Planet OTI

In the fall of 2005 laser printers had fallen to the near $100 mark and our ink jet printer seemed to have an endless appetite for (expensive) ink cartridges.  It was time for a change, and while colour printing is nice - a lot of our printing needs were very basic.  At the time, staples.ca had multiple web coupons you could “stack” and cut a $199 printer down to $126, and there was a $30 mail in rebate on top of that.  I never got the mail in rebate due to the standard rebate avoidance techniques (by the time I found out what I needed months later, the box had gone into the trash).

The printer I bought was the Samsung ML-2010.  It was known to be easy to refill, and considering that a new toner cartridge was nearly $100 at the time - I knew I’d be going the DIY route when the time came.  A full 3 years later we still use this printer and it has been mostly trouble free.  The toner had finally gotten low enough that we needed to do something (taking the cartridge out and shaking it wasn’t helping much anymore).

I figured I’d be getting one of the toner refill kits from eBay, but which one?  I turned to redflagdeals.com and found this thread that pointed me at TonerKits.  While the thread was started back in 2004, but its still going strong at 47 pages with recent positive reports.  I purchased from TonerKits via eBay simply selected the right kit for my printer.  I paid $11.99 USD (7.99 + 4 shipping), but looking today - the same kit is $9.99 with free shipping.  The eBay transaction was quick, and smooth.

Refill Kit Includes:
1 - 100g black toner refill
1 - pouring spout w/cap
1 - set illustrated instructions

(there are cheaper kits with less toner, 100g will fill to ~75% level twice)

Pictured above is my toner cartridge and the 3 items I received from TonerKits.  The refill process was very simple.

The first step is to remove the two screws on the side of the cartridge.  Then gently pull/pry the side off using your finger nails or possibly a small flat head screwdriver.  You will want to avoid touching the green strip on the cartridge (normal toner cartridge care here folks).

Once the side is removed, you can access the round plug.  This comes out fairly easly with a little prying from a flat head screwdriver.  Take it slow - it is a friction fit and may need patience.

Once the plug is out, it is time to add toner.  Give the toner bottle a good shake to break up any clumps, then carefully open it and put the pouring spout on.  The spout goes in the hole, and I used a gentle tapping on the outside of the toner bottle while holding the bottle inverted.  The instructions warn you to not squeeze the bottle, toner is very fine dust and will get everywhere easily.

Did I mention to not squeeze the bottle?  This is the result of my barely squeezing it after I had removed the spout from the hole.

Reassembly is straight forward, reverse the steps.  Give the cartridge a good shake after it is all together to distribute the toner.  A quick test print verified things were all good.

If you’ve been thinking about doing a toner refill and weren’t sure if you could manage it.  Assuming you’ve got a printer like the Samsung ML-2010 which is refill friendly, its very easy.

After months of agonizing over the decision to buy a PS3 I finally made the leap.   This is a decision that I’ve been mulling over since I purchased the Epson 1080UB back in January.  Once Blu-ray had “won” the format battle, the PS3 was nearly certainly on my wish list.  However, early in the year I chose to go with the Oppo 980 DVD player instead of making the leap to the PS3.

There are some stand alone players that are worth considering now.  While you can purchase one in around the $200 mark now, you may end up slightly disappointed with the quality.  Yes - a cheap player will enable you to watch and build a Blu-ray collection, but you are making trade offs on quality.  Looking more at the mid-range offerings, the Sony S550 is very recently available in Canada and offers some features that the PS3 does not.  It benefits from being a stand alone, single function device with IR control.  The S550 also provides internal decoding of the HD audio streams and discreet analog outs.  The PS3 edges it out slightly for performance, but the S550 will run cooler (quieter).  It was a tough choice - but the PS3 also serves as a media center and is more flexible appealing to the geek in me.

I’ve been watching the slow progression the PS3 has made recently, hoping that there would be an additional price break or introduction of new lower power chips.  Neither has really happened over the course of the year.  While 45nm cell processors are a possibility, the PS3 still uses a 65nm cell.  The RSX (graphics chip) is still the original 90nm version.  As a result the unit still pulls around 135Watts of power when in use.

