Content bias in community conferences
As we speak Groovy and Grails Exchange 2012 is deciding on its speakers. As a speaker at most GGX since they started, I am also submitting a couple of talks.
I believe this year, for the first time, all speakers received an email asking them to indicate whether or not they will (a) be claiming travel expenses and (b) be claiming hotel expenses. All GGX speakers to my knowledge are unpaid.
This information will be taken into account in deciding who will be speaking, and those who do not claim expenses will get free sponsorship of the GGX event. I thought to myself “Oooh, I could get Grailsrocks on the event sponsorship”. Then I stopped to think a bit more.
Dependency management is broken
People who know me will recall I have few kind words for Maven. The only redeeming quality that Maven had was that it was “not as bad as Ant” and provided a default project structure, as well as “dependency management”.
I will state outright here that I am no expert on the minutiae of Maven dependency management. Therein lies the problem, there are weird rules and concepts that we as developers should never have to worry about.
I would not be writing this if it wasn’t for Maven-style POM-based dependency management creeping into Grails 2 to appease Mavenites and Enterprise developers who – rightly – need a dependency management solution.
The problem is I just don’t believe that the Maven solution is fit for purpose. This is particularly evident with the problems we have in Grails with the differing “scopes” that Grails and POMs have.
Copying design: Form and function
It seems a lot of people conflate form and function. This is happening with recent Apple designs being ripped off by Samsung and other manufacturers.
People typically cite prior art such as previous generation laptops or phones and say Apple copied those.
You will find however that in most (but likely not all) cases this is a class error. Often they think that the functional elements of a design (flip open screen, integral keyboard, touch screen, or home button) represent the total design aesthetic.
Trade dress disputes are about form. People who say Apple just built on phones or laptops of the past are often missing the nuance of design. Angles. Texture. Finish. Materials. Weight. Volume. Proportions. These add up together to create an end result – the design.
I think iAd may die
I don’t normally care about Apple’s iAd.
Last night however, I was musing about how I intensely dislike the advertising industry and by extrapolation all businesses that are primarily ad-revenue based (Google, Facebook etc).
Witness what Twitter is doing to its user base and partners for just the most recent exposition of the direct conflict with user interests that advertising presents. Or Google’s recent addition of advertising images to the top of image search results.
As for iAd, I thought it was a pretty good idea when they introduced it. As good as advertising can get. Big budget, high quality ads for premium brands. Perfect Apple bedfellows.
Goodbye TextMate
Goodbye TextMate, you served me well.
I’m nearly sad to say that I have finally given up on TextMate. It was the announcement that TM2 was being open sourced that was the final straw for me.
As you likely know, I work extensively on open source code.
However I need a solid, commercially supported and maintained editing tool for Mac. That is insanely fast. That is up to date with latest O/S versions. That doesn’t kill my Mac when I try to find stuff in files. That exists, today.
