Occasional Thoughts

I personally enjoy Agile software development for some years and know that it is not easy for a development team to change its habits. But it's worth the effort. Today I can't image developing without Agile methodologies anymore.

The service menus for subversion provide quick access to the most common tasks when using subversion. It is aimed to be a little bit like Tortoise SVN for that other "Operating System".

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

And I really mean it. The number one source of frustration with software applications is a bad error message at the wrong time. In fact it's always the wrong time for error messages. Given this the error message should not just say 'hey! somethings wrong'. It should also say "do this or this to be able to continue". Even better - it should allow you to solve the problem immediately.

When a error message popped up you already lost time. And when the message is of no help to accomplish the task you were just intended to do it is very frustrating - it sucks!

Recently I had to battle with such an error message using Firefox. Previously I associated MS Office files with OpenOffice. When downloading a file for the first time, Firefox asks you what to do and you are able to select a program. In addition there is a checkbox that prevents this question in the future and always performs the preferred action.

Suddenly this stopped working and I got this error message:

"<<filename>> could not be opened, because the associated helper application does not exist. Change the association in your preferences."

I just had to open a document quickly and wasn't able to do it. After clicking on OK nothing happened anymore. The only hint it gave me was to check my preferences, but in the preferences UI I did not found any helper application registered.

At that time I had no time to google for it, so I just downloaded the file using the context menu action from the link that pointed to the document and opened it manually. But in the long term this got frustrating. More and more time was wasted. Finally I took the time to search the web for it and until I found the solution on MozillaZine lost more and more time.

So what's the problem here?

Just some observations from JAX 2008, the great conference for enterprise Java developers on their choice of operating systems...

About 40% of presenters of talks I attended used Apple notebooks. I haven't noticed that anyone used Linux as choice for his operating system. There was also a very high amount of Apple users among the 2000 attendees. Around 10% used Apple systems. In contrast I have just seen a couple of people running Linux.

I was pretty surprised by this. I would have expected that there would be much more Java developers using Linux. Especially since there is still no Java 6 for Mac OS X is available since a few days and after I've read this posting in the blog of Vladimir Dobriakov, where he talks about his experiences with Mac OS X and his switch back to Linux.

But maybe a lot of the attendees use Linux just on their workstations and not on their laptops.