Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Companies have been attaching the word “beta” without regard for the meaning of the word. Google is quite possibly the largest offender, affixing the “Beta” tag on software that works, is feature-full, and more production ready than many of their competitors final release offerings.

The VMWare Server team wants to fix the injustice to the word “beta” and bring it back to it’s roots. Therefore, the VMWare Server 2.0 is not very good. They’ve replaced the quite usable and responsive thick client that only works on Windows and Linux, with a buggy, unresponsive, slow-to update, web-client that only works in Windows. Huh? I thought the point of using the web is platform-independence. Apparently, VMWare wants to buck that trend as well.

Then you’ve got the hosting component. One of our VM’s kept crashing. The guest was Centos5. Thinking that it was just the guest os, we downgraded to Centos4, since the VM that is basically used for running queries was pretty stable. Nope, same problem. Apparently, it just has issues with a VM that needs to both read and write from a disk.

In an effort to be a good beta-testing citizen, I filled out a bug report, included some log files and sent it on it’s way. I got an email a few weeks later asking for more information. I dutifully ran the scripts they asked me to run. One of the commands told me to contact VMware support for an FTP account, since the generated information was too large for their webform. I emailed back, and I’m still waiting.

We’ve since downgraded to Server 1.04, in what might be a vain hope that since VMWare knows the traditional definition of “Beta,” they may know the traditional definition of “Production Ready.”

Since my computer is hosed because I’m stuck installing Visual Studio (don’t ask), I figured I might as well add to the noise about Steve Jobs Keynote.

Yesterday at 12, we all packed into the conference room, hoping for a live video feed. Instead we watched the live blogging on macrumorslive.com. Overall, it was a total snooze. Little apps that should have been on the device anyway, for $20. A hard drive on a wireless router. A software update and price drop on what has been a sub-optimal device. No wonder the stock price started tanking. Hey Steve, if I want boring, I’ll get a PC.

The highlight of the announcement was the AIR. Besides having a really dumb name, it somewhat compelling. Not to long ago, I got it in my head that I wanted another sub-notebook to replace my nearly 4 year old Fujitsu-P2120. Unfortunately, the only devices available had crippled chips and cost over $2100. I can manage carrying around an extra pound to save a grand, and get more power and a larger hard drive as well. I could never figure out why a smaller machine cost so much more. The $1800 AIR brings this market segment to a more sensible range.

However, as far as light, somewhat durable machines with good battery life go, the bottom of the food chain is far more interesting. This year, we’ve seen 3 offerings of well functioning internet devices for $400 or less, the EEEPC, Ipod Touch. For “coffee-house computing,” which is all most sub-notebooks are really capable of, these make a lot more sense. Drop it. Spill coffee on it. That would really suck, but at least you have some money left in the wallet.

Occasionally, I find myself wonder just how many lines of code I’ve written. Most of the time, I just run some combination of find and wc. But that situation is far from ideal. It doesn’t account for comments, blank-lines, etc. Sometimes, I write a half-assed script to strip out some of the comments in the language I’m most interested in. Again, that has a some drawbacks, especially when I’m working on a multi-language project.

I did some Googling and came across CLOC. It’s just a simple Perl script that ran without any extra fiddling on my Leopard machine. When you run it, it gives you a breakdown of all the code in a directory or in a specific set of files, regardless of language. If your curious about the amount of code that you’ve written, or just how much cleaner things got after the last refactor, give this neat tool a shot.