Planet OTI

Listen up Europeans!

2010-03-17T21:26:08+00:00

Yes, we'll do it again. For all of you who are not getting out of Eclipse Con and Santa Clara on Thursday: Come by and have a drink with us European Eclipse enthusiasts. As every year, we will gather at David's Restaurant @ Santa Clara Golf and Tennis Club, about 0.2 miles from the convention center. And as every year, we will start our little event around 7pm Pacific time.

Thanks to the German OSGi User Group we have been able to raise our liquids budget by 300 Euro. If you are from Europe and your company wants to become a sponsor too, please let me know! We'll happily add your money to pay the tap.

PS: If you don't have a European passport, we'll let you in too :-) Promise! You might not qualify for a large beer though.

Ralph

Comments

2010 Election Results

2010-03-16T13:14:05+00:00

I am pleased to announce the results of the 2010 Board elections.

The elected Committer Member representatives for 2010 will be:

Chris Aniszczyk

Boris Bokowski

Ed Merks

The elected Sustaining Member (e.g. Solution and Enterprise Member) representatives for 2010 will be:

Hans Kamutzki

Mik Kersten

Adam Lieber

Please join me in extending a hearty congratulations to the winners!

I would also like to extend a warm “thank you” to the remaining candidates: Hans-Joachim Brede, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Shawn Pearce, Doug Schaefer and Yves Yang.

In addition, I would like to recognize Hans-Joachim Brede (Bredex), Doug Gaff, Shawn Pearce (Google) and Mike Taylor (Instantiations) for the past service they provided to the Eclipse Foundation as Directors. They have all been excellent representatives for our community. They will be missed.

Congratulations to Ed, Chris, and Boris

2010-03-16T07:09:46+00:00

Congratulations to the new committer board reps: Ed, Chris, and Boris.

All three are immensely talented individually and will be even better as a team: Ed with his skills in coordinating multiple related projects; Chris with his experience attracting new technologies and mentoring non-corporate projects; and Boris with his extensive knowledge of what is needed to support the core committers. I know they will represent the needs of the most important part of the Eclipse community -- the engine of production and innovation -- the committers and contributors (especially the core committers). It will be hard work, but these three have stepped up to the challenge and I look forward to their accomplishments.

Congratulations!

First sale on eBay

2010-03-16T01:42:30+00:00

It is not uncommon to have purchased something from eBay, I’ve had an account for several years and tend to buy something every couple of months. Most of the items I buy on eBay are low cost and generally hard to find locally. I’d often thought about selling stuff on eBay but just never got started.. until now.

What started this off was a sweep through some of the gadgets and whatnot that we’ve got cluttering up our home office. This stuff has to go, and if it has value let’s sell it – otherwise its time to eCycle it. I initially thought I’d start by selling some N64 games, but the game values (<$5) far outweigh the shipping costs. So I figured I’d move onto the iPod that was no longer being loved ever since the iTouch arrived.

I used eBay to research what the going price was for an iPod in the condition mine was, and priced it on the lower end as a starting point. I set a $10 USD flat rate for shipping since if I shipped to California it would be around $8 shipping + $2 for the bubble mailer. Had someone in Vancouver bought it, I would have lost money on the flat rate shipping (about $4)! Shipping is the first real hurdle you need to get over as a seller, and I think it is worse for Canadians (both as sellers, and buyers).

Lucky me, as a first time seller my first 5 listings are fee free! Cool. Of course, it took nearly 24hrs for my item to appear in any search results (trust me I tried). No worries, it was a 7 day listing so lots of time for people to find it and bid.

Days passed. I watched several broken iPod’s get more bidding activity and a higher price than my item. I could see from the eBay dashboard that after 6 days, only 5 page views of my item had happened (2 which were mine!). Then on the 6th day, the watchers arrived – 8 watchers tracking my item – there is hope. The number of views rapidly climbed.

With less than 6 hours to go in the auction the bidding started. My $30USD start price, jumped up rapidly. 17 bids later it sold for $76USD + $10USD shipping, the winning bid was made in the last minute of the auction from a bidder with no previous bids on my item.

After that it was smooth sailing. Payment was via PayPal (who take a small percentage). A quick trip to the post office and the iPod is on its way to the winner. It has been an interesting experience, one I plan to repeat.

Announcing the e4-Rover Mars Challenge

2010-03-13T19:54:01+00:00

For the last couple of weeks, a few people from the e4 team and NASA JPL have been busy working on a cool programming contest to introduce e4 to the EclipseCon attendees, and to encourage them to try out e4 and learn about it. (See below for acknowledgments.)

