Reviews and Ratings
Subversion was chartered specifically to create a drop-in replacement for CVS -- something that worked similarly, but was friendly to the HTTP infrastructure and addressed some key limitations like the ability to version the directory tree structure. It's done what it set out to do, it's reached a stage of maturity and ubiquity, and I've found it to work reliably and well.
Of course most of the interesting work on source control is now being done elsewhere, in projects that intentionally aren't carrying any baggage from CVS and before.
I'm sure at some point in the not too distant future, my team will be moving to something like git, because that's indeed the next evolutionary step. Who wouldn't want smaller working copies, faster updates, and better, legacy-free approaches to merge drudgery, etc?
But more integrations and tool support are needed -- as well as working connectors for services like Ohloh, and project hosting at places like Google Code, Sourceforge, etc, before I can fully make the leap to a late-model revision control platform, instead of just dabbling. I'm doing my little bit to push that forward, working on a git integration with our content management platform and bugging my vendors for git support.
Anyway, Subversion has been a good friend at work for about 5 years, and will be for a while longer before we move on ... and I don't feel any need whatsoever to beat it up for not being designed from scratch in the 21st century. We'll move on someday, but we won't go away mad.
I'd been an Illustrator user for years -- since 2.0 for Windows! I design visual elements mainly for my company's software projects, and occasionally for friends who ask me to channel my Dad, who was a visual artist and taught me to emulate his style. (My work PC today is the illustration workstation Dad bought in 2003, which I inherited when he passed away in 2004)
I quit buying Illustrator for myself at AI10 because I just couldn't see the value of new upgrades, and as a matter of conscience, I refuse to personally purchase anything containing Macrovision's horrifying node-locked protection scheme. I tried to switch to Sodipodi earlier this decade and couldn't quite achieve lift, so I kept a Windows VM running on Ubuntu Linux in order to keep AI10 alive.
Then Inkscape came along and made AI10 -- and the Windows VM where it runs -- obsolete. Every feature I actually *used* in Illustrator exists, and is easier to interact with, in Inkscape. The native SVG support is encouraging, and the import/export capabilities work beautifully for me.
I've used Inkscape for a number of production illustration tasks now; Adobe, I'm sorry, but I just don't love you any more.
FindBugs provides important negative reinforcement when I fall into bad habits, for example, ignoring exceptions. My customer, your manager, and/or my peers might not notice, but FindBugs will. The certain knowledge that FindBugs will out my dodgy practices very effectively inhbits me from going down such roads in the first place.
I agree the signal/noise ratio of FindBugs is astonishing. In my experience with it, the number of false positives generated by FindBugs very closely approaches zero.
I especially like FindBugs in conjunction with the concurrency annotations package jcip-annotations, which further embarrasses me into rigorously obeying my own thread safety policies.
This is a great idea: a project management system that works like developers think - by coding. I spell out my resources, constraints, tasks and deliverables using a simple programmer-friendly syntax, and TaskJuggler compiles my "program" into a plan, with all the necessary communication artifacts like Gantt charts.
Armed with this, I can make better estimates and understand the challenges facing a complex project. As the project moves forward, it's easy to enter actuals and compare to a baseline, and make new plans where needed. Plus, since the project plan exists as a straightforward text file in program-type syntax, it's beautifully susceptible to revision control, modification by external software, etc.
Like many developers I know, I have often used project management software the opposite way -- making a plan in my head, then coercing the software to document it. TaskJuggler really helps make a plan, not just document one.