Category Archives: Smalltalk

New Notebook

After more than seven years my beloved MacBook Pro 15″ (late 2011) has died the GPU death. Before that I have had at least three replacement motherboards, the first after less than 24 hours of owning the thing. All these replacements were free-of-charge and without any hassle. So no complaints from that end. But given Apple’s abysmal product strategy in recent years, and particularly the butterfly keyboard, it was no option to buy a MacBook again.

To be clear on the keyboard topic: My primary objection against the butterfly keyboard is not its reliability, or lack thereof. For me it is simply a very bad keyboard with its short-travel keys. Yes, I am lucky to own an original IBM Model M and that sets a very high bar. But there are quite a few people I know who share that verdict.

Another factor not in favor of Apple was its pricing strategy and the fact that repair is next to impossible. Why would I want to spend enormous amounts of money (approximately EUR 3.500 for what I want) on a machine that cannot be repaired, upgraded, and is thermally constrained anyway? And quite honestly, with all the systematic product issue that existed for more than a decade, why would I believe this has changed?

I still own a Mac Mini from 2011 but it is months that I last used it. And after a number of years when I was really(!) happy with MacOS, I am finally departing from the latter. Overall, I got the impression that the management folks of Apple are going though the “harvesting” phase, where bean-counters have taken the reign after the founder(s) were gone. The same has happened to Hewlett-Packard, which I have had the privilege to work for many years ago. They, as so many others, had the same problem: People at the helm that do not really understand the business, but just apply methods they learned at business school. And for a number of years that works. Until it does not anymore …

So I ended up in the Windows camp, again. While Linux is my OS of choice on the back-end/server side, it has been failing to convince me for the desktop for the last 24 years. Yes, I started using Linux in 1995. And for special purposes I have used it on the desktop, usually via X11, where it made sense to me. In the 1990s that was technical development as well as authoring papers for university with LaTeX. And while a recent attempt, using KDE Neon, showed great improvements, there are still too many things that simply work better for me in Windows.

As to the actual notebook, I was pointed to the Razer Blade 15 (2018 base model) from various YouTube videos. It is a great machine and I had gotten a pretty good deal on Amazon for it. Everything was great – but the keyboard. The latter is something you can find mentioned in a number of reviews, but I must admit that I had underestimated it greatly. This is really sad, because otherwise it would have been the perfect machine for me. So where did I end up instead as keyboard afficionado?

Yes, a Thinkpad T model. What else! More precisely a Thinkpad T490 with a full-HD display, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. This blog post is actually the first one written on the T490 and the keyboard is an absolute treat. What drove IBM to sell this part of the business to Lenovo? Oh yes, the harvesting phase ;-).

Ten Years of Blogging

It is still a somewhat strange feeling that I have been running this blog for a bit more than ten years now. There were phases when I posted pictures from my (job) travels and others when I focused more on genuine content. The latter is mostly about software engineering and management. This may seem like an odd mixture, but it pretty much reflects my interests as well as professional development.

Another type of posts are just links to videos that I find interesting or amusing. These “articles” have the nice side-effect to not require too much time to write ;-). I had discovered YouTube as source of non-trivial content rather late and all the more fascinated I still am with some of it. Two channels stick out in particular for me: GOTO Conferences and TED.

During the second half of 2018 I had to slow down my blogging activities quite a bit due to family commitments. But I will try to slowly increase the pace again. After all, there is a lot of things that I would like to write about. This helps me to become clearer on the topic at hand, because a consistent story line requires a lot more thinking than a few (mental) bullet points.

So I am looking forward for the next ten years :-).

Linux and Me

Although it is not a focal point of my professional live any more, Linux and I share a long common history. My first encounter was with “S.u.S.E. Linux August 1995″ (kernel 1.1.12) in October or November of 1995. Until then I had only played around a bit with MINIX 1.5 on a  80286-based PC. But it had been a bit of a disappointment for me and I never really got into things.

This changed dramatically with Linux. I spent many hours trying to get a setup with X11 (only FVWM2 was available as window manager then) to work. This was not as easy as today. There was no, or very little, support from YaST, the setup tool of SuSE. And one had to be careful with the monitor (CRT of course) configuration. Because too high frequencies could physically damage your monitor. I never used the system to actually perform any work, it was solely for learning.

This changed with SuSE 4.4 and even more so with SuSE 6.1. I do not remember the exact dates, but SuSE 6.1 was installed in late 1997 when I ran my own small company as a “side-project” to my university studies. But since the company was highly successful, I soon used things like HylaFax on Linux and of course also ran my local mail server (sendmail can be a challenge, especially when Google does not exist yet). There even was a dial-in modem for terminal connections.

What I always disliked about SuSE, was that the updates from one version to another never really worked for me. So in about 2002 I finally decided to switch to Debian Woody (3.0). That was again a learning curve, but the apt packaging system was vastly superior to what I had seen on SuSE before and I never had problems with upgrades. The experience gained then is also quite helpful these days for the Raspberry Pi.

Things continued with CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu – with the last two powering my company notebook for a short while back in 2008. But the experience was mixed and I never liked Linux as a general-purpose desktop operating system. I had used it extensively for writing LaTeX documents (using Xfig a lot for diagrams) during my university time. But other than that, for too many Windows (or later Mac) applications I never found a proper replacement.

But for servers Linux is definitely my preferred OS. And especially so because most of the innovations of the last years, like configuration management systems (e.g. Chef, Puppet, Ansible) and containers (e.g. Docker), came to live on Linux.

The Importance of Names

Every once in a while someone is rolling their eyes when I, again, insist on a well-chosen name for a piece of software or an architectural component. And the same also goes for the text of log messages, by they way; but let’s stick with the software example for now.

Well, my experience with many customers has been the following, which is why I think names are important: As soon as the name “has left your mouth” the customer will immediately and sub-consciously create an association in his mind what is behind it. This only takes a second or two, so it is finished before I even start to explain what a piece of software does.

Assuming that my name was chosen poorly, and hence his idea about the software’s purpose is wrong, he will then desperately try to match my explanation with his mental picture. Obviously this will not be successful and after some time (hopefully just a few minutes), he will interrupt me and say that he doesn’t understand and shouldn’t the software actually be doing this and that.

It makes the conversation longer than necessary and, more importantly, creates some friction; the latter is hopefully not too big, but esp. at the beginning of a project when there is no good personal relationship yet, it’s something you want to avoid. Also, think about all the people who just read the name in a document or presentation and don’t have a chance to talk with you. They will run around and spread the (wrong) word. I have been on several projects where bad names created some really big problems for the aforementioned reasons.

My New Toy: Mac Mini

Having been a very happy iPod user for more than six years, I finally got myself a Mac Mini as a kind of New Year’s present. And I must admit that it totally blew me away! The overall usability and the many tiny details that show the degree of thinking that was put into the product are awesome. And of course the design is so much beyond any computer I ever had before.

My only problem now is to find and play with all those nice tools that make one’s life even better. What I already installed are of course Emacs, Eclipse, and a few more. Once I have gained enough experience there will probably be a separate post on what I consider useful.