The idea is to drive a LEGO rover to collect points - your mission is to align the robot's on-board "instruments" with martian "rocks" in an arena. There are two ways to win - collect the most points to win a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set, or write the best e4-based client to win a Lego Mindstorms and a trip to the NASA robotics lab in Los Angeles. Other prizes include credits for Amazon Web Services and T-Shirts.

The architecture of the game system is interesting - the Lego robot executes commands that are sent to it from a local machine via bluetooth. The clients won't communicate with this local machine directly though - to make everything scalable, data about the state of the game, and an overhead view of the arena and the rover is made available using Amazon Web Services. We have an Equinox-based server on EC2, and are using S3 for making data available in a scalable way.

We provide a basic e4-based client, with a joystick-like way to control the rover. If you want to win the grand prize, you'll have to improve the client to make it look better and operate the robot more efficiently. We basically want people to hack the client to beat the game. To help you do this, we have started a tutorial (which we'll refine and expand over the next few days) and a FAQ. We will also add some more comments to the client code, and perhaps tweak the code a little bit, so make sure you check if there are newer versions of the source code available.

To give people a head start we are making the current source code for the client available today. You can download the code now, run the client but you can't actually control the robot. You need a hash key to control the robot and those will only be given out at EclipseCon. What you will be able to do is watch us have some fun playing with the robot, erm, I mean, perform more testing, because the client includes a webcam view of the robot. More detailed instructions are available on the contest web pages.

I have been playing with the robot for the last week. For a little while, I was at the top of the high score list, but since then others have gotten much better. I'll have to end the blog post here to do some more testing. ;-)

Driving the rover is a lot of fun! It's only a week or so until you can play too, at EclipseCon.

P.S. Credit for the idea goes to Jeff Norris, who will be presenting a keynote on Wednesday. Khawaja, Victor, and Mark from Jeff's team worked on the hardware and the server side, and Brian de Alwis, Benjamin Cabe and myself wrote the simple e4 based client. Lars Vogel is helping with the documentation. Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation is coordinating everything, Lynn is going to help run the contest at EclipseCon, and a good number of e4 committers have been recruited as volunteers.

Now That The Voting Is Over

2010-03-12T12:30:00+00:00

Now that the committer Board rep voting is over and before the results are known¹, I thought I'd ask: why isn't the voting open and transparent? Eclipse is an open source community [1]; committer elections are open and transparent [2]; nothing in the Bylaws requires secrecy [3]; the Foundation staff can see the election results; so why are the committer Board rep elections secret from the committer community?

One thing the Bylaws do specify, but because the elections are secret most committers don't realize, is that I get a more powerful vote than does Jeff McAffer, and both of us get a more powerful vote than John Arthorne. This doesn't make sense to me. Why should I, a very small-time committer [4] have 15x the vote that hard-working Jeff has? Or 200x the vote that mega-contributor John has?

This vote power discrepancy is because "Committer Members who are employed by the same organization shall have only one (1) collective vote with respect to election of the Committer Directors..." [3]. I suspect that this clause was put in to prevent the original single large contributor (IBM) from electing all IBM committer reps, but there are other, better ways to prevent that undesirable result. For example, the Bylaws could allow each committer a single full-strength vote, but constrain the election so that no more than one victor can be from any single member company.

Giving John 1/200^th of a vote and Jeff 1/15^th of vote and myself one entire vote is not the meritocracy that Eclipse strives to be. If anything, John and Jeff should, by the merit of their contributions, have 50 votes to my one vote.

P.S. What's more, with this odd voting system, it's possible for the winners to have less than 10% of the popular vote. Consider the approximately 400 voters: 40 independents @ 1 vote each, 200 IBMers = 1 combined vote, and 160 committers across 29 other member companies = 29 votes, for a total of 70 votes. If 36 of the independents vote for Candidate X, then X will win irrespective of votes from member companies. 36 votes out of 400 total is a mere 9%.

¹ I write this post-voting, pre-results so that it can be solely a question about the elections and not, regardless of the results, seen as arguing about, or attempting to influence, the results. Modulo the odd vote-strength issues described herein, we committers will have elected a good group of Board reps and I know they will work hard to represent all committers.

round 2 concepts

2010-03-11T19:51:04+00:00

We are ready for Round 2 of feedback on an updated Eclipse Logo. We have narrowed the options to four different concepts.

As a reminder, the purpose of this exercise is to see if we can find ways to modernize and update the existing Eclipse logo. We are not looking to create an entirely new logo. The simple test for any new logo will be: An Eclipse community member should be able to look at the new logo and instantly recognized it is associated with the Eclipse open source community. A new logo also needs to be be flexible enough to be used in different mediums and formats. The logo needs to be shrunk to an icon, does it look good on a white or dark background, is it easily printed of shirts or paper, etc. These are some of the things we need to consider.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this subject, I have made some mistakes in communicating about the criteria and what is expected of the new logo. This has resulted in some people being unhappy with the process and some of my decisions. For that I sincerely apologize for wasting anyone’s time. However, I do believe getting the community feedback will help us make a decision on changing the logo. We want your comments and ideas on what you like and dislike. In the end, the Eclipse Foundation will take this feedback to make the final decision on any new logo.

