Why is there no WinSCP for the Mac?

Ever since Mac OSX came out, I understood that the Mac is the dream machine for software developers. It's a UNIX like system with a great GUI built on top of it. But how come then that even after I've owned an iMac for a few months, I find myself hardly doing any development work on it?

I try to do my personal development work on the iMac. And recently I even found it quite nice for developing a Java application that's been in my head for a few years now. But most of the development work I do at home is not Java work, it's web development work. And for that I still find myself behind my trusty old Windows XP laptop.

The reason for that is that I do most work through the remote editing feature of WinSCP. For those of you that don't know that program: it provides a Norton Commander style (dual pane) interface, with one pane being the local system and the other a remote system. Like a remote web server. And with a single key press you can open any remote file in a very simple local text editor, make a few changes and then save the file back. Their embedded editor might not be the most feature rich IDE, but it just works, it's there when I need it and apparently it's good enough for me to get the job done with.

But then why doesn't a WinSCP exists for the Mac? I know it's called WinSCP, so it's for Windows. But the Mac must have something similar, right? Well, similar yes... On the Mac there is Fugu, which at first sight seems similar. But it's completely not the same for my case.

Fugu doesn't come with a built-in editor and to me that makes a lot of a difference. They chose to integrate with existing editors instead. Which wouldn't be a problem, if they'd actually integrate with the standard OSX editor: TextEdit. But they don't. Instead they offer a whole list of more or lesser known editors, from BBEdit via TextMate to VI and emacs.

Unfortunately I don't have about 75% of the editors Fugu does integrate with. TextMate sounds great, but I haven't bought it yet as I'll need to invest some time to learn to appreciate it. And for the editors that I do have and that Fugu supports, their integration doesn't work. Now if it doesn't work for those editors, do I want to risk installing yet another editor on my system to find out if the integration works there? Well apparently I don't.

While typing this I already noticed that there are of course more options than just Fugu. There's Cyberduck, apparently Krusader also is nice and Disk Order sounds perfect if it would support SCP/SFTP. So I have some options ahead of me. But until I invest the time and find something that works at least as well as WinSCP, my development work on the Mac is limited to Java applications.

--- January 21, 2008 - Frank van Puffelen ---

I might have finally found my WinSCP replacement. Read more about it here.

Don't mistake the means for the goal

Last weekend my wife was balancing her checkbook. Not that we have a problem making ends meet, but after an embarrassing situation at an ATM she really wanted to figure out why these things sometimes happen to her. I agreed to help her, as long as she would do the actual work herself and draw her own conclusions.

As it quickly turned out, she had no idea where her salary is going. So I suggested she'd categorize her spendings based on what she could find in the tele-banking application. She went to work on it. I knew that something was going wrong when I entered her room three hours later and found her still busy categorizing.

It turned out that she had found this online checkbook application, which could show all kinds of charts based on your spendings. All you had to do was upload a dump of the tele-banking information and categorize it using their "super friendly" web interface. Three hours later and she still wasn't done categorizing just a few months worth of spendings.

I asked my wife whether this was really worth the time. After all, categorizing spendings was not the goal. It was just supposed to be a means to quickly figure out where her money was going. She assured me that it was worth it; she was almost done and then she would know.

An hour and a half later she was indeed done and proudly called me in. "See. I spent this much on our Holidays. And that much on gas." Very interesting information I'm sure, but not what I was interested in. "I'm pretty sure I also paid part of those Holidays", I said. "Does this mean that I didn't pay my fair share?" She started clicking on the charts frantically. "It must be in there?" She couldn't find it and had to go back to the tele-banking application to look it up through a quick search.

Forty-five minutes later we had pretty much figured out where her money is going. And although the online checkbook gave some nice charts, we frequently had to go back to the "source" (the tele-banking application) for additional details. The online checkbook seemed like a nice, quick way of doing the categorizing. But when it turned out it wasn't very fast, she should have stopped entering data into it. Categorizing the spendings was just a means to figure out what type of things her money was being spent on, it wasn't the goal.

It turned out that I indeed didn't pay my fair share of the Holidays and that she was paying for some insurances that really should come from our shared account. With that and a solid resolution to determine where all the cash withdrawals are going she's pretty sure that those embarrassing ATM incidents should not occur anymore. Or at least not too frequently...

Using the iMac for music playback

Now that we've had an iMac in our living room for a few months, we've started using it for many things. One of the most obvious ones is that -after spending almost a month ripping our CD collection- we now use it to play music from. Sure we already had a mediacenter in the living room. But by using the mac, we only have to switch on one device instead of two.

But something that really annoys me is all these small sounds that are added to the music. Just last night we we're listening to the new Crowded House album and right at the end of the song Silent Trees I heard a woosh sound that was not supposed to be there. And at the start of the next song, there was a tring-like sounds that I did not recall hearing before.

So here is one simple request to my family, friends and co-workers: can you please stop signing in and out of iChat while the music is playing?

My first game of planning poker

Yesterday I took part in the first sprint planning meeting of my life. We have started up a new development project and we decided to use Scrum as the process. The project is actually quite small, so we have just two developers (myself included) and a product owner for it.

The product owner had prepared nicely and had a quite extensive product backlog. He had even filled in a "how to demo" field for a lot of the stories, which I'm not sure he's supposed to do before the sprint planning. At least it wasn't very handy to have the "how to demo" in place, as it makes it harder to discuss alternative solutions for the same functionality.