The new 80Gig low end unit is effectively the same as the 40Gig that has been available since late 2007.  It does not have backwards compatibility, and features a reduced number of USB ports and connectivity options.  For folks like myself interested in Blu-ray playback or the PS3 games then it has what it needs.  Earlier units which supported backwards compatibility had the larger cell processors and more chips to support the old games, this meant running hotter with more fan noise.  I haven’t used the PS3 extensively yet, but so far it is quieter than the fan in my projector - which is very quiet (siimlar to the low fan noise of my laptop).

There are no deals on the PS3 happening in Canada.  I was able to score a minor deal from BestBuy.ca which lately has had the best prices on a number of the things I’ve been looking for.  Normally when they have customer appreciation sales with discounts in the 10% range video game hardware is excluded.  As chance would have it a sale cropped up that offered discounts that did include video game hardware.  I was amused to find that the next day a very similar online sale started and ran for a week duration, but specifically excluded video game hardware.

Only $25 off a PS3 isn’t much to boast about.  Considering that in the US people have access to a SonyStyle visa which gives them $100 credit on their first qualifying purchase over $299.

Previously FutureShop.ca had free shipping on many items and BestBuy.ca did not.  Now that both stores off an in store pick up (ISPU) that has no shipping cost, FutureShop now charges for shipping.  Just last night I ordered a copy of Wall E from BestBuy.ca for $27.99 + $1.99 shipping + tax, beating out FutureShop.ca’s price of $28.99.  Of course, both of these prices at the two stores are not available for in store pick up so you have to pay shipping - and they are not filed under the Blu-ray category making it harder to find (they are under DVD, but are clearly Blu-ray media).  This might not seem like a deal with Amazon.com selling it at $24.95, but with the exchange rate the story is quite different.

Of course, to cable it into my system I needed to buy some cables.  The PS3 supports audio over HDMI or digital optical out.  Since I don’t have an HDMI capable audio setup, I went with a digital optical cable.  My projector only has 2 HDMI inputs, and I wanted to continue to run DVD via HDMI so the Satellite box lost out and has moved to component.  I used Tartan Cables for the component and digital cables, and its parent company Blue Jeans Cable for the HDMI as they had a sale on their old BJC-Series2.  All of the cables came in a single shipment, since Tartan and BlueJean are really the same business.

The PS3 only comes with a single controller, which can be used to control Blu-ray playback but there is an additional Sony Bluetooth remote you can purchase.  I was able to find one used in mint condition for $15 from someone who had upgraded to an integrated automation solution.  The PS3 has been criticized for not having a standard IR control story, and there is merit to this argument.  A number of 3rd party solutions exist such as IR2BT, ps3toothfairy, Schmart and IR4PS3.  I’ve chosen to go with the latter, it is built in Canada and uses the guts from the official Sony Bluetooth based remote meaning it has 100% compatibility.

There are still lots of things for me to do to get the PS3 setup to my satisfaction.  I haven’t yet ordered the rack shelf, but it will be another 2U unit from MiddleAtlantic.  There is a very long thread on AVSForum on setting up the PS3 for Blu-ray playback.  I will also want to get the AVS HD 709 calibration disc and see where things sit (this opens up the whole calibration can of worms again and I really need to find time to do more on this front).  And of course there will be actually getting the IR4PS3 and integrating that into my remote control setup.

Initial impressions can be summarized in one word: Wow.  The ability to deliver 1080p content to my projector (not upscaled) is awesome.  I haven’t yet watched a Blu-ray disc, but just the intro/menu of the Indiana Jones Crystal Skull looks great.  Another thing that impressed me was that my MythTV box was discovered on the network, recognized as a media server - and the PS3 was able to play back recorded content without any complicated setup.   This alone justifies the choice of the PS3 over a stand-alone player for my needs.

Ola Bini, just wrote about how he’s planning to have a special variable to expose the result of a regular expression match in his new language Ioke.