Thanks to everyone, over 2100 people, that participated in the first round of feedback. I am looking forward to the feedback from the second round, so please go give it now. The deadline for feedback is Wednesday, March 17 at 3pmET.

robot control client

2010-03-11T15:31:30+00:00

The EclipseCon e4-Rover Mars Challenge is coming together very nicely. It is turning out to be an impressive use of Eclipse technology, including e4, Equinox and Equinox in the Cloud. I had the chance to interview Jeff Norris from NASA and Boris Bokowski an e4 and Platform committer. I asked them to described the e4-Rover architecture; you can listen to the conversation here.

For those that rather read than listen, here is a summary:

A LEGO Mindstorm robot will be setup in an arena at EclispeCon. There will be 4 RFID tags around the arena and two RFID readers on the robot. The goal is to drive the robot around the arena to different tags, to collect points.
The Robot will be controlled by a local server application based on Equinox running on a Mac laptop located next to the arena.
The local Equinox application will communicate with another Equinox based application hosted on Amazon EC2. The Equinox application on EC2 receives and forwards commands from an e4 client that is to be used by the players. The Equinox application on EC2 receives a video stream from the arena, so players can control the robot from anywhere. In fact, as a test I have driven the robot located in Los Angeles from Ottawa. The EC2 based Equinox applications also manages a queue for players waiting to drive the robot and keeps track of the scoring. The great thing about having this on EC2 is that it is fully load balanced and will easily scale up in case lots of people start playing.
The players will be using a desktop client built on e4. One of the main goals of the contest is to introduce developers to e4. The client will consist of a set of views that show the video image, provide controls to drive the robot, scoring information and the player queue. Besides collecting points during the game, players are also asked to enhance the client to make it look nicer and make it easier to collect more points. Below is a screenshot of the client. The intention is to have the client code available in the next couple of days.

Jeff and Boris do a much better job of explaining the architecture, so give it a listen.

We also have been lucky enough to get some great prizes for the winners. Lego has donated two Mindstorm NXT 2.0 robotic sets, Amazon has donated credits for AWS and NASA and the Eclipse Foundation will help organize a trip for one person to visit the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Los Angeles. It should be lots of fun.

See you at EclipseCon.

ianskerrett

2010-03-11T14:27:07+00:00

It is always nice to come across examples of people thinking about future IDEs. I came across CodeBubbles and this video. Looks pretty cool and it is built on Eclipse. I wonder if they use e4?

EclipseCon

2010-03-11T01:26:41+00:00

In case you missed the news, Oracle is now in control of the Java community. The next 6 months are going to be fascinating to watch Oracle put their stamp on the JCP, OpenJDK, Java 7, Glassfish, Jigsaw, JavaME, dynamic languages and much more. I have a lot of confidence that Oracle will do the right things to help move the Java community forward. It is going to be a journey, so we can’t expect all the answer immediately.

I am expecting that journey begins at EclipseCon. Oracle is bringing out the executives that are making the decision on the future of Java. Steve Harris and Jeet Kaul are doing the EclipseCon Tuesday keynote speaking on Commuity and Adaptation. From the abstract…

Come hear two technology leaders from the combined Sun and Oracle talk about the future of Java. Gain insight to how the power of the Java community will be strengthened, how specific technologies will be optimized, and how the platform will adapt to trends ranging from modularization to dynamic languages. Get perspective on innovations in Java EE 7 and SE 7, the benefits of OSGi, and the advantages of Profiles. Leave with new ideas on the synergy between Java and Eclipse both from standpoints of both community and technology.

On Wednesday, Oracle is organizing a panel ‘Ask the Oracle execs: Java – the Platform for the Future’. From the abstract…

We invite you to join a panel of Oracle executives for questions and answers about how the new strategy impacts key areas of Java such as developer tools, Java servers, client Java, and developer programs.

Jeet Kaul – VP, Client Software Development, Oracle
Steven Harris – Snr VP Product Development, Oracle
Paul Hartenstine – VP, Application Development Tools, Oracle
Justin Kestelyn – Snr Director, OTN & Developer Programs, Oracle
Adam Messinger – VP of Development Fusion Middleware, Oracle

Moderator: Dennis Leung – VP of Software Development, Oracle

A pretty impressive roster. I am not expecting they will have all the answers but I do hope they starting charting the journey on where they want to go with Java. These are two sessions I am not going to miss.

