My son likes getting under the hood of his car, tweaking and tinkering.  I like getting under the hood of my computer and tinkering.  Just as my son likes to push the performance of his machine, I like pushing the performance of mine. 

Occasionally, my son will bump up against the limits of his knowledge, so he’ll come into the house, sit down at the dining room table, boot up the spare laptop, and start googling around.  Depending on the size of the problem, or what piece of machinery he’s working on, he can be engaged for hours.  Sometimes, he pulls out his phone and starts calling friends with expertise.  Not once in all the years he has been working on cars has anyone told him to get a Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Toyota, or etc. 

I also will occasionally bump into some esoteric little quirk of high-tech behavior that I have never seen before.  If I can’t find an answer on Google, sometimes I ask on Facebook.  I have over 4300 “friends” on Facebook, many of them are wizards.  Some are not. Inevitably, one of the non-wizards will say,  “You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac.”  And just as inevitably, I will unfriend that person.  It’s not like I don’t warn them ahead of time—but they say it anyway.  It’s the cyberspace version of Tourette Syndrome.

Actually, they're right. If I had a Mac, I wouldn't be having that problem—but I also wouldn't be running a state-of-the-art machine either.  Inside my custom case lurks a Sandy Bridge motherboard, an i7-2600K running at 3.40ghz, 16gb of RAM, a 240gb SSD for the OS, and 6TB of onboard storage—so when I'm trying to change a tire on my Ferrari, I don't want to be told I'd be better off with a Lexus. I wouldn't. The Lexus is very pretty. It’ll get you to the grocery store and the movie theater and the mall.  But it won’t get you the other guy’s pink slip at the track. 

100 years ago, and if someone driving a horseless carriage had to stop to change a tire, passersby would yell "get a horse." The "get a Mac" remark is the 21^st century equivalent.  It’s thoughtless.  It’s stupid.  It’s rude.  It’s what falls out of the mouth of someone who has nothing useful to say, but has to say something anyway. 

The remark doesn’t address the problem I'm trying to solve—it simply asserts that I’ve been wrong in all my choices.  It’s no different than a bible-thumper insisting that I’m going to Hell unless I accept Jesus as my savior. The remark is an arrogant assertion that my years of expertise in the x86 architecture has been wasted, and that my decades of investment in high-end hardware and software is immediately inferior to an overpriced and underpowered exercise in style that offers me significantly fewer options, almost no opportunities to get under the hood to tinker, and a much smaller menu of available games and applications. 

I don’t want to join iCult.  I see no advantage in living in a "walled garden" controlled by a corporation that has proven itself more interested in serving its own needs than mine.

Friends don’t tell friends to get a Mac.  So if you tell me that, I will unfriend you.  Honest.  (Unless you’re a redhead who owns a chocolate store. But that’s the only exception.)

Today, BlackBerry announced the final release of its Tablet OS SDK for Adobe Air, the WebWorks 2.0 SDK for Tablets and Smartphones, and its answer to the iPad and Android tablets – the PlayBook.

The WebWorks SDK 2.0 includes JavaScript APIs, which are separated from the OS according to a release from RIM. WebWorks framework and the APIs associated with it are open sourced and available on GitHub. WebWorks works with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to build BlackBerry applications and then the applications can also be used on the PlayBook tablet.

Do you think these software development kits will help developers create new applications for BlackBerry? If you’re a developer, do you think WebWorks gives you more flexibility?

The PlayBook has been reviewed all over the Web, here’s one from Engadget.  

Updated 4/29 - According to BlackBerry's Developer Blog, Android applications will be supported through "application player" apps, available in the BlackBerry App World as of summer 2011.

For your Monday-afternoon pleasure: a big list of new tools to try out.

• LLVM 2.9
• Gnome 3
• rPath X6
• live.js
• TDgotchi (a virtual pet that helps hone your TDD skills.)
• HireFire - The Heroku Worker manager
• Issues 2.0

A pseudo-meme I've noticed recently has been the discussion of Git and Subversion and their issues when it comes to large projects. It would seem that a repository of 6 GBs or more is too much for the scions of open source SCM. Steve Hanov has a detailed discussion of the problem on his blog. In almost all of the discussions I have seen in the past few weeks, Perforce comes up as the SCM offered as the solution.