The idea is to introduce a special variable called it, which holds the result of the conditional expression in an if or unless statement, or method in Ioke’s case. Ola says that this is different from the special Ruby globals like $~ because For one, it’s not a global variable. It’s only available inside the lexical context if an ‘if’ or ‘unless’ method. It’s also a lexical variable, meaning it can be captured by a closure. And finally, it’s a general solution to more things than the regular expression problem.

As it turns out, I learned at RubyConf that the Ruby ‘globals’ which give access to the results of the last regular expression match, aren’t really globals at all. This came up in a conversation after the MagLev presentation, when Charlie Nutter asked Allen Otis of Gemstone how they were handling those variables, since they are really frame locals. Matz was standing there and quickly confirmed Charlies observation.

So $~ and it’s friends, like $1, are really more like special names for local variables. Other than the lexical ‘look’ they behave more like locals than globals.

I just concocted a completely bogus Ruby program to demonstrate this.

def lambdas(str, re)
   re.match(str)
   [lambda {$~}, lambda {|str| re.match(str)}]
end

m_lambda, match_lambda = *lambdas("this", /(this|that)/)
puts "(m_lambda.call)[1] is #{(m_lambda.call)[1].inspect}"
/(foo)/.match("foo")
puts "$~[1] is #{$~[1].inspect}"
puts "m_lambda still is #{(m_lambda.call)[1].inspect}"
match_lambda.call('that')
puts "now m_lambda is #{(m_lambda.call)[1].inspect}"
puts "$~[1] is still #{$~[1].inspect}"

The lambdas method returns two lambdas, the first simply returns the current value of $~ when evaluated, the second does a match against the regular expression passed into the lambdas method with a new string, on demand.

When run this produces the following output:

(m_lambda.call)[1] is "this"
$~[1] is "foo"
m_lambda still is "this"
now m_lambda is "that"
$~[1] is still "foo"

Note that $~ in the outer context is a different variable than $~ in the context of the invocation of the lambdas method. Let’s call these the outer and inner $~ variables respectively. Doing a regular expression match in the outer context leaves the inner $~ unchanged, while calling the second lambda affects the value of the inner $~ but leaves the outer $~ unchanged.

As they say, you learn something new every day.

Chad Woolley sent a link to this video. That’s yours truly on the right, next to David Chelimsky. Jim Weirich has his back to the camera. Doug Alcorn is sitting on the table. I’m sorry but I don’t know the names of the other two.

Chad also sent a link to a set of photos he took.

Update

Jim Weirich commented “The guitarist in front of me in the orange tie-dye shirt is Corey Haines.” Unfortunately, I was too quick on my spam filtering and deleted his comment before I noticed it among all the drug spam posts. After a period which was relatively blog-spam free, the spam posts have started to appear again. Perhaps this is driving the e-mail spammers to blog-spam!?

It has been a troubling experience getting OmniFocus to work on the iPhone but I am now able to finally use it the way I have wanted. In fact, when looking back, it was around July 11th of this year when I first tweeted about buying the OmniFocus application for my iPhone. So yeah, I have been wanting this for a while.

The trouble has been that OmniFocus for the iPhone initially only worked with the MobileMe and WebDAV services. I did setup an Online File Folder account with GoDaddy but it didn’t work right. I would sync my data only to find that repeating tasks would start duplicating on both my iPhone and my desktop. This proved too be to annoying to cope with and eventually I gave up using the app on my iPhone.

The good news (and something I have been patiently waiting for) is that OmniFocus for the desktop (version 1.5) and OmniFocus for the iPhone (version 1.1.2) both support Bonjour network synching now. This means that I can sync the data between my desktop and my iPhone using my local network. Finally, it all works!

The setup is really easy. For OmniFocus on the desktop, you just need to adjust your preferences as such:

(click to view)

Then from the iPhone, you enter the settings menu and pick the Bonjour network as shown here:

The best part, of course, is being able to make use of all your actions while on the go. Here are some screenshots that show OmniFocus being used on my iPhone:

(home screen)

(main application screen)

(contexts screen)

I have written about OmniFocus many times before on this site (more notes here) but if you are looking for a GTD solution that works both from your desktop and while you are mobile, then this is definitely worth checking out. I’m definitely happy with it (finally).