Oracle is also a big time contributor to the Eclipse community. Here is a complete listing of Oracle’s participation at EclipseCon.

round 1 results

2010-03-09T15:34:17+00:00

Round 1 of the voting for a modernized Eclipse Logo is now finished. We had an incredible 2128 people vote; a great response! Thank you.

Unfortunately, Houston we have a bit of a problem. The two leading design concepts (Logo 1 and Logo 2) really don’t fit the original goal of the task: to modernize the Eclipse logo, not create a completely new one. The existing Eclipse logo has a LOT of brand equity and recognition. We [I] just can’t give up on that and start with a brand new logo. It is not the responsible thing to do.

When I started this project I was thinking along the lines of what Ubuntu just did to their branding, some simple changes Any new logo needs to pass a very simple test: Any Eclipse community member should be able to look at the new logo and instantly recognized it is associated with the Eclipse open source community.

I’ve spoken with a couple of graphic artists. Some have said that Logo 1 is probably the nicest design and the fact that Logo 2 was on a dark background might have gained it more attention. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t mean they past the simple test mentioned above.

It turns out I made a big mistake with Round 1 voting. When people went to vote, I didn’t explain the criteria for selecting a new logo. I also shouldn’t have included in the vote logos that were not acceptable. Ironically, in the bug where we kicked off the project, a lot of discussion was spent on the criteria. In fact, Logo 1 has the fewest nominations and almost didn’t make it to the final 10. Remember we had over 200 concepts that were narrowed to 10.

So what is next to Round 2?

We are going to proceed to a second round of voting with a shorter list of candidates. Unfortunately, I have to disqualify Logo 1 and Logo 2 for the reasons above. This means Round 2 will have Logo 3, Logo 4 (existing logo), Logo 5 and Logo 6. I am also going to add Logo 8 since I personally think it is the best design. The colours need to be toned down but it is the what I had envision for a more modern Eclipse logo.

I realize this may not be a popular move. I apologize if people feel they have wasted their time. Doing an open vote for a graphic design was a risky decision but I still think it is the right thing to do for Eclipse. I hope to have the Round 2 voting up later this week. This time I will have much clearer instructions.

I always knew CDT was great

2010-03-08T05:30:00+00:00

In the New Scientist's "Seven Theories of Everything" article:

Causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) looks pretty similar to loop quantum gravity at first glance. Just as loop quantum gravity breaks up space into tiny "building blocks", CDT assumes that space-time is split into tiny building blocks – this time, four-dimensional chunks called pentachorons.

The pentachorons can then be glued together to produce a large-scale universe – which turns out to have three space dimensions and one time dimension, just as the real one does. So far, so good, but there's a major drawback: CDT as it currently stands cannot explain the existence of matter.

Yes, this sounds a lot like the CDT I know (s/pentachorons/plug-ins/g). And I look forward to CDT 5.0 and the explanation for the existence of matter!

Mirrored Drives with Ubuntu

2010-03-07T03:27:09+00:00

Mirrored drives are also known as a RAID 1 configuration. It is important to note that running mirrored drives should not be used as a substitute for doing backups. My motivation for running a RAID 1 is simply that with the drive densities today, I expect these drives to fail. A terabyte unit is cheap enough that multiplying the cost by two isn’t a big deal, and it gives my data a better chance of surviving a hardware failure.

I purchased two identical drives several months apart – in the hopes of getting units from different batches. I even put them into use staggered by a few months as well. The intent here was to try to avoid simultaneous failure of the drives due to similarities in manufacture date / usage. In the end, the environment they are in is probably a bigger factor in leading to failure but what can you do?

Linux has reasonable software raid support. There is a debate of the merits of software raid vs. hardware raid, as well as which level of raid is most useful. I leave this as an exercise up to the reader. The remainder of this posting will be the details of setting up a raid 1 on a live system. I found two forum postings that talked about this process, the latter being most applicable.

We will start with the assumption that you do have the drive physically installed into your system. The first step is to partition the disk. I prefer using cfdisk, but fdisk will work too. This is always a little scary, but if this is a brand new drive it should not have an existing partition table. In my scenario I wanted to split the 1TB volume into two partitions, a 300Gb and a 700Gb.

Now let’s use fdisk to dump the results of our partitioning work:

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdd

Disk /dev/sdd: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 1 36473 292969341 83 Linux /dev/sdd2 36474 121601 683790660 83 Linux

Next we need to install the RAID tools if you don’t have them already:

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm initramfs-tools

Now recall that we are doing this in a live system, I’ve already got another 1TB volume (/dev/sda) partitioned and full of data I want to keep. So we’re going to create the RAID array in a degraded state, this is the reason for the use of the ‘missing’ option. As I have two partitions I need to run the create command twice, once for each of them.