After the product owner had explained each story, we were to come up with an estimate of how much work (in ideal man days/story points) it would be to implement the story. I have done many of these estimation sessions before, but this time we decided to play a game of planning poker. Being the good scrum master that I am, I had brought two packs of (rather improvised) planning poker cards.

The other developer and I talked through the story, determining what it would take. We were basically already breaking the story down in tasks, which was a nice head start for the actual breaking down we planned to do later. After agreeing on the tasks, we would go into our poker deck and select the card matching our estimate. When we both had selected a card, we'd pull it out of the deck at the same time - revealing our estimate.

Now I must admit that I wasn't too impressed with the transparency that this estimating method brought. I guess -just as with real poker- you shouldn't play with just two players. There was actually only one story where we seemed to have a big difference in estimate: 8 vs 13 points. But as it turns out, our decks just didn't have any numbers in between 8 and 13. We had both wanted to select a 10, but since that wasn't there we just had to pick something slightly higher or lower. Being the planning pessimist that I am, I of course picked the 13. :-)

So there you have it: I played the game of planning poker. It wasn't anything special or extremely different from the ways I've done estimations before. But I guess that contrary to popular belief, being extremely different is not what Scrum is about. What is it about then, you ask? I'll let you know when I find out. Because if I answered that question now, I'd just be repeating the Scrum/Schwaber mantra.

a List vs. IList

One of the advantages of being a programming language polyglot is that you get to see the difference of how people work in all those languages. Of course it might take a while before you're comfortable enough with a language to be able to appreciate it, yet step back far enough to see the patterns of people (including yourself) using that language. But once you do, it takes your understanding of programming languages to a whole new level.

That's all very nice and abstract, but I recently encountered a very practical example of the difference between the C# collection classes and the Java collection classes. While reviewing some of the code of a new prodct, I noticed that a lot of methods in the API were accepting and returning List objects.

• List filterInstructions(List instructions);

Now without reading further tell me, which language is this: C# or Java. Don't worry, I'll wait while you think about it...





Ok, that wasn't very nice of me. You can't really tell which language it is, since the syntax is valid in both.

But there is a huge difference in what it actually means in both languages. In C# List is a concrete implementation of the IList interface. In Java List is an interface, which is implemented by classes like LinkedList and ArrayList. Do you notice the subtle difference? In C# List is a concrete implementation, in Java it is an interface. So the above code sample in C# would accept only instances of the List class (or a subclass), while the Java implementation would accept any implementation of its List interface.

Now I don't want to start a debate on whether classes should accept or return interfaces or concrete classes. There are plenty of good discussions out there. What I want to do is show what might cause the difference in what I often see in Java code and what I see in C# code.

The example above was from a C# class in one of our products. So the developer chose to expose a concrete List implementation, instead of the IList interface. I noticed this and -coming from a Java background- wondered whether our Java developers would normally expose e.g. an ArrayList in Java. They wouldn't. They would expose the List interface instead. So I asked the C# developer why he chose to expose the concrete class, rather than the interface. He didn't have a specific reason, he just did what was easiest: expose the List class.

Keep in mind that a good developer is a lazy developer. So actually this developer was taking the right approach (be lazy) yet he got a different result than what I'm used to seeing in Java code. But then why wouldn't a Java developer expose his ArrayList, but instead choose to expose the List interface?

Well... I know one possible reason. Both of them are exposing the same thing: a list. And actually they are both saying exactly that in their contract: we're accepting and returning a list. It's just that when you literally say that in C# ("I am exposing a List") it translates into a concrete class, while if you say the same thing in Java ("I am exposing a List") it translates into an interface.

It's really all a matter of understanding how a developer thinks and how your choices in class library design influence that thinking. In this case it is very simple: Microsoft seems to put the List class first in your mind, while Sun/Netscape puts the List interface first. A small detail to many, but I found it an interesting difference between the platforms. What a difference an I makes. :-)

Background compilation vs background unit test runner

A few months ago I posted about how to get background compilation in Visual Studio by using Resharper. It's really remarkable how background tools like these can improve your productivity. Sure, you'll have to learn to ignore the red wiggly lines until you're done typing. In that respect it is no different than the spell checking in Word or Firefox. But once you know when to check the results and when to ignore them, background compilation with "in code" feedback is a real time saver. I probably would have worn out my ctrl-shift-B combo long ago without it.


This week I noticed that even though compilation is automatic, you still have to start unit tests manually. And while they're running, you have to wait for the unit tests to complete before you can continue working on your code. And if you have a substantial set of tests, like the good test-driven developer, running them may take a few minutes. So running the tests is quite disruptive to the development process.

And as you probably know, if something breaks the flow of your development process you probably won't do it as often as might be useful. Why are continuous build systems so good? Because they work automatically when you check something into your version control system. Why is background compilation so good? Because it works automatically as you're making changes to the code.

So why can't we then have the unit tests running in the background? Sure, it'll eat up some resources. But it's not like my machine needs all its megahertz's to keep up with my typing anyway. And I can only imagine how great it would be to automatically see a purple line appear under some code I just changed that broke one of the unit tests.

Sounds like cool stuff to me. Does anyone know if this already exists?

Darth Vader's sword

I just wondered about something yesterday:

Jedi knights use light sabers since they are on the good side

But shouldn't darth vader then be using a dark saber?

I know, it has nothing to do with technology - except for being extremely geeky. But sometimes these questions just pop into your mind.