I want to encourage you. Forget your ailments. Forget recession, financial crisis and your subprime poisoned fonds. Forget your workplace problems for a moment. Forget your slow DSL connection at home.

Add joy to your life!

Come and register for Eclipse Summit Europe. Two days of joy. Two days of excitement. And two days of nice company. An evening with beer and music (thanks to MicroDoc GmbH). Fast internet connection. At least that's what the Forum in Ludwigsburg promises

So, what are you waiting for?

Ralph

The deadline for proposals for EclipseCon09 is just two weeks away! OK it’s still two whole weeks, so no panic, but since we all know you’re not going to submit anything until the very last minute anyway, now might be a good time to plan on panicking.

Some suggestions, just to get yourself ready:

1. Scream “OMG! OMG! Why did I put this off for so long?!”. Practice on family pet, then try on a loved one.
2. Send out a mad flurry of emails to people who you’ve said, “You know, we should really write a paper on that someday”, asking them if they can remember what the heck exactly “that” was.
3. Open whatever app you like for document writing. Turn on favorite music. Stare at blank page for awhile. Go get coffee, return, repeat.
4. Write some gibberish. Close without saving. Curse. Tell your workmates how brilliant the proposal was while flaming the software tools industry for allowing innocent users to exit without saving.
5. For inspiration, browse EclipseCon08 papers. Remember how clever that Cory Doctorow was. Go to BoingBoing, read some posts. Follow links to steampunk sites. Puzzle as to why your web browser is open in the first place.
6. While at lunch, suddenly shout out, “Quiet, I’m trying to concentrate!”, then resume eating. Try first in busy cafeteria, then at Wendy’s drive thru for contrast.
7. Get out notepad, a blue pen, and a red pen. In blue write, “EclipseCon09 Submission Outline” at the top. Carefully underline it. Use the red pen for that. Pick up blue pen. Draw happy faces and other favorite doodles. Alternate last step with red pen. Ponder the wonder of color and whether paper and ink is additive or subtractive. Try to remember which pill you were supposed to take in The Matrix.
8. Stare wild eyed at whoever walks into your office.  Try not to listen to anything they say while compulsively glancing back at computer.

With this guidance, I believe you’ll be fully prepared for the inevitable last minute submission panic.

• The start of the week that holds American Thanksgiving?
• The day the lead singer of Queen died?
• The day that the Brady Bill passed the United States Congress?
• The last day to submit a proposal for EclipseCon 2009?

• You can tell us about your peer and community interactions or your successes and failures with ecosystem building.
• Do you have insights and experiences on how to work in the open, or how to foster or be a successful contributor or committer? Please don't limit yourself to just Eclipse experiences. Other communities experiences can be very relevant.
• If you are an expert on the Eclipse foundation and its governance model, licensing or the Eclipse IP process, share with the rest of us.
• The Eclipse development process...a whole world unto itself ready for you to help us explore.
• How did you start your Eclipse project, foster its growth and sustain its maintenance?

As some of you have noticed, it was impossible to register for Eclipse Summit 2008 for the last couple of hours.

The way Bjorn explained it to me: "There was some bogus sysadmin stuff going on!"

The site is back now – so you can go ahead and register, if you haven't already!

Ralph

I recently learned of DynDNS, a free dynamic DNS service, from Paul VanderLei. As most know, the connection to your ISP is always a dynamic IP address which means that you might have a 24 hour window (roughly) where you can hand out your IP address for others to connect to your home server before it changes again. Obviously, this is not optimal. Enter DynDNS. They allow you to create a domain name that others can depend on without worrying about the IP address changing underneath. The following demonstrates how easy this is to set up:

1. Create a free DynDNS account.
2. Add a new hostname where you can choose your name and then pick from a selection of suffixes. Example: aeonscope.homeip.net.
   