$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 missing /dev/sdd1 $ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 missing /dev/sdd2

Now we can take a look at /proc/mdstat to see how things look:

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sdd2[1] 683790592 blocks [2/1] [_U]

md0 : active raid1 sdd1[1] 292969216 blocks [2/1] [_U]

unused devices: <none>

Now we format the new volumes. I’m using ext3 filesystems, feel free to choose your favorite.

$ sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0 $ sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md1

Mount the newly formatted partitions and copy data to it from the existing drive. I used rsync to perform this as it is an easy way to maintain permissions, and as I’m working on a live system I can re-do the rsync later to grab any updated files before I do the actual switch over.

$ sudo mount /dev/md0 /mntpoint $ sudo rsync -av /source/path /mntpoint

Once the data is moved, and you need to make the new copy of the data on the new degraded mirror volume the live one. Now unmount the original 1TB drive. Assuming things look ok on your system (no lost data) now we partition that drive we just unmounted (double and triple check the device names!) and format those new partitions.

All that is left to do is add the new volume(s) to the array:

$ sudo mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1 $ sudo mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda2

Again we can check /proc/mdstat to see the status of the array. Or use the watch command on the same file to monitor the progress.

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sdd2[1] 683790592 blocks [2/1] [_U]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[2] sdd1[1] 292969216 blocks [2/1] [_U] [>....................] recovery = 0.6% (1829440/292969216) finish=74.2min speed=65337K/sec

unused devices: <none>

That’s all there is to it. Things get a bit more complex if you are working on your root volume, but in my case I was simply mirroring one of my data volumes.

Of Procs, Blocks, and Dancing Angels

2010-03-05T02:08:39+00:00

Angel Dance
© Ina Centaur

Recently, Yehuda Katz wrote an article in reaction to a Pythonista's criticism of Ruby and in particular to the complaint that you can't call a proc with parentheses:

  my_method = Proc.new {1 + 2}
  my_method()

Yehuda did a great job of defending why this is consistent with the rest of Ruby, and talked about how blocks in Ruby are really used. As part of the article, he conflated blocks and Procs. The difference is rather subtle, and in most cases can be ignored. But Giles pointed out that the difference is there, and is documented both in the Pickaxe and in David Flanigan and Matz's "The Ruby Programming language" and I posted a comment in support of Giles after Yehuda pushed back maintaining his view that there was no difference.

Yehuda followed up with another article, Which prompted this article.

Let me start by saying that I'm not interested in starting a war here. First, I've nothing but respect for Yehuda, and I'm very impressed by his body of work, particularly the refactoring of Rails from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Second, I agree that most of this stuff really doesn't matter all that much, and only when discussing things at a rather deep level. It can be like a debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin! But such discussions can be fun and in rare instances even enlightening.

Proc Identity

Here's Yehuda's example from the second article:

    def foo
      yield
    end

    def bar(&block)
      puts block.object_id
      baz(&block)
    end

    def baz(&block)
      puts block.object_id
      yield
    end

    foo { puts "HELLO" } #=> "HELLO"
    bar { puts "HELLO" } #=> "2148083200\n2148083200\nHELLO"

He points out that the identity of the proc object bound to the two arguments named block in the bar and baz methods doesn't change. He then gives a slightly different example:

  def foo(&block)
    puts block.object_id
    yield
  end

  b = Proc.new { puts "OMG" }
  puts b.object_id
  foo(&b) #=> 2148084040\n2148084040\nOMG

and then proposes two "mental models" of what's going on:

The &b unwraps the Proc object, and the &block recasts it into a Proc. However, it somehow also wraps it back into the same wrapper that it came from into the first place. or...
The &b puts the b Proc into the block slot in foo’s argument list, and the &block gives the implicit Proc a name. There is no need to explain why the Proc has the same object_id; it is the same Object!

He then says that the first actually represents the MRI implementation. Based both on a reading of Flanigan and Matz and the MRI code, I respectfully disagree, the truth lies in the middle

The first thing to realize is that the use of & before the last argument of a method definition is not the same thing as the use of & before the last parameter value in a method invocation. The

An analogy with Splat

Ruby has a similar prefix *, a.k.a splat, or what David Black likes to call "the unary unarray" operator. Actually depending on where it occurs * is either an "unarray" or a "make array" operator.

