“$.vakata.context.cnt.delegate is not a function”

when using jsTree and jQuery you need to upgrade your jQuery to the latest version. I had 1.3.2 and got the error, upgraded to 1.4.2 and it works fine.

But I think that’s the wrong way of approaching the question. Instead you should ask the more fundamental question: where do I want to work for the rest of my life?

They don’t tell you this in school, but there’s a certain organizational personality connected to each language. For example:

• C++. Very techie, if you want to work in the engineering department in a large industrial company, pick C++. Also the language of choice for most games.
• Java EE. Software architects love Java EE. It is used mostly in the financial world, banks, insurance companies, large web sites usually use Java. If you enjoy writing PTS reports and working in a cubicle, pick Java. Expect to spend a lot of time going through huge log files with debug exception print-outs.
• C. Also very techie and close to hardware. There are usually wires and expensive prototype equipment involved when you program C. Expect to spend a lot of time chasing memory leaks or optimizing code to fit in to a finger nail.
• PHP. Rapid development of web sites, pretty common amongst web hackers, startups and PR agencyes building WordPress sites for customers who wants to “get in to social media”. Usually a fun and relaxing atmosphere – or total chaos depending on your point of view. Many PHP programmers are self-taught – and that shows.
• Ruby. This is the smarter sibling of PHP. Common in startup environments or web agencys.
• Scala. Java EE refreshed. You can probably get away with using Scala in a Java organization, making your life in the cubicle a little less miserable but don’t count on it showing up in a job ad – yet.
• Java SE / Java ME / Android Java. A completely different beast than Java EE. Java SE on the desktop is hardly used anymore but Java on mobile phones is of course a growing opportunity. Java ME is a dying breed of Java and most of the development is done in India or Eastern Europe. Android Java will be huge the coming years and the kind of organization that will want Android developers is wide and varied.

These are just a few programming languages but I hope my point goes through: every language has a certain personality and a certain type of organization that uses the language. You have to pick a language that fits your own personality. I am myself a Java developer who started out as a C++ developer but now coming to realize that I actually like the more fast paced world of PHP and Android development better.

It’s not a matter of the powers of the languages themselves but how they are used and who uses them and what kind of projects will you be doing with the language. Just try to keep that in mind if you’re thinking about becoming a programmer.

I should also add that you definitely should learn more than one language for precisely the same reason: to learn different ways of thinking and widen your perspective.

Update: as always, good discussion on Hacker News.

Linus G Thiel points out that Javascript is up and coming. I agree.

And I stopped using Jaiku.

One thing I did miss from the Jaiku-days, though, was the long discussion threads under each “jaik” (the Jaiku version of a “tweet”). Here’s an example. This provided Jaiku with depth, something you can hardly accuse Twitter of.

So an idea emerged: what if you could build a web service that made it possible to comment and discuss each tweet just like you did in the Jaiku-days.

Thus, Discuss a Tweet was born.

Or, well, at least the domain was registered. I did this April 17 2009. It then ended up in my pile of great-ideas-I-should-one-day-implement and nothing happened.

Until… last weekend.

I knew that it would be possible to put it all together quite fast. I had used Disqus when we built Rate My Pitch during 24 hour business camp – so I knew that the commenting system, the most difficult part, I would get for “free”. I wouldn’t even need a database. It was all about putting things together in a slightly new way. A classic mashup.

So, I started hacking away. A couple of hours later, the result is a mashup of the following services:

• Disqus, for the commenting system.
• JQuery, the Javascript framework to do some AJAX magic and UI manipulation.
• JQuery Corner to get the rounded corners.
• Typekit, better looking web fonts.
• BluePrint CSS, a CSS framework that simplifies layout.
• Twitter, of course. I used the Twitter PHP class by Tijs Verkoyen to simplify the API.
• Bit.ly the URL shortener. I used this Bit.ly PHP class by Dennis Madsen to makes things even easier.
• Simple HTML DOM to parse HTML.
• Google Analytics, let’s not forget this visitor statistics tool.

This is just a tiny little hack but I think it serves as a good example of how modern web development is done. You pick bits and pieces from all over the web, some open source components, some embedded web services. You put things together and something new emerges.

