US tosses the equivalent of 12 mil Mac Pros into the trash every year.

US tosses the equivalent of 12 mil Mac Pros into the trash every year. @robertnoack #idiocy https://t.co/7S1g84NNF1 pic.twitter.com/5F5PSkaHwE

— Prez Cannady (@prezcannady) April 30, 2016

Qualitative comparison of US and Japanese software dev practices.

Qualitative comparison of US and Japanese software dev practices. https://t.co/lWBxAerLbZ pic.twitter.com/1VAlqMIwGG

— Prez Cannady (@prezcannady) April 30, 2016

JDK 1.6 and Maven 3.0.5 on Windows 2000

The installer for JDK 1.6.0_45 crapped out on me.  I think its probably due to trying to install Sun JavaDB.  Screw it.  The JDK installed but didn't get registered with Add/Remove Programs.  Not sure how I feel about that but it works.

Initially tried Maven 3.3.9, but a unsupported major.minor version issue drove me quickly to the archives.  Ended up going with 3.0.5.  Not convinced 3.3.9 is out of the picture, but then again not convinced that I'm stuck on JDK 1.6 either.

Next break, I'll give Eclipse and Scala a shot.

GNUStep on Windows 2000

It's as good a time as any to see if MinGW and GNUStep play nicely on Windows 2000.  They should.  Let's see if the binary path is sane enough to let me write up and run Alex Perez's Converter tutorial.

Project Center and Gorm

So far, so good.  Next need to deal with some pathing issues with the build tools.  Yay.

UPDATE:  Easier than I expected.

Converter running

Ended up just building from source.

Reviving Windows 2000, IE 6 SP1 and Visual Studio 2005 C++/C#/J#/VB/Web Express

Why sleep when you can build the dev environment of your (late 2002) dreams?

Visual C++ and C#, SSME against SQL Server 2005 Express

Ingredients:

• Oracle VirtualBox
• Windows 2000 installation media (you're on your own)
• Visual Studio 2005 Express installation media (courtesy of AP Dubey, h/t to Sivakumar K for this answer at Stackoverflow)
• Visual Studio 2005 Express SP1 installers
• Optionally, if you install SQL Server Express 2005, grab SSMSE.
• Internet Explorer 6 (see below)
• A standalone Internet Explorer 6 SP1 update (see below)

So not quite what I wanted back in 2002, but if 2002 me got his hands on VS 200-AnyYear he would've murdered Doc Brown and stolen his time machine.

Installing Visual C# 2005

Why IE6?  Well, first I needed to discover for myself that there was no way to shoehorn VS 2008 Express Edition onto my box, and for some damned reason the Installer UI is HTML with a bunch of ActiveX shit that chokes IE 5.5.  Going from 5.5 to 6 is an exercise in pulling teeth.  Fortunately, the good folks at Evolt keep a whole stable of legacy browsers handy, including base IE6.

Unfortunately, you have to dig further for a standalone SP1 update and wade through lots and lots of dead links.  Fortunately, we have Internet Archive.  Link is below:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060201000000*/http://www.greenapple.com/support/software/browsers/files/ie60sp1july.exe

Installing Visual C++ 2005

Have fun.

Hello, World!

Xcode turns 30 in 2016

It never ceases to amaze me what folks could pull off with 25 MHz and 8 MiB of RAM.  Granted, I've got a lot more horsepower now and Project Center ain't Project Builder, but to think that machines were capable of this much 30 years ago this year.

2016 is also the 30th anniversary of the 80386.  Sure, Microsoft managed to get Xenix running on the 286, but the 386 finally closed the gap enough on workstation performance that within five years it ran two BSDs and a little thing called Linux.