I think over the past few years, my internet browsing experience has steadily decreased.
From Firefox leaking memory like a sieve to Safari officially eating more memory than Eclipse on a consistent basis.
Memory, it’s what’s for dinner.
Welcome to the Open Source Club IntelliJ
By Chris Aniszczyk
It looks like Jetbrains just announced that they are releasing a free and open sourced version of IntelliJ under the APL 2.0 license. Cool beans, however, open sourcing an IDE is just the first step…
The hard part is building a sustainable community. To channel Tim O’ Reilly,
…what really distinguishes open source is not just source, but an architecture of participation that includes low barriers to entry by newcomers, and some mechanism for isolating the cathedral from the bazaar. This architecture of participation allows for a real free market of ideas, in which anyone can put forward a proposed solution to a problem; it becomes adopted, if at all, by acclamation and the organic spread of its usefulness.
Let’s hope that IntelliJ isn’t just throwing the source over the fence and expecting magic to happen.
Good luck to IntelliJ creating that architecture of participation.
Aptana + PDT
By Chris Aniszczyk
There’s great news from Aptana and the Eclipse PDT project…
We are pleased to announce that Aptana is combining our efforts with those of the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) project, the official set of Eclipse development tools for PHP. We will be contributing various parts of the Aptana PHP plugin to that project. We believe that having a single plugin will be best for the PHP developers community, and look forward to a long and productive relationship with the PDT team.
Even though I had some choice words for Aptana in the past, I think this is a great move and should benefit PHP developers everywhere who rely on Eclipse for their development needs.
Let’s hope this is a sign that Aptana is going to work closer with the Eclipse community in the future.
Run Austin Run Half Marathon 2009
By Chris Aniszczyk
I managed to crawl out of bed today and participate in the Run Austin Run Half Marathon 2009.
The course turned out to be very difficult compared to what I’m used to running for half marathons. A lot of the terrain involved hills that I usually go out on the weekends to enjoy… on my bicycle. The race was significantly more challenging than the San Francisco Half Marathon I did a couple months ago. The temperature this morning was sitting at about 50 degrees fahrenheit which equates to perfect running temperature for me. Even though the course was difficult and there was some overcast skies… I managed to come out with a PR of 1:33:03 (6th in my age group)!
I do have some feedback for the race organizers though. I managed to finish the race in a respectable time only to come to witness the travesty of NO BREAKFAST TACOS and some of the booths being torn down…
No tacos? No precious sweet leaf tea? How could this happen?
The answer is simple… when organizing a race with a 5K, 10K and Half Marathon distances… stagger the start times appropriately so most people finish around the same time. Instead the race organizers thought that a 5 minute stagger time between each event was enough. No it’s not enough. What happened was the 5K and 10K’s pillaged all the breakfast tacos and sweat leaf tea.
On the bright side, since Austin is the live music capital of the world… there was fantastic live music at the finish line:
Overall… great race, tragic absence of breakfast tacos, coffee and tea at the finish line.
Great live music.
I hope to see the race put on again next year!
Next week is the IBM Uptown Classic 10K for me where I’ll be chasing sub 40s…
Modularity is Fun?
By Chris Aniszczyk
A few days ago I had one of those moments that made me smile, let me describe it in pictures…
I recently was hacking on the JGit project as I’m working on getting a build ready for the project.
What did I notice? Well, there was some evil UI code in the JGit bundle.
You know what to do with evil UI code? Time to move it into another bundle!
Sweet! Now we have a nice separation between core and ui layers, right?
Oh no… compile errors… what the heck?
It looks like some of the code in the core bundle was referencing UI pieces. This is an obvious bad practice since there is the common use case that people may want to run your code in a headless fashion. However, as a developer, it’s common to start out and just group your code into one bundle. It’s sad but it’s just the reality of development. This reason should also highlight to you why modularity doesn’t come for free… you have to think about your dependencies and architecture. If you produce complex code first and try to modularize it later… you’ll end up in painful situation. Thankfully, when you have good tools that manage your classpath for you, errors like this become evident.
Ok, enough of my diatribes, back to getting a build for JGit in place at Eclipse.
On a side note, I’ll soon blog about using EGit and Gerrit to develop JGit, stay tuned.
Beer, Coffee and Pumpkins
By Chris Aniszczyk
I always like October… however… my health suffers due to the evil pumpkin.
To start things off… the pumpkin spiced latte is deadly…
Even worse… deliciously pumpkin flavored beers like Dogfish Head Punkin Ale don’t help…
Welcome to October.