3. Download the DnyDNS client. This is what updates DnyDNS with your new IP address as it changes.
4. Finally, launch your AirPort Utility, click on the Advanced tab, select port mapping, and then personal web sharing or whatever service you are planning to host:
   

In my case, I choose to use only port 3000 since I’m mainly just hosting my Rails apps to share with others for development purposes. Thanks Paul, for the tip. Hopefully others will find this useful as well.

King Arthur: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
      -Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail

Unfortunately, source code, like coconuts, needs help to migrate from on repository to another. When we started, we only wanted to change where our Smalltalk source was stored. We had lived with multiple repositories and were tired of ensuring that dependent changes in each of the repositories got into the right build, or was correctly backed out when there were problems. Our original goal was only to replace the ENVY repository with CVS, or any other version control system, and continue to use all the existing browsers.

To get to that goal, we needed a way to export our Smalltalk code to flat files and a way to load from the files back into the image. The obvious answer is Smalltalk's existing file-format, the "chunk" format. Chunk format, while fine for computers, leaves something to be desired when it comes to human consumption. Various other file-formats for Smalltalk have been development but none of them felt quite right for us.

Our solution is something we call FileBasedSmalltalk (FBS), which has become on of the core components of STDT. FBS provides a meta-model to map classes and methods back to their files so that the source can be kept on disk, not in memory. The model maps FbApplications, FbSubApplications, FbClassDefinitions, FbExtensions and FbMethods onto their "normal" ENVY model objects. The FbLoader is responsible for reading the files in and creating these model objects. To provide name resolution, the FbResolver was created and it can be thought of as the Smalltalk dictionary for FBS.

I can hear you thinking, "You have a meta-model... you still haven't actually installed any classes in the image" and you're right. The EmImageBuilder is a fantastically complex piece of code that does a great job of atomically loading classes, applications, etc. We definitely didn't want to rewrite it, so we did the next best thing - we subclassed it. FbImageBuilder is the new image builder that can force the FBS model objects into the right shape, allowing them to be loaded and installed as classes. Getting this correct was a lot of fun as mistakes often meant starting with a new image.

Now, I've explained how the Smalltalk source gets loaded into the image, but what does this have to do with repository migration? At the same time we were getting the FBS figured out and working, we had started to mirror all of our code from ENVY into CVS each as part of every build. Source code without history - no change comments and no ability to see why things changed - makes it very difficult to determine if that nonsensical code snippet is there for some vastly important reason or can be safely removed. Today there is over a full year's worth of history in CVS for all of our Smalltalk source.

As part of each build, our Smalltalk tools were run twice, once from ENVY and once using FBS. The output from the two were compared to ensure they were identical. It was now safe to only run the tools using FBS, although ENVY was still the "master" for the source and the mirroring to CVS continued. And that was the migration, a gradual switch once confidence had been built up in the new tools.

Turned out that trying to keep the ENVY browsers and make them work on files was more work than was practical. Instead, the STDT tools were born.

Ars Technica: First look at Windows 7’s User Interface

Looks like Windows 7 is going to have a bunch of interesting new task management features. (Of course, Microsoft has been pulling the ol’ bait-and-switch on things like since Memphis…we’ll see what actually ships.) The taskbar is getting a complete overhaul: thumbnails and “Jump Lists” look cool. Window management is changing as well; I especially like the ability to dock a window on one half of the screen.

Even if you’re not a Windows user, major new features like this will no doubt influence other platforms.

Engineering Windows 7: The Taskbar

Seeing the Ars article on Windows 7 reminded me about this post that I saw a while back. It sets the context for some of the new task management features. The most interesting part is seeing the statistics on what features of the taskbar are actually used, how many windows people typically have open, etc. This is a bit like the kind of data I’m hoping to collect with my tabbed browsing study.

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

This is brilliant. A graphical visualization of system calls in IIS/Windows vs. Apache/Linux. Full size images: IIS, Apache. (via Greg Wilson & Visual Complexity)

Cruz - A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Cruz is a new WebKit-based browser written by Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid. Some cool features: multi-pane browsing, a plugin API, Greasemonkey support, built-in TinyURL support. It’s only at 0.1 now, but I’ll be keeping my eye on this.

