ONLamp.com has an article comparing alternatives to make (heavily biased towards make).  In fact it only looks at ant and IDEs, I assume because it’s an extract from a book about make.  It also focuses very heavily on Java development which is a real shame because Java development is the one area that make is almost never a good option.

The main reason that make isn’t a good option for Java despite it’s technical abilities is that every Java developer is expected to know at least a little about ant – a huge number won’t know anything about make and very few Java developers who work on Windows will have it installed.  Every self-respecting Java developer will have ant installed and configured on their machines.  It’s just the done thing when you work with Java.  No self respecting C programmer would develop on a machine without make, no self-respecting Java programmer develops on a machine without ant.

It’s good to see Sun getting into the spirit of openness in the ways that really matter – weekly builds of the J2SE Mustang release will be available from now, including the source code (source Mark Reinhold).  I’m not sure exactly what’s in the source code drops yet but even if the native code side of things isn’t included it’s still extremely useful.  Most if not all of the people interested in fixing bugs in a Java release are Java programmers so they’re most likely to be submitting patches on the Java side of things anyway.

Andy Lester asks Uncle Bill to answer some technical support queries for his family.  Generally I agree with his sentiment but I have to pull him up on one thing:

At some point, we’ll get her HP laptop turned over to Linux, but until then, I have the weekly-or-so cussing from the dining room table.

and then later:

The bigger question for the industry: Why do we continue supporting a company that sees BSODs and registry hacks as part of normal computing life for the average user?

Because the alternative seems to be supporting a loosely coupled group of volunteers that sees competing GUI conventions and command line hacks as part of normal computing life for the average user.

It seems more and more spam is getting past SpamAssassin and into my inbox these days.  The upgrade to 3.0 hasn’t helped and may have even made it worse (or maybe the spam just got worse in the few days I took to get the database upgraded correctly etc).  I’ve got the required score set down to 3 but there’s a bunch of spam coming through with a score of 2 while I do get random emails from people that score up to 2.5 and shouldn’t be considered spam.

I finally got around to setting up Synergy between my OS X laptop and my PC.  It’s simply awesome.  Generally the way I work has fitted well with having two keyboards on my desk but it’s definitely a bonus to be able to use my nice wireless keyboard and put the laptop up higher instead of hunching over it destroying my neck.

Definitely should have set this up years ago…

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned how cool Java Webstart is (or more specifically, JNLP) but I’d not thought about how other technologies achieve the same thing.  Martin Pool apparently has (hint: he’s using yum).  JNLP has the advantage that it includes security concepts (sandboxing in particular) and that it checks for updates each time the program is run rather than only when the user runs the updater.

Having said that though, JNLP needs to include finer grained specifications for security privilege requests (currently it’s essentially applet, servlet or full permissions) as well as the ability to turn off automatic checks for updates (or specify that the user can decide).  Currently though JNLP is excellent for deploying applications within corporate infrastructure and pretty good for deploying to outside customers.

Apparently my Mum has discovered my blog.  Next time I’m home I’ll have to introduce her to RSS so she can save herself the trouble of checking in each day.

I finally decided to empty my spam box today and discovered it had some 13000 messages taking up 140Mb of space.  Spam now makes up 56% of my email which is pretty insane.  The updated version of spamassassin seems to have helped a little but there’s probably still a few getting through and I really don’t think I should lower the threshold any further – it’s currently at 3 whereas the default is 10.

I’ve changed from using the entry ID for the filename to using a "dirified" title.  Redirects should be in place so that all the old links work but if you do find an entry that has disappeared off the face of the earth please let me know.

Also, major apologies to anyone who winds up with every entry in my RSS feed being marked as new because of the change.  I would have hoped that wouldn’t happen but NetNewsWire seems to think they’re all new so I suspect the planet aggregators might as well.  Sorry!

This week was a big release week for us.  With new versions of EditLive! for Java, EditLive! for XML and EditLive! for Windows all going out.  My main focus has been on EditLive! for Java’s release and it was pretty huge.  There’s a lot of things in there that we’d been wanting to do for a long time but couldn’t because of limitations in the Swing text components.  We’ve now replaced so much of the standard Swing text code that they’re possible.  Stuff like spell checking as you type, inline image and table resizing and a much better selection model just makes life for users so much easier.

I finally got around to embedding EditLive! for Java into Movable Type so I don’t have to do all the HTML layout by hand.  It’s amazingly simple to integrate once you work out which template you have to edit as well, just 5 lines of JavaScript.

For the love of God people – learn how to use charsets properly! You don’t get to blame the browser for not displaying your page correctly if you declared the charset incorrectly.