The New York Times has an article on the decline of female computer science undergraduates. I found that a bit funny, since I spent the day at a course on plug-in development for a content management system, and out of a total of 8 participants, 3 were female. Not a bad percentage at all, compared to when I worked at Opera, where there were just a handful of women working in the Engineering department.

All in all, I find that the IT consulting companies in Norway seem to have plenty of women… It might just be a coincidence that I’ve met so many, though. I don’t doubt that the IT industry is still dominated by men.

Bruce Eckel writes:

“Based on Yarko’s suggestion, experimented with BitBucket and the Mercurial DVCS and immediately ended up moving the project there. Hard to put my finger on why, but everything seems significantly smoother and easier. The BitBucket site also responds much faster.

Eckel is the author of numrous software development books, and is now working on a book called Python 3 Patterns & Idioms, which is being created using an open-source development process, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

I’ve written about bitbucket.org previously, and it’s great to see it getting more users and some decen projects.

CNN has a list of the 9 top tech flops of 2008, with the T-Mobile G1 as the first flop.

There’s probably no denying that the Google phone has its issues, and it is far away from being the huge success the Apple iPhone has been, but with it’s open platform and development environment it was probably never meant to be a new iPhone.

The Google phone with its Android platform is like the iPhone a newer form of mobile phone, where the user interface and experience has changed from being … well … phone-based to something more. For too long has mobile phones just been mobile phones, while they clearly can benefit from doing more, considering how much we use them.

Sure, efforts have been made, with JME and other APIs, but it has taken companies not traditionally in the phone business to do something more with the phone, and do it better than what has previously been done. It’s hardly perfect yet, I know, but it’s a good start.

Perhaps the Google phone is just looked upon as a flop because it was perceived as being something it wasn’t intended to be. From what I read, it would have been obvious to anyone that it wasn’t a new iPhone.

Perhaps old news for some, but the beta of Programming Clojure is now available.

One of the arguments people use against Common Lisp is the lack of libraries - wether or not that is true is a different discussion, but with Clojure you can use a modern Lisp dialect with a modern platform that has an abundance of high-quality libraries.

You might not like Java, but if you’ve ever programmed for the JVM recently, you’ll probably be aware of the effort that has gone into not only the JVM, but the libraries and the platform as a whole.

Earlier this year, Opera announced Dragonfly, a developer tool to compete with Firebug, the popular web development extension for Firefox.

Since I have been working more on front-end development lately, I’ve been testing both Firebug and Dragonfly. Opera is my browser of choice, so I really want to use Dragonfly… However, it turns out that it’s not that great, even though they want it to be. A tagline I’ve seen used, is that Dragonfly is “like Firebug, evolved”. Well that certainly sounds good! Incidentally, the tag line for Firebug is “web development evolved”.

After trying Dragonfly a bit on and off for a while, and recently reading a bit more about it, the new project lead for the project spotted my whining on Twitter last week, and asked me for feedback. Giving constructive feedback can be difficult, but I pointed out a few things, and I’ll summarize it here for your pleasure.

While I’m sure Dragonfly has many nice features (such as remote debugging, which is pretty nice if you’re doing web development for a special device), the user interface seems clunky and unintuitive. This is perhaps somewhat vague, and I did mention some specifics on Twitter. In general I found Dragonfly more difficult to navigate and work with than Firebug.

As a small and somewhat silly example, take a look at the following screenshots:

The first shows Firebug, the second is Dragonfly. Both have been opened on Gmail, and are shown in their default state. Firebug shows the DOM and the CSS, while Dragonfly shows … Well … Scripts? Why is about:blank in the script list? To find the DOM in Dragonfly, I actually have to click the DOM tab on top, and then a DOM tab on bottom again.

I’m sure some of the things I find irritating about Dragonfly will go away as I get used to it, but I can’t shake the feeling that the developers are focusing on features instead of usability. The good thing however, is that this is most likely something they will use extensively themselves, as they do a lot of in-house web application development at Opera, so hopefully they will over time refactor the user interface. Or perhaps not. Who knows.