Jonas Beckman

Martin Beckman

Userland has shipped Frontier 6.2 and I just downloaded and made a fresh installation. Very painless, very smooth… so now I am going to have fun!

Frontier was always an amazing piece of software and it’s now even better. I manage this site with Manila, which is just one application of Frontier. Frontier itself is powerful enough to host hundreds, even thousands of Manila sites like this one - in fact, that’s what EditThisPage.com has been doing for the past seven months.

Moreover, Frontier supports SOAP (in fact invented parts of it), has an object database that can be used to store XML… and, as they say, lots more.

Now I’m going to take a look at how to make a Swedish version - the support for different languages is already in place, but Swedish is not supported. I wonder if any other Swedes are thinking about translating right now? Jag undrar om några andra svenskar funderar på att sätta igång och översätta med en gång?

I just noticed that Scott mcCloud (author of Understanding Comics) has a website.

Oh, and the flowers… they are beautiful. Aila has turned my balcony into a little garden, just like I said she would.
Too bad I still use a slow parallell interface to get the pictures out of my camcorder - expect pictures any day now

I’m drinking one of Aila’s delicious fruit shakes and surfing the hardware sites contemplating my next workstation - which is going to be quiet. After the weekend I will find out exactly how much goodies a custom-built PC can take and still be very, very quiet.
My new pulse monitor is making me think a little different about how I run. Slowing down whenever my pulse is higher than optimal feels strange… but after an hour I notice I am still smiling at people I meet. I neither know nor care about speed or distance. Staying in “the zone” is all that matters: is my heart working hard enough? Fine, just breathe and relax.

I have always liked scripting languages: from Hypercard all the way to Python. And I spent some formative years programming in either C or Smalltalk.

This background left me feeling rather uneasy about C++. I don’t mind complexity. But I prefer thinking about maximum effiency as a well-supported option - not as the overall design choice of an entire language.

For “real” Windows-applications, Delphi has been my primary choice since version 1. And with Kylix, Borland will soon take a shot at Linux.

Despite all that, I have spent the past few days reading up on C++ again (and playing with code, of course). Maybe it’s because I don’t like to be accused of critizing things I don’t understand. Or because I see more Linux coming. Or because I enjoy good writer/developers writing really good books about C++. Anyway, I am currently reading: Bruce Eccles Thinking in C++, Andrew Koenig’s Ruminations on C++, Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ and Forman & Danforth’s Putting Metaclasses to work.

I just slept for two hours, coming home after a long day at sea. Quite a lot of sun out there, but it’s cloudy and grey in the city. Still warm, though, so it’s OK. Me and Aila will meet for a late dinner at an outdoor table somewhere, in a few minutes.

It’s a great night to be a tourist in our own city, almost everyone who lives in Stockholm has left for the country - now it’s up to us and the visiting hillbillies.
Hillbillies is how the usually excellent online dictionary of Skoldatanätet
translates “lantis” - if you know any Swedish you are welcome to suggest a better translation.

I am following the way Dave Winer covers Microsoft’s current announcements with great interest. No time to write about it, today, but I definitely will. These are interesting times (did you know that “may you live in interesting times!” was an ancient chinese curse?).

Ah! I’m back. Running again. The hour round midnight is the best! Down by the water, through the parks and up the hill by the the large hospital. And afterwards a slow winddown, all the way down to some really good sleep.

Today is midsummer, and traditionally everyone is preparing for fertility rites in the archipelago. Rain is anticipated, expected but still considered a catastrophe by many. But not by me. Rain is good news! The pollen count is low and nothing is better for running than a light summer rain.

And today I had a new toys: new shoes and a Polar pulse monitor from Löplabbet (swedish for “Runner’s Lab”. It is always very interesting to see how hard the heart is actually working, compared with the subjective feeling. Sometimes (for certain kinds of training) my intuition is very accurate, for other activities it’s completely off.

Tomorrow I won’t mind rain either - me and Aila have booked tickets for a day cruise in the archipelago. I almost hope it rains: I love sitting below deck, eating and drinking and watching rough weather with a contented smile.

David Gelernter has written something sure to be talked about, called The second coming. From the more mundane perspective of a developer, it’s about servers everywhere… a good thing to talk about, because it is happening right now.

Dave Winer can always be relied on to link to stuff like this. Thanks!

Update: Gelernters company Mirror Worlds holds a patent on the concept of “lifestreams” mentioned in his article. It is a somewhat nebulous concept - hopefully the patent comes to no good end.

I have decided that my next workstation should be very quiet - whatever it costs. This doesn’t seem very excentric or unreasonable to me… but actually finding a good supplier is harder than I thought.

Right now I am downloading chinese fonts in one window: that’s what it takes to navigate this suppliers site. In one window are the search results from Ars Technica, in another the 49 ideas of Silence. And so on…

I want the quiet PC. Maybe Decibel (from Swedish Captech) is it?
Just mailed them for a quote. If you have any experience with quiet PC:s, please send me a mail or discuss it here.

Blivet notes that Susan (of 2020 Hindsight) is thinking about silent retreats.

Right now I am looking at the summer schedule of Plum Village, where I spent some time last year.

Every day we got up early, meditated and prepared our breakfast. Then we sat outside our small house, in a beautiful french landscape… and ate in silence. At the sound of the first bell we could speak if we wanted to. One day, when the bell rang, I realized I had nothing to say. I smiled.

Conversation during these breakfasts was an adventure - not because fantastic things were said, but because the silence was still there.

Stumbled across a page about muscle memory on WikiWikiWeb. They talked about software called Sensiva - I just downloaded it and it works fine. More later…

Where are they? or Maybe we are alone in the galaxy after all?

Fascinating story in Scientific American about the search for extra-terrestrial life. I have a subscribtion to SciAm - but snail mail across the Atlantic means I haven’t seen this issue yet. Someone over at Kuro5hin had.

In a few days I will be able to spend more time writing here. If you are a regular, hang on!

I just came back home from another coding-session (an XML-interface for a large object-oriented framework) and missed clicking “Flip homepage” by five minutes… so now it’s Tuesday.

And suddenly I remember one of my father’s many short stories: the american tourist is doing his “Europe-in-five-days” tour: Oh, it’s Tuesday! Then this must be Belgium!

Justin Hall wonders what we are all working for, too. But right now I am having fun.