The aggregate number and percentage of Securities to which this Schedule 13D relates is 160,566,828 shares of the common stock of the Issuer, constituting approximately 21.2% of the 757,953,410 shares outstanding.

As the result of investment analysis or the occurrence of events, Southeastern may desire to participate in discussions with the particular portfolio company's management or with third parties about significant matters in which Southeastern may suggest possible courses of action to assist in building corporate intrinsic value per share or to cause the Company's true economic value to be recognized. In such situations, Southeastern may elect to convert a filing on Schedule 13G to a filing on Schedule 13D in order to be more active in corporate governance and management matters, and to have the ability to enter into discussions with third parties concerning proposed corporate transactions of a significant nature.

There are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, and in a burst of inspiration today, I realized I can probably tie them all together in one post. Here goes.

Fennec

Fennec is the name of the upcoming mobile Mozilla browser — think Firefox for your phone. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development for a while, especially the UI design discussions that Aza and Madhava have been having. Things are really coming along…last week Madhava posted a walkthrough of the first alpha version:

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

One of the coolest things about Fennec is that it dedicates the entire screen to web content. Pixels are precious on small screens, so you don’t want to waste them on controls that you aren’t using. On the iPhone version of Safari, the title and URL bar are fixed to the top of the page, so that as you scroll down, they disappear. But the navigation bar — with the back, forward, and bookmark buttons — remains fixed at the bottom of the screen. In Fennec, the title and URL bar also disappear when you scroll down the page, but the other controls aren’t at the bottom — they’re accessible by dragging the page to the left or right. Check out the video to see what I mean.

Edward Tufte would be proud: “the content is the interface, the information is the interface — not computer administrative debris.”

Computer Administrative Debris

In his critique of the iPhone interface, Tufte praises the iPhone interfface for minimizing “computer administrative debris”: the buttons, menus, labels, etc. that steal content space away from the users. This is becoming a serious problem as we continue to shoehorn our desktop interfaces into smaller and smaller screens. For example, take a look at an Asus EeePC running Excel:

Barely half of the available screen space is actually taken up by the content.

On larger screens, losing a little content space is not a problem. But then, I find it causes another problem: it’s distracting. My monitor is too big to run apps at full screen, so I have no choice but to work with clutter all around the window I’m focusing on.

Debris on the web

Inspired by Tufte’s coinage, Ryan Tomayko redesigned his web site to remove all of the “computer administrative debris” earlier this year. When I saw it back then, it caught my attention. I thought it was definitely an interesting experiment, but I thought it went a bit too far, although I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I didn’t like about it.

Earlier this afternoon, I was procrastinating on my thesis work, looking for inspiration for the long-promised redesign of this blog. I want to stick with something minimal, and I remembered Ryan’s site, so I swung by to check it out again. This time, I was able to put my finger on what I don’t like — it’s the missing title and navigation bar.

The thing is, without a title and navigation bar, the user is missing a lot of important context. When I visit a web site, I’m happy to see a small banner across the top with a few navigation links, because it quickly gives me some important context about the content I’m looking at, and about the site itself. It’s not strictly necessary, but that’s fine as long as it doesn’t get in my way, and lets my focus on the content. And the way most sites implement a navigation bar, it disappears as soon as you scroll the page, like the URL bar in Fennec. So it’s not persistently in your face, or wasting important screen space.

The other thing a navigation bar does is give you some idea about where the links lead. When I follow a link labeled “about” from someone’s blog, I have a pretty good idea where it’s going to take me. But if I just click on the person’s name, I’m not sure — maybe it’s a mailto link (note: I’m guilty of this one too).

So, by all means, let’s eliminate useless administrative debris. But be careful; you aren’t just moving functionality, you’re also removing important contextual information.