Consider this code:

  array = [1, 2, 3]

  def three_args(a, b, c)
    "a is #{a}, b is #{b}, c is #{c}"
  end

  a, b, c = *array

  a # => 1
  b # => 2
  c # => 3

  three_args(*array) # => "a is 1, b is 2, c is 3"

  def glob_args(*args)
    args
  end

  x, *array2 = 4, 5, 6

  x      # => 4
  array2 # => [5, 6]

  glob_args(:now, :is, "the", Time) # => [:now, :is, "the", Time]

As I said above, * is an unarray operator when it appears either in the right hand side of an assignment, or in the argument list of a method invocation. It acts as an operator which coalesces multiple values into an array if it appears on the left hand side of an assignment or in front of a formal parameter in a method

One important consideration in the use of both splat and proc arguments, is that the method definition doesn't "know" whether the method will be invoked like this:

  foo  # with no block
  
  # or this:
  
  foo { 1 }
  
  # or this:

  foo(&b)
  
  or even this:
  
  proc = Proc.new {1}
  foo(proc)

All of these are valid, and need to work.

Method definition with a & Formal Parameter

In Yehuda's last quoted example this is the def foo case.

Method Invocation with a & arg

Two things happen when a method is called with a & argument. The cases of calling the method with either an implicit block, an explicit value for the argument, or no argument for the block at all all need to be handled. And the cases of explicitly calling the argument e.g via block.call, and yielding to the block both have to work.

So the &block argument in the definition of foo means that the method prelude ensures that the block argument will either be nil or will refer an object which is a Proc, or at least appears to be a proc. It does this at the entry to the invocation of the method.

It also must ensure that yield semantics will work whether the method was called with an implicit block, or an explicit value for the parameter. Note that in MRI, block yield works by reference to a field called iter in the current stack frame, which in Ruby 1.8 is used to find the node in the abstract syntax tree of the method which defined the block which corresponds to that block. And yield is implemented by evaluating the subtree of the AST rooted at that node. Of course the representation in YARV in Ruby 1.9 represents executable code differently but the effect is the same. The yield keyword deals with the internal "VM" representation of the executable ruby code directly without surfacing it as a Ruby object. This is the real difference between a block and an instance of Proc.

The draft Ruby standard abstracts this iter field a bit using the notation [block] to refer to a logical stack of blocks in the execution context. The draft distinguishes between block and procs. Since I started writing this article, Avdi Grimm wrote another reaction to Yehuda's second article, which looks at the same issues I'm talking about here from the perspective of the draft standard.

With all that said, here's how that formal block argument is handled when the foo method is invoked

If block is not nil, then it sees if a block was given in the method call, and if so, it creates a Proc object which will cause the block to be executed when the proc is called.
If block is NOT nil
1. If the value of block is not already an instance of Proc send :to_proc to the value (with a guard to see if it responds, but that's a minor implementation decision to avoid having the overhead of catching a MethodMissing exception). This is why defining Symbol#to_proc allows writing things like (1..10).map(&:succ).
2. Set up the VM so that yield will work should that happen. In Ruby 1.8 this involves correctly pushing an iterator onto the stack frame, I haven't read through the YARV implementation but I'm sure that it has the same effect.
If the object referenced by block isn't a proc or convertible using #to_proc, to a 'proc-like' duck which can quack to the tune of #call, then a TypeError is raised.

Note that this isn't wrapping the argument with a proc, it's ensuring that we have an object which acts as a proc, if it needs to be 'cast' into a proc it will be, but if it's already a real Proc, or it responds to to_proc by returning self, then it will be the same object.

Method invocation with a & prefix on the last argument value

This part is a bit simpler. The argument itself is just passed through. The trick is that in the process of invoking the method, the sending code must do the same thing as step 2.2 above in case the method does a yield.

Does it Matter?

Barring any embarrassing mistakes on my part, this is what happens in MRI ruby, as described in section 6.4.5 Block Arguments of Flanigan and Matsumoto, as well as my reading of the MRI code.

Yehuda makes the point that this is all pretty invisible to the Ruby programmer, and he's right. It would seem that a Ruby implementation could ALWAYS turn blocks into procs and not have a separate hidden iter structure in the VM. One reason for not doing so is performance. Since Procs are closures and capture the bindings of any variables in their scope, there is some overhead to their creation and destruction, if a block is only accessed via yield, then it's guaranteed not to have a lifetime past the return of the called method. So this is an optimization. And such optimizations are known in other dynamic language implementations. Smalltalk gives the illusion of uniformly using closures to represent blocks, but most implementations cheat and recognize cases where the overhead of creating a closure can be avoided. In some cases this is invisible to the Smalltalk programmer, but not always.

So although we might know exactly angels are dancing on the head of the pin, or what steps they are doing, the ruby language books and the draft standard let it slip that they are there.

ianskerrett

2010-03-04T20:51:09+00:00

Open source has come a long way over the last number of years. Apache Software Foundation celebrated their 10th anniversary. Lots of open source companies have figured out how to make money off open source software. Large companies have also figured out how to leverage open source software. The question then becomes what is next for open source?

