daniel fäldt

It’s now long time since I was writing anything here. Since last post I’ve got a child and I’m actually on my last (initial) paternal leave today, on Monday I will be back at work again. For the last month I’ve only worked two days! Life is hard.

For this last month I’ve really tried hard to get into the “Twitter thing”. The initial questions where like “Why Twitter?”, “What’s in it for me?”, “What’s in it for anyone?” and so on…

So what is the result after a month? Do I like Twitter? Is it useful for me? I guess the answers all will be YES. Twitter can be really good as long as you just follow girls/guys which have anything interesting for ME to listen to. This means that I probably not should follow famous media people from television…which I was initially trying to.

So right now I am following users which have something to say about programming, software, gadgets (of course) and Swedish politics (and some friends as well). This means that most of (or at least a lot of) the tweets popping up in my Twitter app(*) is really interesting.

Conclusion: Twitter is really good, if you are very careful when you choose who to follow.

(*) I think Twitter gets much more useful if you have it close to you at all time and can have a quick look at it in a spare second. So for me this means that I really need a good iPhone app. I really recommend TwitBird, don’t really know why there is any other iPhone Twitter app out there…(the free version is good enough)

So, see you on Twitter!

Since a couple of years I’ve been using my own webserver at home, done all my backups etcetera my self. Since I am in a slacky period I’ve abandoned this solution today and moved all my mail to Gmail.

Google versus Daniel 1-0. Google is the winner, at least for a year or two…

If you are interested in my previous solution, please have a look at Surgemail. Surgemail is a little bit hard to configure, but on the other hand it is a very competent mailserver (of cause with imap, pop3, smtp and webmail).

…and of cause I goes Google for real. Now using Gmail, Google Documents, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google Offline “stuff”, Google Calendar, Google Buzz, Google Labs, Google Reader… Everything Google…isn’t it a little bit spooky?

At home I have media server (pc) connected to the tv and to the 5.1 system. This works really good and the Windows Media Center on it also works nice right now (impressed?). No problem listen to Swedish (web) radio by just clicking in the system, the same with all online channels (SVT Play, Tv4 Play etc.).

It is of cause also possible to watch movies, see picture (even bluetooth them directly to the system) and listen to music in it. Though administer playlists, search for new music in Spotify and stuff like that is really hard. In those cases you need a keyboard and a mouse.

The solution at home right know includes an icecast2 server installed on the media center and an edcast client installed on a laptop.

Step by step:

1. Install a IceCast2 server on the server (dooh).
2. Start it (no need of configuration if behind a firewall and at your home network).
3. Install EdCast (incl lame enc for mp3) on your laptop.
4. Start a streaming client in the media center. Use for example VNC and connect to http://localhost:port/stream
5. Start playing whatever you want on your laptop.
6. Really great!

No matter which version control system (VCS) you are using in your software development environment is is important to have a strategy for working with branches, trunk and tags.

One of the most convenient way is to follow the “branch always” strategy. Do never ever do development on the trunk*! This, together with a trunk integration policy, will cause the trunk always being “compilable“. It will also help the developer a lot since she can use the VCS as a VCS, thus check in things whenever she wants or whenever it helps her.

Example:

Every time the developer have produced something useful, good or at least something to remember. She should do a commit! The VCS keeps the history for you and you can do more “crazy” things since you know you always can get back to what it was like before (and all steps in between where you have done a commit). Thus, do commits often into your own temporary development branch!

Step by step:

1. You got an story to develop.
2. Do a temporary branch for your development and switch to it.
3. Do some development and commit your changes to your branch.
4. Do some more development and commit.
5. Do an update from trunk and merge it into your branch.
6. If story implementation isn’t finished, goto step 4.
7. Implementation finished. Do a last update of your branch.
8. Test your functionality again so you are sure it is really working.
9. Integrate (merge) your implementation into trunk.
10. Delete your temporary branch.
11. Goto step 1.

This is especially good when working in an agile environment since the idea is that the code (trunk), at all time, should be compilable and runnable.

What’s the down side?

The developer need to know how to use a VCS, which means how to branch, merge, update etc. Since this really is an important tool for a developer this should not cause any oppositions at all.

For the lazy developer there can be oppositions in the beginning though since there is actually some extra work to do, it is not just coding. It is much easier (for that single person) to just work onto trunk.

When everyone works on trunk it means that everyone gives everyone the problems on every commit. It also means that the developer doesn’t have any upsides of using the VCS, it is just a matter for the configuration managers. A VCS is a development tool first! For developers needs! They just have to understand that they need it.

Trunk integration policy

As mentioned above there also need to be a trunk integration policy. This policy is really simple. Do not integrate/merge anything into trunk if it isn’t working (compiling, running) in your development branch. Always do an update before integrating to trunk to avoid merge problems (and new compile/run problems caused by merging).

(*) There is a few exceptions to this, minor bugfixes can be made directly on to the trunk, if the impact is very small and there is no new logic in it.

Just finished reading todays news papers, both the local one, UNT, and the national one, DN.  I read them both in the non virtual version. In the so called “traditional” paper version.

Is anyone else reading the paper in this way anymore?

I have been looking for signs of change here. What is gonna happen when everyone reads the paper online? For me it is a huge difference what news I am focusing on when reading the paper online. It is much more important to have a really good headline, it is also very important that the headline is on the first page (everything just one click away).

In the traditional paper it is possible to have short press items which actually gonna be read. Can one have that in online papers?

So what is the sign of change? Is the iPad solving my “problem”?

- Read the online paper in a traditional way.

I don’t really think so, modern people don’t gonna read the online papers in a traditional format anyway. So what is the actual solution? Do we need a solution?

What about the local ads which always are a big part of all local papers?

I have always developed my own websites from scratch, mostly using php and mysql. The hard core of software development… Today I took a step towards being a “software configurator” instead of developer. You are just looking at the result from it. Moved everything to a predeveloped WordPress site instead.

The major work right now is to do the customizations needed…it’s really a lot of work! Also converted my old guestbook into the WordPress plugin guestbook.

Don’t know if I really like it…is this really easier?

Börjar bli rastlös nu. Andra dagen jag är hemma och är sjuk. Får försöka ta tag i sånt man borde gjort för länge sedan…eller så försöker man sätta upp en blogg.

Gjorde det enkelt för mig och körde med en WordPressblogg.

Första tanken var såklart att skapa en själv med hjälp av PHP/mySQL. Känns lite överdrivet dock. Andra tanken slog mig när jag började skriva. Vilken är min målgrupp egentligen? Har jag ens någon? Engelska eller svenska? Förmodligen kommer det bli en salig blandning är jag rädd för.