this sense of relaxation, making sure we find enough time with each other to remember what life is about: family, friends and making time to fully enjoy the company of your beloved ones. We'll remember this year's holiday as the time when our little daughter started walking, and realizing ourselves that sometimes, we should be easier on ourselves, and not be too serious about who we are, what we do and where this all might eventually lead us. Words for this year: serendipity and capriciousness. Thanks to everyone who made our holidays worth the while.

So Apache is planning to move forward with a J2EE container project. Only hours after Greg Stein, ASF Chairman, made the announcement and call for participation, websites, blogs and mailing lists are picking up the news and start commenting. Plenty of FUD is bound to happen, of course, since this is all about IT and IT isn't exactly a world where truths need to be checked, and where everything you can find on the Internet is regarded as a fact.
Some perspective... without too many hyperlinks, but Google will help you to find more references. During JavaOne 2002, Jason Hunter of the ASF shares the stage with some Sun hotshots to declare an intention to open up the JCP process for open source projects. This essentially means a selected list of research- and community-oriented open source organisation, the ASF being one of them, can get the TCK kit for free. While this essentially can be regarded as a Good Thing, the devil is in the details, given the way ASF projects are structured. You have some kind of three-tier structure of contributors, committers and members, members being largely orthogonal to the projects. Contributors are the participants on the mailing lists, which evolve from users asking questions, to people sending in patches and discussing the evolution of a project. Committers are those who have read- and write-access to the codebase, and also have a binding vote on that evolution and the decisions along that path. Within a JCP-related ASF project, most typically the committers will be granted access to the JCP resources, often requiring them to sign off an NDA with Sun for the duration of the JCP process. Looking at some examples out there (like the Portlet JSR), this JCP relationship can be quite some community killer. Nevertheless, the ASF is one of the few non-commercial entities which is regarded to be on par with the normal (paid for) JCP participants.
Next, one might wonder why the ASF has been granted this special status. There's other open source projects and groups out there, and some might confuse the JBoss project with being a worthy candidate for this special treatment as well. Like it or not, the ASF has a core set of values which might just warrant this special treatment. First of all, the ASF is all about individuals, bringing them together to form a development community which eventually produces a codebase. The ASF is a meritocracy, which means you can only get involved if you show a long term interest in supporting the community by contributing code and participating in the discussions. Typically, your intentions to do so must be present at least half a year, sometimes prolonging into a year (or two!) as a normal contributor, before the existing committers will consider you to be a valid candidate for committership. So being on the payroll of some LargeCo won't help much, since the energy required to become a project participant will be more than your boss want to spend on you (the individual). Furthermore, in most ASF projects you experience a sense of independence and detachment from the LargeCo committers between their day job and their ASF contributions. After all, their committership might outlast their job.
As much as people would like to see it different, during my two years of active involvement with the ASF as a committer for the Cocoon project, and being extremely sensitive about independence, I find it hard to say that large corporations have been inflicting their interests upon the ASF. Of course, some projects depend on communities originating from one LargeCo, but the ASF as a whole (some 600+ committers) can be regarded as independent as humanly possible. This independence, combined with the meritocractic character, definitely differentiate the ASF from other open source organizations out there.
Although J2EE/EJB isn't exactly my area of interest, having an ASF J2EE container might be valuable - I honestly don't care too much. Having a community of J2EE developers run along the ASF guidelines, and culled from the existing group of ASF committers might prove to be immensily valuable. Being able to untap many years of community-based open source development experience, and total independence from any personal cult, cheerleading and company involvement, Geronimo might be able to accumulate the brain power to build a healthy, standards-compliant J2EE container. But first and foremost, it will gather a community where each member will be judged upon his abilities to collaborate both on a technical and community level. So I'm feeling sorry already for the avalanche of peeps who are sending in mails like "I want to be part of this! I have 8 years of software development experience!" to the Incubator discussion list. It's not about the code, and your ability to code, people. It's about your ability to share values and cooperate while protecting your edge of independence. It's essentially about maturity and equanimity.

Update 1: it becomes fairly easy now to explain what exactly the differences are between JBoss and Apache. Little time after all this became public, some involved parties saw their commit karma being revoked by the JBoss peeps. In the entire history of Apache, this has happened only once, for one person, and only after several months of intensive debate. The point is that, very comparable with the Python/Zope case, open source projects need more than just one main commercial entity being involved logistically, setting the policies and guidelines. Preferably, commercial involvement happens only peripherical - since many individuals happen to have a day job as well. Otherwise, you will always end up with a serious conflict of interests, which won't disappear with some miserable whitepapers falsy restating what open source is about. What would happen now if OSI starts legal actions upon JBG's abuse of the term open source? I'm particularly interested in term 6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.

Update 2: JBossGroup LLC has requested to review the seeding code of the Geronimo project to check for IP issues. I'm pretty sure the FSF is already hoping for this going to court, and it would be fun to see the Java-ignorant LGPL license being put to trial in a real court room. OTOH, I'm pretty sure the Geronimo peeps know their basics, being careful not to infringe IP of JBG, and JBG is just trying to spread some more FUD. It's about time JBG is showing its real face instead of abusing the open source brand to drive more cattle into their farm.

Update 3: for the people who want some further reading on how JBG is dealing with the Geronimo threat, have a look at these JBoss mailing lists threads.

Blogging is still light since I'm having an extra week of holiday at a friend's house. Large garden, great weather in Belgium, kids at home and my lady working only half days this week. I'm messing around a bit with pyblosxom, which definitely seems like a great little blogging tool. I was also kindly invited to give a Cocoon talk on Javapolis, something I'll be happy to oblige, even though this might appear to be slightly twisted given my latest standing with the organizers. Autumn and winter of this year might become a time management balancing act, especially since some speaking gigs and conferences happen to coincide with each other, but we'll work something out. Somehow.
In the mean time, I'm still dreaming up a budget to afford myself a new workhorse, and I decided to give in and make the switch. Although the hard- and software are proprietary as hell, I suspect the kewlness of it might be inspirational.

Wouldn't Separation of Concerns rather be a Collaboration of Specialities? Marc escapes from the technical-centric school of thinking where SoC and IOC are being put forward as nifty technical design advantages, or manageability on the code level, and moves to the more valuable level where the rubber effectively meets the road. Go, read and enjoy. The only caveat however is that it's still "Engineers at Work", and although there is absolutely no disdain, let alone envy in that remark, EaW reminds me of the UI of the mobile phones from my previous employer: all features could be found, and everything was possible. "Have fun hunting." Surely it pays off to apply some common sense to software development environment usability.