This is why I was pleased to organize an EclipseCon panel on the future of open source. We have organized a great set of panelist to look into the future, including:

Justin Erenkrantz, President of the Apache Software Foundation
Martin Mickos, formerly of MySQL
Stephen O’Grady, Indstry Analyst and Co-Founder of Redmonk
Jason van Zyl, CTO and Founder of Sonatype, the company behind Maven

Mike Milinkovich will be the panel moderator, so my expectations are high for great questions.

It is important to be thinking about the future, so it will be fascinating to see what comes out of this discussion. The panel is Wednesday, March 24 at EclipseCon.

Ruby Release History

2010-03-02T15:17:40+00:00

Yesterday I found myself trying to figure how which version of Ruby was the latest on a particular date. I had trouble finding a resource with this information using google, so I posted a query to the ruby-talk forum, and Urabi Shyouhei posted a list derived from the ftp site.

In the interest of posterity, here's the list as of now:

Ruby Version	Release Date (in Japanese time zone)
Ruby birthday	02/24/1993
0.95	12/21/1995
1.0-961225	12/25/1996
1.0-971225	12/25/1997
1.1c0	07/17/1998
1.1c1	07/24/1998
1.1c2	08/11/1998
1.1c3	08/27/1998
1.1c4	09/03/1998
1.1c5	09/08/1998
1.1c6	10/05/1998
1.1c7	11/09/1998
1.1c8	11/19/1998
1.1c9	11/26/1998
1.2	12/25/1998
1.2.1	01/11/1999
1.2.1	01/12/1999
1.2.2	01/21/1999
1.2.3	02/16/1999
1.2.4	04/09/1999
1.2.5	04/13/1999
1.2.6	06/21/1999
1.4.0	08/13/1999
1.4.1	09/16/1999
1.4.2	09/17/1999
1.4.3	12/07/1999
1.4.4	04/14/2000
1.4.5	06/23/2000
1.4.6	08/16/2000
1.6.0	09/19/2000
1.6.1	09/27/2000
1.6.2	12/25/2000
1.6.3	03/20/2001
1.6.4	06/04/2001
1.6.5	09/19/2001
1.6.6	12/26/2001
1.6.7	03/01/2002
1.6.8	12/24/2002
1.8.0	08/04/2003
1.8.1	12/25/2003
1.8.2	12/25/2004
1.8.3	09/21/2005
1.8.4	12/24/2005
1.8.5	08/25/2006
1.8.5-p2	12/04/2006
1.8.5-p12	12/25/2006
1.8.5-p35	03/13/2007
1.8.6	03/13/2007
1.8.5-p52	06/09/2007
1.8.6-p36	06/09/2007
1.8.5-p113	09/23/2007
1.8.6-p110	09/23/2007
1.8.5-p114	10/04/2007
1.8.6-p111	10/04/2007
1.8.5-p115	03/03/2008
1.8.6-p114	03/03/2008
1.8.7	06/01/2008
1.8.7-p17	06/09/2008
1.8.5-p231	06/20/2008
1.8.6-p230	06/20/2008
1.8.7-p22	06/20/2008
1.8.6-p286	08/08/2008
1.8.7-p71	08/08/2008
1.8.6-p287	08/11/2008
1.8.7-p72	08/11/2008
1.9.1-p0	01/30/2009
1.8.6-p368	03/31/2009
1.8.7-p160	04/09/2009
1.9.1-p129	05/12/2009
1.8.6-p369	06/09/2009
1.8.7-p173	06/09/2009
1.8.7-p174	06/15/2009
1.9.1-p243	07/18/2009
1.8.6-p383	08/03/2009
1.8.7-p248	12/24/2009
1.9.1-p376	12/07/2009
1.8.6-p388	01/10/2010
1.8.7-p249	01/10/2010
1.9.1-p378	01/10/2010
1.8.6-p398	02/03/2010
1.8.6-p399	02/04/2010

Protected: Theater Room - Reassembled

2010-03-01T04:24:37+00:00

Article Series - Home Theater Renovation

Protected: Theater Room - Original Setup
Protected: Theater Room - Dismantled
Protected: Theater Room - Ceiling
Protected: Theater Room - Walls
Protected: Theater Room - More Walls
Protected: Theater Room - Baseboards
Protected: Theater Room - Reassembled

Previous in series

prior art

2010-02-26T11:15:25+00:00

A few caveats before starting:

I am not a lawyer, just an old country programmer, currently working at IBM.
This blog post is my own and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
The patent infringement suit I mention below does not involve IBM as a litigant. It does involve me as a fact witness.
No need to go into details on the patent infringement suit, as they are irrelevant to this blog post.

Tim Bray recently wrote a blog post, "Giving Up On Patents", providing his opinion on the state of patents and linking to a number of interesting patent-related texts on the web. My thoughts are currently roughly aligned with Tim's, so there's no need to restate them.

