Musings of a Trained Monkey

Inkscape is an insanely cool open source vector graphic editor that uses SVG as its native file format. I installed it shortly after reading about it with no problem, except that when it starts up it complains about X11 not being installed.

Apple provides a download, X11User, that will set things up if you haven’t already. The download page says something about a version on the Tiger DVD installation disk, but I assumed the download would work as well. (After the fact I see the System requirement is 10.3.8 – 10.3.9)

Ouch, don’t do it. If you install X11User from Apple’s website it decides your OS X version is 10.3.8 and iTunes and other applications won’t work anymore! I tried to figure out what files I had blindly installed, but the damage was done. I tried several efforts at getting Software Update to work, but it felt my Panther 10.3.8 system was up to date :-(

Long story short, here is a good file to know about: /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist It contains the version of OS X that most of your applications will care about, including Software Update. I altered the 10.3.8 to 10.4, then ran Software Update and Software Update got everything repaired to 10.4.8. As a special bonus the X11 stuff continued to work, so I am now Drawing Freely, with Inkscape.

I am happy to see that ActiveMessaging (a13g<-corny) is returning to life. It was announced with a bit of fanfare by Obie in early 2006 and then disappeared.

Jon Tirsen sent out some invites for a new Google Group and introduced Andrew Kuklewicz as the new maintainer of the project. I think this will become the premier way for RoR apps to interact with Java backends in 2007. Take a look at the code and see how you can contribute!

Patrick Logan offers an interesting take on the state of design doctrines in his post Code Shrink Programming Models of particular note was this bit:

By the way, the thought crossed my mind again recently… has “agile” killed “patterns” or did it die on its own? Are “patterns” the best way to present a new programming model? Does anyone really “do” patterns anymore, the way the original movement intended? Or do we just write some text and draw some pictures and call them patterns? Is there any point to the “patterns” idea anymore? I’m not sure either way.

This is a beguiling idea as lots of companies look for architecture documentation that explicitly states which patterns were used, etc. Yet I find myself agreeing with Patrick’s post. Good programmers inherently write good code, other programmers attempt to employ patterns to write mediocre code.

I forwarded this article to David Gifford, a friend of mine to get his perspective since he has been working in the industry as an architect for a long time. His response made me laugh for quite awhile.

Frameworks evolve so “lazy” developers don’t have to give much thought to patterns, instead everyone just thinks about all the multitudes of configuration files and should groovy or xml be used…

Anyone working on the web with Java in the pre-Struts days can remember when they didn’t have to make giant configuration files. Now I am wondering if “multitudes of configuration files” is recognized by the community as a pattern or as an anti-pattern? I know what the answer is for me.