Openfire switches to the Apache License 2.0
By Chris Aniszczyk
I was having my morning caffeine fix and saw a tweet go by…
I quickly went to the front page and noticed it hasn’t been updated yet:
However, this is interesting news to say the least. When established open source projects backed by some company switch licenses, there’s usually a business model change afoot. Or was there pressure from Google to switch the license since Google Wave uses Openfire under the covers>?
Thankfully, Matt Tucker’s explanation hints at some of the reasons:
I’m happy to announce that Openfire will be moving to a more liberal open source license — Apache 2.0. Apache 2.0 provides significantly more flexiblity than the GPL in virtually every way, so it should be a big win for the community all around. We expect to get all the source code headers updated for the next release. There were several motivations for making this change:
- The GPL license was preventing some companies from using Openfire due to corporate policies
- There was no reason to keep using GPL and end-users generally seem to prefer Apache
- We’d like to encourage a broader range of commercial companies to contribute to the project and the Apache license is a good way to help make that happen
Would be happy to answer question or comments.
It was delightful to see the Openfire community be notified of the license change, with reasons why and a request for feedback. Scratch this one for the proper way of doing a license change in an open source community. In the open source world, we hold transparency sacred. Don’t be like switched from EPL to GPL and told no one until it was too late.
It’s important to be upfront and transparent.
Austin Marathon Relay 2009
By Chris Aniszczyk
Today, a few friends and I participated in the 2009 Austin Marathon Relay.
It was an early morning… the race started at 7am and was delayed slightly since the sun wasn’t up yet! On the bright side, there was a nice view of the Long Center in Austin while the sun was coming up.
Once the sun came out, things picked up and people started running!
I had the honor of running the first leg of the race which was a 12K that weaved around downtown Austin. It started out great, I crossed the first mile marker at about a 6:30 pace and then things went bad as I came around the Texas Capitol building. My stomach wasn’t cooperating and was on its way to give me the runner’s version of Montezuma’s Revenge. I had to make a quick pit stop and picked things up to finish just under a weak 52 minutes. Overall, the team did well, no injuries and lots of fun!
Lap 1 51:58.8 6:58/M 7.456 Lap 2 50:57.7 8:12/M 13.670 Lap 3 56:50.4 9:09/M 19.884 Lap 4 25:51.5 8:19/M 22.991 Lap 5 23:20.2 7:31/M 26.098
To numb the pain of what I viewed as a terrible time for my 12K, I headed for the beer tent!
The only downside of the beer tent was like in hell, it only served Heineken Light.
But hey, it’s free beer!
Next up on the schedule is the Run Austin Run half marathon!
Boston, Taxis and Linux Core Dumps
By Chris Aniszczyk
I was in Boston last week for the Eclipse Board of Directors meeting. It went great, a few Eclipse committer colleagues and I worked hard to make sure the foundations were in place for Git at Eclipse. My dream of having Git tooling developed at Eclipse along with moving to using Git at Eclipse is slowly coming true.
While I was in Boston, I had time to catch a Red Sox game…Â Fenway Park is amazing:
Unfortunately the Red Sox decided to lose, but that’s OK.
One of the highlights of the trip was finding out that the taxis in Boston run Fedora Linux. How do I know this? I saw one of the Boston taxis core dump and took a quick photo:
Unfortunately the photo doesn’t show that it’s running Fedora, but I saw the coredump happen in real time! I swear! I always wondered if your taxi ride is free if your taxi core dumps…
Who says it isn’t the year of Linux?
Zilker Relays 2009
By Chris Aniszczyk
A few weeks ago, I ran the Zilker Relays with a few friends. It’s a great 4×2.mi relay race at Zilker Park in Austin. One of my favorite events due to the copious amount of beer available after the race.
I usually wait for pictures to show up before I blog about race results, but it seems the pictures are never showing up (I’m looking at you Kreutz Photography). Here are the results:
Lap 1 15:27.13 6:20/M 2.440 Lap 2 16:55.39 6:56/M 4.880 Lap 3 17:09.67 7:02/M 7.320 Lap 4 15:34.66 6:23/M 9.760
I had the honor of running Lap 1 which I ran at a decent clip. I was shooting for sub 6 miles but I’m not there yet at a consistent level. I need to concentrate on more speed work in my running workouts. I hoping to improve my time a bit at the Austin Marathon Relay this weekend albeit I’m running a 12K leg distance instead of the nice 2.5mi distance 🙂