General

Some Thoughts in General

I have been kind of lazy writing this blog lately. After keeping it up pretty okay during summer, the pace has now slowed to a minimum. I think it can be partly explained by the fact that I have been using Twitter for some of the stuff I used to write here and that my new HTC Hero Android phone made tweeting more convenient than ever…

My intentions are to use this blog for subjects that cannot easily be said in 140 characters and twitter for the short, more daily stuff…

Well, so what has happened since last time. Since I have solely been using NetBeans the last couple of years for Java development, I decided to give Eclipse Gallileo a chance. It took me an hour of frustration to conclude that it still sucks for Maven based projects. Why it should be so hard is beyond my comprehension! In NetBeans, you just choose open project, selects the pom.xml file and everything is fine. Dependencies are resolved as they are defined in Maven, no stupid .classpath, .project and .settings rubbish created that makes Eclipse to totally hick-up if a dependency is changed.

Apart from my unsuccessful flirt with Eclipse, I have continued development of KanbanFX. It has been converted to a maven project and besided the information on Kenai, I have created a page for it here where you can try it out. Kanban is increasing in popularity, @henrikkniberg had 300 people on his Kanban vs Scrum session at JAOO this week.

Adding RAM to an Acer Aspire One

Well, this post has nothing to do with Java or agile. That is, unless you can consider a netbook to be a lightweight tool for Java development 🙂

I just finished upgrading the RAM on mine. Maybe not such a great achievement, but I sure have never had to screw the whole computer apart to be able to add a piece of RAM before. Thanks to some helpful videos on YouTube it was doable. Shame on you, Acer!

Twitter

Well, I finally got on Twitter as well. You can find it at http://twitter.com/ivar_grimstad or by watching the tweets in the box to the right. Actually I have had a twitter account for quite a while, but have not gotten around to start twittering yet. We will see how it goes 🙂

Larry on stage

Just when we were wondering if the whole keynote would go by without anybody mentioning Oracle at all, Scott McNealy invited Larry Ellison on stage!

Larry said that Oracle has no plans of changing anything radically. On the contrary, he emphasized that the combined resources of Sun and Oracle will let Java and the Java Community continue to grow as it is doing today.

The show is about to start

My last chance to get a post out in May…
This week, thousands of Java nerds gather in the Moscone Center, San Francisco for the JavaOne Conference. First out is Community One West which takes place on Monday. Then the big opening of JavaOne happens on Tuesday morning. I have the best intentions to write a little bit from it here every day as I have done the previous years.

Sun+Oracle

This week, it became clear that Oracle buys Sun. Personally, I think this is much better deal than if the IBM-deal had gone through. Just by looking at the corporate culture, it must be a hell of a lot easier to merge Oracle and Sun than trying to squeeze the laid-back-California-minds of Sun into the business suits of The Big Blue.

Oracle has a great history of software acquisitions and Java is so important for Oracle that it is probably in the best of hands.

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stram Mapping has been around for years, but it is only recently that I started hearing about it in the context of software development. Maybe the renewed attention can get us to focus at the whole process rather than only the development part?

Nearly all projects I have either been involved in or heard of that claim they are using Scrum, are only using it for the development part of the process. The total process from an idea is born until it is in production usually consists of a gazillion boxes and arrows where the development part is one of the boxes. By optimizing this little box (for example by introducing Scrum), the process efficiency (if you are lucky) maybe increases from 4.0% to 4.1%…. Is this what we call sub-optimizing…?

Value Stream Mapping can help us optimize the parts that really gives impact and is an excellent tool for removing waste.