Forcing NetBeans to use Metal LAF on Ubuntu

I just installed NetBeans 6.1 on my Ubuntu Gutsy running Sun’s Java 6. The default L&F used is GTK. I personally prefer Metal with Ocean theme. Here is how you get those:

1. Edit NETBEANS_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf
2. Add --laf javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel -J-Dswing.aatext=true -J-Dswing.metalTheme=ocean to netbeans_default_options variable

Thats it!

Streambox TV – Frustrated

I recently took a Streambox TV account. Since taking the account 3 days ago, I have not yet been able to watch anything on it

Streambox folks say that some channels are not working and they are working on it. But from what I have seen so far, the only part working on their website is the credit card billing I am not even able to open a ticket with them as their issue tracking system goes into a loop between pages. I should have known when they were not able to give me a preview of any of the channels before I signed up.

So if you are considering taking a new Streambox TV account here is a friendly piece of advise – wait until they are able to show a decent preview of the channels you want to watch.

Yet Another Certification

This time from Raganwald. Of course, we might soon see training centers in Hyderabad.

StandoutJobs.com

StandoutJobs.com posts their recruitment advertisement …. on youtube!

Neat!

Rosanne: 28 card game

Rosanne is a program which plays the card game 28.

28 is a card game that is very popular in Kerala – many people I know play the game. The rules are simple, but the game is challenging and fun. For a year when I was doing college, I stayed with my folks in Mavelikara and commuted by train to my college in Kollam. One side of the commute takes about an hour, and I used to play 28 often with fellow-passengers. I have played many an exciting round of 28 during those days.

Playing Rosanne brings me memories of those days! It is distributed with a GPL license and is freely downloadable. Pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux are available. I have spend considerable time playing the game, and my rusty 28 skills have steadily improved since. Its a great way to spend time if you are stuck in a stupid meeting or training – go check it out! (Warning: Addictive)

Kudos to Vipin Cherian for bringing out this great game – malyalees around the world owe him a beer!!

Popular del.icio.us tag for its own signup page

I read quite a lot of articles and blogs online, and save bookmarks to interesting pages in my browser. I had not signed up for any of the social bookmarking sites – but today I gave in and signed up for del.icio.us, like the rest of the world. When I finished installing the delicious buttons on my browser, I tried the keyboard shortcut to tag a page – and here is what I got.

Notice the popular tags on the bottom right of the image. I wonder how it got there.

Steve Yegge’s NBL

Most readers of this blog would have read Steve Yegge’s prediction on the Next Big Language (NBL). In his post, Steve refused to actually name the language but he dropped hints on the language (languages?) he had in mind. Commenters on his blog tried guessing the language – JavaScript2, Erlang, Scala, Perl6 etc were mentioned. If I had to guess I would have guessed JavaScript2; but I am no expert in programing languages, so my strategy is to wait and watch.

But today, I was re-reading an old blog post and I was reminded of Steve’s prediction. Jarosaw “sztywny” Rzeszótko, a young Polish blogger, had send 10 questions to 8 famous programmers and he had posted their replies (I had written about it too). Here are some excerpts from that post:

Q. What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?

Steve Yegge:
I think web application programming is gradually going to become the most important client-side programming out there. I think it will mostly obsolete all other client-side toolkits: GTK, Java Swing/SWT, Qt, and of course all the platform-specific ones like Cocoa and Win32/MFC/etc.

It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s very slowly been going that direction for ten years, and it could well be another ten years before web apps “win”. The tools, languages, APIs, protocols, and browser technology will all have to improve far beyond what you can accomplish with them today. But each year they get a little closer, and I’ve finally decided to switch all my own app development over to browser-based programming from now on.

Microsoft and Apple definitely don’t want this to happen, so a necessary first step will be for an open-source browser such as Firefox to achieve a dominant market position, which will in turn require some sort of Firefox-only killer app. (A killer app would be something like iTunes, something that everyone in the world wants to use, badly enough to download Firefox for it.)

…

Q. If you had three months to learn one relativly new technology, which one would You choose?

Steve Yegge:
I do happen to have 3 months (part-time), and I’m spending it learning Dojo (http://dojotoolkit.org) and advanced AJAX and DHTML. I’m learning it by writing a fairly ambitious web application. Dojo’s really cool, and I’m sure it will only improve with time.

sztywny made this post on Oct 16th 2006 and Steve made his NBL post on Feb 19th 2007. From the above snippet, I think Steve had JavaScript2 on his mind as the NBL.

BG quote on Lines of Code

I was reading through the Wikipedia entry on source lines of code and noticed this quote from Bill Gates:

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Good one!

Liquid Coding

Business World’s Great Places To Work 2006 survey places my employer, Tavant Technologies, at #17! Congrats to self!

From their writeup on Tavant.

Who is a liquid coding champion? A crack coder at Tavant Technologies. For those who think coding is the stuff spy stories are made of, well, it is the backbone of a software programme. In any IT solutions business, when a client gives a specification for a certain programme, it seldom stays what it started out as. A good coder will keep this in mind and ensure his work is flexible from day one. That way, he doesn’t have to start all over again when the specifications change.

Liquid Coding was a programing competition held for programmers at Tavant Technologies. It is a 3-hour competition and one can pair up with another person. At the start of the first hour, you would get a set of requirements. At the end of the first hour, you get some more requirements and further some more at the end of the second hour too. Each requirement is specified as one or more executable unit tests, and they carry certain number of points based on their complexity.

The crux of the competition is to write code to match requirements under extreme time pressure, and write it in such a way that it is extensible enough when further requirements are to be implemented.

I paired with Vineeth for this competition, and we came first in the tech lead category. The experience was intense and real fun. It is one of the best prizes I have ever got; and definitely the one that I am most proud about.

What programing languages should one know

Today I came across the article What Programming Languages Should You Know? by David Chisnall. David’s list of essential programming languages include C, Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang, Haskell and Prolog.

Of these, I know only Lisp (Scheme, to be precise). Eric S. Raymond’s famous quote (David also quotes it):

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

influenced me to try the language. Reading SICP and EoPL was useful. I also worked through most parts of PCL also.

I did some C during college, but I never learned the language well enough (I know enough to know that I don’t know it well enough) . Tom Drake, who works as a senior architect with Tavant, once advised me that learning C is important whatever language you actually work with. Tom should know – he has worked with lots of different languages and systems in his career. I haven’t followed that advise so far, largely because you don’t come across articles saying “How C cured cancer!” on reddit. One these days, I should go learn some C, I guess.

I am trying to learn Haskell – I have been following tutorials on the web, and have been making some progress. A friend who is returning from US is bringing a copy of Programming in Haskell, and I should get it by next month. I had worked through a draft copy of the book, and I found it lot more approachable than other tutorials I found – so I am looking forward to reading the actual book. Erlang also looks to be an interesting language, and I am curious to understand what all the cool kids are talking about its concurrency primitives. I haven’t read much about Smalltalk and Prolog (except some videos I watched about the Seaside web framework in Smalltalk).

It amuses me to note that both programing languages I have used extensively in my professional career – Java and JavaScript – do not make the list. But things I have learned in other languages had helped me understand these two languages better. Knowing Lisp, in particular, has helped me understand JavaScript. I have briefly dabbled with Ruby, Python and Groovy too. I have to agree with David on:

The more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up a new one. Eventually, you start thinking of every new language as just a set of modifications to a language you know already.

So, what are the languages have you learned or are planning to learn?