There’s a pattern I fall for, about once a day, while browsing the web on the iPhone. It goes something like this:

1. follow a link to a new page
2. as the page starts filling in, read the first screenful
3. do the “scroll up” gesture to make more content visible
4. watch as the iPhone randomly does one of three things:
   • ignores the gesture completely.
   • waits about a second and then scrolls a few pixels
   • starts loading the page pointed at by the link you happened to be over when you started the scroll up gesture

Ok, so it’s not like I don’t understand what’s going on here: The poor thing is busy painting the page, and it just can’t deal with the added processor requirements of recognizing all of the events that make up the gesture. It either misses them all, or gets just a few of them, which leaves it either scrolling “a bit” or treating the gesture as a click on the link.

The thing is, it really doesn’t matter to me whether this is processor limited, or a bug in the OS (i.e. events get lost), or it’s just a bad design (i.e. input handled in the same thread that does the drawing), but the end result is that because I can’t trust what the phone will do in response to my touch, I have to wait until the page fully “settles” before I start scrolling. On pages that have lots of content and go off to ad services to fill in side bars, etc., this means I wait for a long time.

I mean, c’mon Apple; do I really have to tell you about the need for responsiveness?

Anyway, as frustrating as this is, the only real reason I started ranting about it is because it got me thinking about Eclipse, the UI thread, and the multi-core CPU trend. We’re pushing more and more work into multiple threads, drastically increasing the contention at the glass. The Jobs framework and UIJobs are interesting, but don’t address issues like recognizing when multiple jobs are attempting to paint conflicting (or even exactly the same) information in the UI… Anyway, there are aspects of the e4 “modeled UI” that are related to this, but it’s not clear that we’ve thought enough about it yet. Hm…

I just read Wayne’s nice blog about accessibility in Eclipse.

As some of you may know, before moving to CS I did three years of Industrial Design. A lesson I always remember is that its a mistake to regard accessibility as a secondary design function. Rather, one must realize that we are all disabled, to some degree, at some point. It could be weak eyesight, RSI, a broken wrist from a skiing accident, tired after a long day… Good design incorporates accessibility from the start.

For example, doorknobs are bad, but door handles are good. Doorknobs require grip strength, thus fail if you have arthritis, hands full with grocery bags, cream on your hands… while as door handles are usable with an elbow, a hip, a cane. Its not that they’re designed to be used in these manners, its rather that the ergonomics are gentler and thus lends itself to different ways of using it.

Eclipse is generally regarded as one of the more accessible IDEs, and I know that the platform and JDT UI teams have always taken it quite to heart (others teams as well, no doubt).  But as someone who has attempted to use Eclipse in large font/low color mode, I would say its accessible but not terribly usable. We’d make certain design trade offs differently if we were working in that mode all the time. For example, maybe wouldn’t show icons in the explorer since they don’t provide enough information to warrant the (now limited) real estate. Maybe the shape of the UI is wrong and we shouldn’t use multiple view stacks, instead focusing on a single display area/stack with changeable content like a web page.  We’d likely get rid of some of the pretty but extraneous, space hogging border treatment.

It turns out that if you try to run Eclipse on a low res device like the Eee PC, you’ll hit much of the same issues.  Thus a device change brings with it some similar trade offs as visual accessibility. Its like as if using the Eee PC suddenly makes your vision poor.  You become “disabled”.   Designing for accessibility meanwhile has the positive side effect of increasing usability on the Eee PC.

In the best design, accessibility emerges naturally as the outcome of a highly flexible and broadly usable UI. Ideally our UIs would transition gracefully to these different usage contexts.

Everyone then wins.

I am very happy to announce that we have a new project proposal at Eclipse.

Now the fact that we have a new project proposal is not in itself very interesting. We have those all the time. What is new and interesting about this one, however, is that it is being supported by our friends at Microsoft. That’s right, Microsoft is funding our member company Soyatec to develop Eclipse tools for Silverlight. This project is not only building development tools for Silverlight, it is also focused on easing the integration of Java-based web sites and services with Silverlight applications.

Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE) ….Microsoft announced plans to support additional tools for developing Silverlight applications by providing funding to Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, to lead a project to integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE. Soyatec plans to release the project under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge and submit it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project….

Please check out the SLDT project proposal, and comment on the newsgroup (if it’s not up, it will be shortly). We hope to see lots of interested parties join in on the effort.

