Salvadorean food and Willow Glen ice cream

Two nights ago, my buddy Jonathan and I met up for dinner. We were in an adventurous mood, so we went to Vicky’s Restaurant [map | Mercury News review], which specializes in cuisine from El Salvador, in the Burbank neighborhood of San Jose. Jon couldn’t resist the 2 Tacos for $2 deal, but we also made sure to get Salvadorean specials, like pupusas (stuffed fried tortillas), sweet corn tamales with sour cream, and pasteles (mini pies stuffed with meat and vegetables). Highly recommended. It came out to $22 for the two of us, and we were absolutely stuffed.

But we went for ice cream anyway. I suggested Cold Stone Creamery since I had a gift certificate. Jon vehemently rejected it, which was fine by me, since years of training at Berkeley has resulted in a knee-jerk reaction in avoiding chains at all costs. So we drove to Willow Glen, since I figured given its demographics, there had to be at least one ice cream store there.

After going up and down Lincoln Avenue, we found it: The Willow Glen Frozen Yogurt Company [map]. I went for a “small” raspberry frozen yogurt, while Jon went for a “medium” handmade fudge-type ice cream. Boy it was good, but it was too much. “Small” was the third largest size, after child and mini. The frozen yogurt store looks like it’s been there forever and the line was out the door. But it turns out it’s only been open since 2002; the building used to be a Wolf Camera store.

Python IDEs

Normally I program in Java, but recently I needed to write a quick program, and I turned to my favorite language for such tasks, Python. I hadn’t used Python for a while, so I’d forgotten how much I like the language — terse, clean syntax, and an elegant design.

But I’m still looking for a good IDE for writing Python programs in Windows — a text editor and the command line just don’t cut it for me. Currently, I’m keeping my eye on four environments. Two of them, DrPython and ActiveGrid IDE, are standalone, and the other two, Pydev and TruStudio, are built on Eclipse, which I use for Java programming.

I also came across a free text editor called PSPad. While I’m a fan of TextPad, you can never know too many text editors.

More product naming goodness

Earlier I wrote about Microsoft and IBM making their nomenclature more sane. Looks like Sun is getting also into the act. The current version of Java is “Java 2 Platform Standard Edition, version 5.0” (or J2SE 5.0), which has an internal version number of 1.5. That’s three version numbers for one product. Thankfully, the next version will simply be called “Java Platform, Standard Edition 6”, or Java SE 6. Similarly, J2EE and J2ME will be called Java EE and Java ME. Finally! Too bad they didn’t start with J2SE version 1.5 5.0.

Language-oriented programming

Lately there’s been a bunch of initiatives aimed at making software development easier and more robust, by having programmers create and program in domain-specific languages, instead of general-purpose ones like C or Java. Examples include Intentional Software which was spun off from Microsoft Research, the Meta Programming System by JetBrains, and Software Factories by Microsoft. Martin Fowler has a good overview and commentary of this promising area in an article and follow-up blog entry.

A sudden outbreak of naming sanity

Two of my biggest pet peeves were recently addressed. Microsoft announced that in Longhorn, it is dropping “My” from My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, etc. Woohoo! I’ve always thought it sounded pretty lame. I used to rename these folders myself, starting in Windows 95, but eventually I gave up.

The other one is about the names of Lotus products. A few years ago, IBM decided to rename its instant messaging product, Sametime, to “Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing.” It also renamed its team collaboration software, QuickPlace, to “Lotus Team Workplace.” No one used these awkward names, not even IBM/Lotus executives. Finally, IBM announced that it is reverting to the Sametime and Quickplace names when version 7.0 is released. thankyouthankyouthankyou

More about Borland

Today I went to a Borland presentation on its Java development tool, JBuilder 2005. I hadn’t played around with it for more than five years, so obviously what I saw tonight was dramatically different. It has some slick support for developing and refactoring J2EE programs. For example, if you rename a class via refactoring, JBuilder is smart enough to not only rename any references to the class in other Java classes, but also within XML configuration files.

I was also interested in finding out more about JBuilder’s upcoming transition to Eclipse. I asked why Borland picked Eclipse over NetBeans. It all boiled down to the ecosystem. Even though JBuilder’s architecture is more similar to NetBeans than Eclipse, it would still be painful to move the code base to NetBeans, and the payoff wouldn’t be as great, because there is less third-party support for NetBeans than there is for Eclipse. Plus, Borland was actually a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation (although it didn’t became a strategic partner until this year), so they’ve been keeping an eye on Eclipse for a few years.

A little trivia: Borland has been in Scotts Valley, CA since its founding in 1983. In 2003, it started leasing office space in Cupertino City Center. Cupertino’s city government claimed that Borland was moving its headquarters to there, but Borland denied it. However, if you look at its web site now, its Scotts Valley address is almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it lists its “executive offices” as being located in Cupertino. But the listed phone number is the old Scotts Valley number!

Talking to the folks at tonight’s meeting, it turns out that most of the developer tools are still being developed in Scotts Valley, while sales, executive offices, and development for other products are in Cupertino. As for the headquarters… who knows.

Borland switches JBuilder to Eclipse

In a move a lot less talked about than Mac to Intel, Borland announced that a future version of JBuilder will be based on Eclipse. This is good news both for Borland and Eclipse — Borland can focus its energies on building on JBuilder top of an IDE ecosystem, instead of trying to compete against one that’s free, and Eclipse gains that much more momentum. Every major tool vendor now supports Eclipse in some way, except Sun and Microsoft.

These last few blog entries have gotten quite technical; sorry to those not fluent in computergeekese.