Posted by F
Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:06:00 GMT
A couple of smart friends of mine are strong advocates of mind maps, so much in fact that they had nothing better to do than develop http://wisemapping.com. It’s a pretty impressive online mind-mapping tool with everything you’d expect these days from a web two-oh application: rich UI, collaboration, tagging, sharing.
Here’s my first try, presenting the basic ideas behind DITA:
It’s still a private beta, with many more features coming.
Posted in Software Products | no comments
Posted by F
Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:27:00 GMT
I’ve been trying Beryl (a 3D Window Manager for X) and I’m pretty impressed.
True, it’s full of useless graphical effects and pure eye-candy. But
it also provides practical features and is very configurable.
Among the actually useful things: fast and practical ways to change
windows, desktops, to expose the desktop area, scale and pick a window
(ala Mac OS X’s “exposé”), visual notifications, desktop zoom, screen
annotations.
Unfortunately, most demo videos concentrate on
the graphical effects instead of the useful features, but they still
give you an idea of what it can do.
I really like the idea of using a
“water-ripple” effect as
an unobtrusive -but impossible to miss- way of receiving notifications.
It integrates nicely with KDE, Gnome and pretty much any desktop
environment. And you can easily switch back to your previous window
manager at any time on-the-fly.
I have it running on my work laptop, with Fedora 6, KDE and AIGLX.
Very nice.
Posted in Software Products | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:21:00 GMT
Most software products and logging frameworks produce entries in their
log files with different severity levels (say, from Debug to
Severe). Then, you can configure which level of messages you want the
application to log.
At development time, you may want all messages to be logged. But once in
production, you normally configure things so that only Warning and
higher messages get logged (for performance, space and other
reasons).
The problem is that when a Severe message arises you may need more
detailed (Debug level) information in order to understand the actual
cause of the problem. So, a common practice is to increase the logging
level at that point, and wait for the problem to happen again –not very effective.
This is one of the problems that motivated the guys behind
LogBag. The idea they propose is nice and simple:
Make the system write only Warning (and higher) messages to the log, but when such a message is logged, it should also include some lower-severity messages that occurred right before and after this one.
It’s one of those good ideas that might seem obvious, but for some
reason nobody thought (or did anything) about before.
To implement this, the logging system could keep a buffer of the
last N messages generated by the application, and when a Warning (or above)
message comes in, the whole buffer is flushed to disk. This should
not be too hard to implement, since most logging frameworks already
use some kind of buffering, in a producer-consumer pattern, to improve
concurrency and performance.
From the LogBag site:
You keep on putting things in a Log bag. Then whether the entire
log bag gets written or not depends on the highest severity level
in the entire bag. So either you write everything or you write
nothing.
I think it’s a nice idea. I bet the technical support guys would like
it too :-).
Posted in Debugging & Optimizing, Software Products | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 04:31:00 GMT
Old news: BEA Systems acquired Fuego Inc..
Starting March 1st, virtually all Fuego employees (including myself)
became BEA employees. There are few organizational changes, which
helps minimize disruptions on our productivity and service.
I’ve been with Fuego since its early days. I started working for
Fuego’s ancestor company, InterSoft, as a Java/C++ developer in
1997.
I have different feelings about the acquisition. On the one side I
feel a bit nostalgic: the company I somehow helped build is no
more. But on the other side I’m proud to say Fuego was no “bubble”,
and I’m very positive that BEA’s infrastructure and steering will
provide the power to support the crazy growth we are experiencing, and
bring the product to the next level.
All analysts are talking about BPM systems these days. BPM became a
buzzword in the Enterprise software market. This is nothing but a
proof of how far ahead the founders of Fuego were (and probably how
clueless some analysts are?): the product itself was started in 1997,
and it was called jBPM (yes, the same name later taken by the now
JBoss-sponsored jBPM project).
Read more...
Posted in Personal, Software Products, BPM | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:07:00 GMT
If you haven’t looked at the available Version Control Systems lately,
you’d better look again.
About 5 years ago, CVS was pretty much the only open source Version
Control System in use, and it’s still very popular.
But in the last few years, a surprising number of new and really good
open source version control systems came to life. Like most open
source projects, their authors started them to scratch a personal
itch. In this case, the itch was caused by some important limitations
in CVS:
- The directory structure is not versioned (it only keeps history of
files)
- Impossibility to rename, move or copy files (without loosing history)
- Operations (like commits) are not atomic
- No concept of “change sets”
- Very expensive (inefficient) branching mechanism
- Limited merging capabilities
- No support for decentralized repositories (distributed development).
Don’t get it wrong though: CVS is a very respectable piece of
software: it’s been first released more than 20 years ago!
Among the new open source alternatives I found these to be quite
popular:
Subversion – Explicitly designed
as a replacement for CVS. I would say it’s achieving it’s
goal. Many big projects moved from CVS to Subversion, like
KDE, GCC,
Apache.
SVK – Built on top Subversion’s
libraries. It offers additional functionality, like distributed
repositories and better merging. It integrates with existing
Subversion repositories, so it’s more an extension than an
alternative to Subversion.
Arch – Very powerful and decentralized. The
current version 1 received many complains around usability, which
spawned new projects like
Bazaar. But version 2 promises many
improvements, including ideas from Bazaar and other systems.
Git – Developed by Linus Torvalds and other
Linux Kernel hackers when they were forced to stop using the
commercial BitKeeper because of
licensing issues.
Darcs – Written is
Haskell.
Codeville – Apparently has an advanced
merging algorithm without the problems of 3-way-merge.
Monotone
Subversion, like CVS, is designed around the concept of a
centralized repository: all developers work against one single
repository. All the other systems mentioned above are decentralized,
allowing for more distributed development: several repositories may
exist (say, one per developer) and they are synchronized in a
peer-to-peer way.
Read more...
Posted in Software Products, Developer Toolbox | 2 comments | no trackbacks