There is a head-to-head comparison over on Stack Overflow where some folks compare Perforce and Subversion. It seems the real issue here is simply the way Subversion and Git handle their repositories on disk. When you're dealing with huge trees in Subversion, with thousands of files to move around or merge, it takes a non-trivial amount of time.

Hanov says that Perforce was confronted with this type of problem years ago, by Google. There's a link to a rather large PDF linked to on his blog, but I shan't link to it here due to its size. It's a good read, and gets into some nice juicy details about speeding up access to a large repository.

Thanks to the generosity of Google, I have an Android phone. We can go into my thoughts on the device some other time, but suffice it to say, my phone has caused me to go wandering around the Android world to see where the new, hip, cool stuff is going on. The other day, I was told to check out CyanogenMod, an open source mod to the Android OS that speeds things up and adds a bunch of features. Installing the mod requires some ROM flashing, so I decided against trying it out just yet (I'm squeemish about experimental software on the single most important device in my office). But while looking at the CyanogenMod home page, I discovered that the project is in the middle of a tiff with Ultimate Droid, a seemingly similar Android mod package.

Evidently, this Ultimate Droid package is just a rebranding of CyanogenMod, plus some hidden music quotes and quips, strewn like Easter Eggs. It's an intriguing occurance, and one that highlights what is really the only reason for copyright law: plagerism is the single most dangerous event prevented by said laws. Now, there are other reasons for copyright laws to exist, but this specific topic is really the crux of the whole thing.

CyanogenMod is actually licensed under the Apache Software License, and as such, does not even require attribution. And the CyanogenMod folks seem to understand and be OK with this. But one thing that open source licenses do not stop is flame wars on the Internet. And, wow, did one open up because of this little event. Take a look at this blog posting over on the CyanogenMod site. In it, the details of said flame war are laid bare in mirrored forum postings and Github comments.

When you get right down to it, this is something we all have to expect with open source. And it's something we all have to be ready to deal with. In the end, even the CyanogenMod people realized their flaming efforts were pointless and silly. Of course, stealing code and presenting it as your own is always a shadey thing to do, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really hurt anyone except those who can't find decent support because they're looking in the wrong place. Still, it makes for some entertaining drama.

For the googly-eyed Git goon and Ruby-smitten gem jabber, GitHub has been the place where the cool kids are storing their code. It's essentially a Web interface to control your Git-controlled source code, but all the social and Webbish add-ons make it a Radical Ninja way to handle your code.

You could, for example, fork Ruby on Rails right now. If you wanted to screw with it in ways too terrible to be seen, you can pay them to make your fork private. It's a good business model: Everyone's gotta play out in the open if they want it for free.

Today, GitHub released its code in an installer (built by also radical company, BitRock). That installer can be run behind your firewall. You can finally run GitHub in your server room. It's quite a killer app for the Git community.

If you're new to Git, you should read up on how merging works, as it's a bit different from Subversion. 

I'm often asked, "What's the cool new thing?" I'm not a fan of the question, as it should be I that is asking y'all. But still, y'all ask. And I answer: For the past six months, my answer has been Git. I've offered up different reasons almost every time I've been asked. One of my friends said, "Source control management is a solved problem." I agree, for the most part!

Those folks at Git, however, are just... so persuasive. I say they're at Git because they don't just get Git. They live Git. They love it. They aspire to build their next project on top of Git. They see Git liberating the cloud. They see it everywhere. It's like they're brainwashed. They're like Linux junkies in the early years. Like the Gnu herd nerds. Like Mac maniacs. Beset on all sides, yet divinely in love. I see in Git the Emacs-like user passion.

I just wanted to show y'all a few links that explain the brainwashing. I can't possibly make Git's case better than the folks in these links:

Avery Pennarun puts it all out there: Git is beautiful.

This fellow chose Git over Mercurial.

David N. Welton doesn't like Git at all.

R. Tyler Ballance puts it somewhat less eloquently.

Sadaf Azad sees it as a Subversion versus Git thing.