I used PHP and this is also worth noting. People complain about PHP but one of its biggest strengths is its user base and size. When you’re doing a mashup such as Discuss a Tweet you can be sure someone else has done about the same things you need and there is code out there ready to be used. You can’t say that about Scala or Erlang regardless of how powerful and beautiful the languages are. (Things are changing of course as the popularity of the language grows.)

Another thing happened while Discuss-a-Tweet was in my idea-pool: Google Buzz launched. According to Mr Jaiku himself, Jyri Engeström, Buzz is the continuation of Jaiku. And, yes, it allows you to comment and discuss tweets.

Maybe a usage pattern is emerging in how we use different social networks. Twitter for quick news updates and cool links, Facebook for our friends and Buzz for the discussions. Maybe the Opportunity Cloud for a service such as Discuss-a-Tweet is dispersing. We’ll see. It was fun building it anyway – and it only took a few hours after all.

(PS. Follow me on Twitter.)

I’ve been wrong every year.

Of course the sales of mobile phones have been great but in terms of mobile applications and the mobile web, things were more or less stuck in black & white text mode. But, the last couple or years, things have finally started to change – and change fast!

So, it is a very good time to get in to mobile development. This is like the early days of the web all over again. Opportunities are plenty! Before you know it, every company will want a mobile application to accompany their social web site. If you don’t know mobile yet, now is the time to start learning.

The obvious first question is: where do I start?

There are many mobile development tools out there. This blog post is a little deeper look in to three different approaches that will give you an app running in less than an hour.

By far the simplest approach is taken by tools such as AppWhirl. This is an online tool that generates a complete application for you. Not only that, it sends the app to the Apple App Store for approval. That’s right, AppWhirl is only for iPhone.

It is also extremely limited in that you can only generate apps from existing RSS feeds, making it less of an application toolkit and more of a mobile RSS reader-generator. Nothing wrong with that, you just need to be aware of the limitations.

AppWhirl is:

• Extremely simple to use – anyone can generate an application with this tool.
• Extremely limited – this is not an application SDK but a very simple way to publish your RSS feed as an application.
• Only supports iPhone.

PhoneGap is far more advanced. This is how they describe themselves:

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian with a unified JavaScript API.

Now, while PhoneGap is a cross platform tool, the development process and setup is slightly different for the different platforms. You need to install all the different SDKs to fully use this tool. This can be quite a hassle.

What is PhoneGap? It’s basically a bridge that enables Javascript to call native functionality not normally accessible to a web page running in a browser. It does this by packaging the PhoneGap framework, your HTML/CSS/JavaScript-files and a magic JavaScript-file called “phonegap.js” in an application package. It then uses the built in browser component to render the “pages” of the app.

This means if you’re used to web development you will be up and running quickly on PhoneGap. It also means you can use nice frameworks such as JQuery for that AJAX mojo.

Unfortunately the documentation wasn’t exactly up to date so I had some problems getting things up and running on my Android Developer Phone. If this is the same on the other platforms, you’re in for a couple of hours of tweaking settings and installing SDKs and googling around for fixes if you want your app running on more than one platform.

To summarize, PhoneGap is:

• Cross platform, works on many devices – but will require setup for each.
• Web developer friendly. People familiar with HTML and JavaScript will feel right at home.
• Capable but still limited by browser. With the upcoming HTML5 PhoneGap will become really interesting, though!

Next in line is MoSync. (First a disclaimer: I have worked for the company behind MoSync.) The platform recently became open source and received an investment from none other than the MySQL founders, Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark. Like MySQL, MoSync is based in Stockholm.

You don’t need to install any other SDK than the MoSync IDE to get started. Programming is done in C++ which means you will feel at most at home if you’re coming from the embedded or gaming world. In fact, MoSync can run legacy games like Castle Wolfenstein just fine:

(That’s me speaking in the background, by the way.)

So far, MoSync is Windows only (although the IDE is based on Eclipse) so Mac- and Linux-users are out of luck. Supported platforms include Symbian S60, Java ME, Moblin and Windows Mobile. Android, iPhone and Maemo are “coming soon”.

MoSync is cross platform but obviously you won’t get more features than the underlying platform supports. Best support you’ll get for basic graphics, sound, simple Bluetooth access and networking. Without a doubt the best feature of all is the promise of one codebase, multiple platforms, but your mileage may vary.