As you can imagine, there have been lots of conversations that have led to this point. Those conversations lead me to believe that at least some people at Microsoft “get it” when it comes to open source. They are looking to open source as a path to increase their revenue and drive incremental customer value by making more of their stack interoperable with other technologies. It’s not about ideology, it’s about making good business and technical decisions.

We at the Eclipse Foundation are thrilled to have Microsoft supporting open source projects here. We hope this is just the beginning of a long and beneficial relationship. We certainly look at it as a strong endorsement of Eclipse’s model of collaborative development.

Next Wednesday, October 15th at 12:30pm Eastern time I will be giving my first web talk via Eclipse Live.

The talk is going to be “A Practitioners Guide to Ecosystem Development”. Consider it a peak into what we at the Eclipse Foundation think about how to build and foster ecosystems around the Eclipse technology.

It should be fun. I hope to see you there.

I hate the idea of strategic voting. I’ve always been a strong believer in voting for the party/candidate that most strongly reflects your world view. This year, however, I’m strongly tempted to vote Liberal (even though I think they’re idiots), simply because I believe the prospect of having a Conservative majority in government *now*, at the point when the world is about to go through a significant upheaval would be tragic.

The thing is, when I look at the state of the world — ecologically, socially, and economically — and how I feel that we will have to respond to it, it’s clear that the party that best reflects my views is the Greens. I also believe that many, many others in Canada feel the same way.

The NDP are also close, if they could just figure out that sometimes “Environment first” is going to have to trump “People first”, so that our kids get to have a world worth living in too.

So what to do… hm…

Btw, do you realize that if the Americans aren’t careful, they may end up with a vice-president who believes that Christ will return during her lifetime (or at least believed this at one point during her life).

Random, unrelated question: Is insanity grounds for disqualification for leadership in the U.S.?

Now that Ganymede is out the door and the teams have had a chance to breathe a bit, its worth taking a few minutes to think about how you can promote all the hard work you’ve put into the release. One of the best forums you could ask for is Eclipse Summit Europe. I’ve been to all of the ESE events and have found them to be fantastic. The conference is chock full of interesting people and talks. The venue is very inviting and if we are lucky, there will be another caipirinha night.  Why not make one of those talks (and drinks) be yours this year? The first step is to propose a talk. The conference is in November but the talk submission deadline is coming up in September. Don’t put it off, submit early and often…

This is just too cool. The ECF guys (in particular Mustafa Isik) have some up with a system for real-time shared editing mechanism called Cola. I’ve not tried it myself but the screencast they put together is so compelling that I had to stop watching it and post this! Check it out. Very cool. And the HD mode on the video is awesome. Well done guys.

p.s., yes I realize that I used “cool” three times in this short post. What can I say…

Often when I ride my recumbent kids will light up and say things like, “wow, cool bike mister”.  Parents will tell their children, “look at the neat bike”.  This evening, one kid about maybe 10 said, “That looks like its really relaxing”.  I told him he was very smart.  I always say a kind “thank you”.

I will admit that when I first got years ago I wondered the kinds of reactions I’d get.  Almost 100% its positive.  Even the teens, who try to be oh so reserved, will often chirp up, “Nice bike man”.

And what a wonderful way to ride along the Ottawa river, surrounded by the beauty of the river, trees and parks, and the excited kids greeting me. I often come back with a kind of happy glow about me.

I’m just tickled that I’ve now been referenced from two news links:

1. An infoworld article on the talk I did at EclipseCon with Tim Wagner
2. An infoq article with a quote from my eclipse blog on the Eclipse e4 work

Not that I go searching for such things (both I was informed of by others).  What I find interesting is that I always have this model in my mind that I’m just doing these little things and am surprised when others notice them!  Both are nice positive articles, which is a relief compared to being completely misrepresented in The Register in 2006 (which I won’t even link to).

Thursday night I was also captain of the team that entered in the Developer Bowl. We defeated CodeGear, and Intel defeated the notorious Google team. In the finals, IBM beat Intel by a very slim margin.

More pictures and a victory video are available here.