Goo.gl URL shortened goes public

Google have made their shortener service, http://goo.gl, available for public use. Previously it was up but shortened URLs could only be created by certified individuals. Now the website is open for all. The announcement is at http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html

Atlassian acquires BitBucket

Altassian announced that they have acquired popular Mercurial (Hg) hosting site BitBucket. As part of the announcement, 5-user accounts will remain free, whilst a tiered pricing system for those with more than 5-user accounts is priced in support contracts accordingly. Those with existing subscription accounts have had them cancelled; BitBucket used to collect payments through PayPal, but Atlassian have their own support/pricing structures. Those subscribers will receive a mail message indicating the upcoming changes.

Mercurial is a popular Distributed Version Control System, and BitBucket is to Mercurial what GitHub is to Git. According to the FAQ on the acquisition, BitBucket now has over 60,000 users on its books. (This corresponds with GitHub's announcement of 1 million repositories; though an average of 5 repositories per user gives an approximate 200,000 GitHub users.) The acquisition can only help to improve the popularity of Mercurial as a DVCS.

Mercurial is one of many version control systems that are supported by Atlassian's products. These include Git and Mercurial support for FishEye and Crucible, and third-party support for Bamboo. They are committed to delivering native support for DVCS in future versions of their tools.

Git presentation at NSCoderNightLondon

I was invited to give a talk on Git to NSCoderNightLondon last week, and the slides have been made available as both a Keynote document and a PDF. The presentation was really an interactive one so there's not that much explanatory text; it may not stand up on its own that well. Still, if you're interested, you can see that. Thanks to @Abizern for organising.

For those that are interested in a little more explanation, you can see a similar screencast I made available for the Eclipse DemoCamp London this year about Eclipse's Git team provider.

All quiet on the blue front

It's been a bit quiet on this blog recently <crickets> and really I don't have any decent excuse other than life being sufficiently busy. As Doug said, “I should blog more. But Twitter is so much faster.”

The good news is that I've not been entirely out of action. My InfoQ contributions are drip-feeding in place, including the fairly popular Oracle Confirms Plan B for the JDK on the recent change in plans for the JDK's content, and JSRs: What Lies Beneath as a dive into how JSRs work, and why apparently simple changes to the Java language take so much to go from idea to ideal. I still want to continue my modularity series (last updated with Modular Java: Declarative Modularity) and in fact have notes for the next couple; but finalising them still needs more time to complete.

So, what have I been up to? Well, I transitioned to a new role at work which is a lot more OSGi- and Eclipse-focussed, so I'll finally be putting my knowledge to good use as opposed to purely an evangelistic role. Obviously I can't say anything more about it, but it will be an interesting departure from my prior role and a good challenge for what goes ahead. Since any role change involves some form of upheaval it's meant other things have taken more of a back burner.

The other good news is that I've recently had my CAA flight medical unrevoked, so I'm now able to go flying again. The last time I went flying was shortly after Holly's birth so she hasn't flown with me at all (conversely, Sam flew on his first birthday to Le Touquet). Since I'm out of hours, I need to spend a few getting up to speed again; fortunately, it seems I can still remember how to fly and even get the plane down safely – if not entirely bounce-free – with a 60° cross-wind, which I don't consider to be too shabby. Hopefully I'll be able to get that out of the way in the next couple of months and I'll be able to take the family flying for a night-flight towards Christmas.

On the open-source front, ObjectivEClipse remains as dead as ever – though with the recent turn-around on the limitations for Section 3.3.1, it perhaps opens the door for revisiting it again. It's unlikely that will happen any time soon though; it really needs to be a core integral part of CDT and so developed at Eclipse, and there's never really been a huge amount of interest in making it happen. That's not to say it never will, but the law of diminishing returns, particularly with the upcoming Xcode 4, means that it's not tremendously likely.

Finally, ZFS is still something I'm working on in my spare time, but there's not a huge amount of that. I released MacZFS-74 not so long ago, but there were a couple of problems in the switch to MacZFS-75 that I've not yet debugged fully. Unfortunately, that really requires a pair of machines to debug so it's not something I can do unless I'm working back at home. Fortunately, I think my time is freeing up somewhat so I'll be able to devote more time to that in the near future than I have been able to in the past couple of months.