MoSync is:

• Cross platform, works on many devices – Android and iPhone “coming soon”.
• C++ based, suitable for porting old embedded apps to native but a little higher barrier to cross for the beginner (but C++ isn’t that difficult).
• Still a bit untested, MoSync needs a few more success stories that proves their claims.
• One codebase, one tool!

All in all, three completely different approaches to mobile development. Which one suits you? Well, that’s for you to decide. They all have their strengths and drawbacks and I think it will be quite obvious for you which one fits your bill.

Now, get out there and create great stuff for mobile!

Updated: MoSync just announced Android support.

Updated 2: David Wood wrote an overview of some other cross platform tools.

Programming is purely a mental activity and has no relationship to any physical activity including typing. To become a better programmer, you will need to exercise and build up the part of the brain that deals with managing complexity and dealing with the relationships between countless objects.

Learn to manage complexities. That’s the core of programming. Add human communication to that and you have software engineering.

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Change it to:

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

Now you can enable the Headspace plugin and go to Settings -> Headspace and define exactly how your titles should be generated.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m in a big hallroom full of people all of them hacking on their computers.

The event is called 24 hours Business Camp and the goal is to bring 90 entrepreneurial people together and have them build a service in 24 hours.

There are 52 teams (although it’s not a contest, there’s no winner) and the ideas are ranging from tampon subscriptions to Youtube wrappers.

Building a service in such an extremely short timespan has been (is, there’s still 9 hours left!) a learning experience, primarly about the importance of focusing on what’s really important.

A little too tired to write anything more right now but let’s just say that without my framework of choice, JBoss Seam, I wouldn’t have been as productive as I have been. A couple of hours have been lost doing stuff like configuring Apache proxies on my server or fixing Hibernate errors. Still, it’s really amazing how much you can do with all the frameworks and open APIs out there. Everything is in turbo speed compared to a couple of years ago.

But now I should get some sleep.

I have two computers on my desk. My MacBook and my Asus EEE B202 running Windows XP. I wanted a development environment for Drupal (a php content management framework), so I tried running PHP on my MacBook.

It worked fine, but the first problem appeared when I tried to run Drupal. The PHP GD library was missing (used by Drupal for graphics). This is a known problem and requires a recompilation of PHP. The problem is, the Apache web server installed on the MacBook is used by OS X and may change in future updates to the OS by Apple. It also seemed a bit cumbersome to get it all to work as it should. So, I figured, why not in stead run a virtual machine with a developer setup in linux and get a clean separation between my day to day OS (OS X) and my developer server.

I decided to use VirtualBox, a free software provided by Sun, and run it on my XP machine (the B202). I installed Ubuntu Server 8.10 on the virtual machine.

If you haven’t used a software like VirtualBox or VMWare before, I can only say that it’s much easier than it sounds like. If you can install an operating system you can use VirtualBox. It’s a very slick and easy to use program.

But, there are of course a few problems.

The first problem was that Ubuntu Server was also missing PHP GD (not because of VirtualBox of course, but still). This time I only needed to do a:

apt-get install php5-gd

and voila, Drupal was running.

Now everything should have been fine and dandy if it hadn’t been for the bluescreens that suddenly started to occur on my EEE-box. After running VirtualBox and Ubuntu Server for a couple of minutes, maybe half an hour, XP decides to just crash. This happened over and over again.

Finding the cause of a bluescreen is never fun but it was clearly due to the VirtualBox setup.

But, hey, I’m in the virtual world here. So, I simply copied the .vdi-file (the file that VirtualBox uses to store the operating system on – it’s like a virtual hard drive) to my MacBook and set up a virtual machine with the vdi-file.

Everything worked as it should, except networking (I’m using hosted networking, making the virutal machine appear just like a third computer on my network – very neat, when it works).

The problem is that, although the environments are similar, the virtual network adapter gets a new MAC address. So, the Ubuntu OS gets confused and can’t find the network adapter. This is easily fixed by simply deleting an autogenerated file:

rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

and rebooting.

Now I have Ubuntu Server 8.10 running on my MacBook. I don’t have any desktop environment set up, making it rather slim (I use 384MB RAM and the full OS only takes about 1,5GB hard drive space). You probably want something like Webmin to make configuration a bit simpler. Here are instructions for setting it up.

Now, let’s just hope my MacBook doesn’t bluescreen.