Since I was recently involved as a fact witness in a patent infringement suit, I thought I'd provide some tips if the following are true for you:

You believe that there are a lot of patents granted for which there already exists prior art, and so those patents really shouldn't be granted in the first place.
You make things.

The tips:

Document the crap out of the things that you make.
Put your documentation on the web, and make sure search engines can find it 20 years from now.

For the suit I was involved with, an attorney of one of the defendants did a Google search on a term relevant to the suit, and found a paper I had written 13 years ago, on my personal web site. The paper they found lead them to believe I had information relevant to the suit; they thought I had evidence of prior art. Eventually, a lot more documentation was excavated from various people and places.

I found it interesting that a couple of movies were added to the pile of evidence I was asked about during my deposition, all of which appeared to be digitized versions of tape. They were all also around 13 years old. I suspect video will become even more popular as evidence in the future, given the ease in creating and disseminating it, and the amount of information it provides. Lawyers love information. Think screencasts, or perhaps ASCIIcasts are more relevant for the thing you made.

In case you're morbidly curious, I don't believe the statements I provided during my deposition actually helped the defendant in any way. Based on the questions I was asked, I have my guesses as to whether I helped anyone, but I have no way of knowing. I didn't study the patent in question, so I don't know what claims the plaintiff is making, nor do I know how the defense is planning to defend against those claims. All that is irrelevant for a fact witness; I was there to objectively answer questions that were asked of me. Just the facts, ma'am.

A couple of slightly humorous notes:

During the deposition, the court's Windows machine could not be coaxed to play the videos (missing codecs). One of the younger attorneys saved the day with his MacBook.
Making some small talk (heh) with my counsel during a break, I mentioned that I might claim "software patents are against my religion" if I was ever asked to do something I really didn't want to do. He had a good laugh, and said he'd never heard that before. Note taken.
The paper that the attorney found on the web had a self-referential link in it. I always do that, never know what might happen to an HTML file. The link, however, was to a web site long since gone, which today renders as a parked 404 page somewhere. Of course, the paper had moved somewhere else, and of course, Google knew where it was. But it was still funny to see that old link.
Being a fact witness doesn't pay well. I received a $55 check for my time; the deposition was an all-day event.

LogoSurveyScreenshot

2010-02-24T19:22:58+00:00

In January we started a process to determine if we should update the existing Eclipse logo. As I have said before, the existing logo is great but it was created 8-9 years ago and maybe deserves an update or modernization. The response to a call for new concepts has been outstanding. We had over 200 concepts submitted but have narrowed the potential choices to 10 concepts.

Now we need feedback from the community to help with the decision making process. We are going to organize two rounds of community voting: Round 1 will be to choose from the 10 nominees a short list of 3 concepts and Round 2 will be to select a final concept. Changing the logo is a big deal for the community and a big deal to implement, therefore, the final decision will be made by the Eclipse Foundation.

Some people have already expressed an opinion that we should not change the logo. I want to be clear that a perfectly acceptable outcome is that we keep the same logo. Therefore, on each round of voting the existing Eclipse logo will be included. If you don’t want to change the logo, make sure you vote for the existing logo.

Voting for Round 1 is now open. If you have an opinion, please go express it now. Vote based on the concept you like. I fully expect any new concept will need refinement and tweaking before it is finished. In fact, on the poll you can recommend the refinements you would like to see on the concept of your choice.

Deadline for Round 1 voting is Wednesday, March 3 at 3pmET.

ianskerrett

2010-02-23T19:25:41+00:00

Millions of individual and thousands of organizations are part of the Eclipse community as users, contributors, committers, adopters, researchers, students, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the majority of the Eclipse community is passive. One thing we are trying to do is make it easier for more people and companies to actively participate in the community. For instance, we recently introduced a ‘contribute page‘ to make it easier for individuals to understand how they can get involved.

For companies, the bulk of the contributions come from technology companies: ISV, hardware vendors, consulting companies, etc. The challenge is how do you make it appealing for more companies, especially large IT organizations that make extensive use of Eclipse but have no obvious way to participate in the community. At a marco-level there are two ways companies can actively participate: 1) fund committers to work on Eclipse projects, or 2) contribute money to fund the services of the Eclipse Foundation. Both are important but today we announced the Corporate Sponsor Program to making it easier for companies to donate money to the Eclipse Foundation.

The Eclipse Corporate Sponsor Program recognize companies that donate money or services to help fund the Eclipse Foundation. Not every company has the ability to fund committers or even become a member of the Foundation. However, this new program allo companies to contribute back to the Eclipse community and thus actively participate in the ongoing success. If you work for a company or know of a company that might be interested in joining the Corporate Sponsor Program, details are available here.

In addition to big companies, we are also trying to make it easier for small technology companies to become members of the Foundation. In the past, the minimum membership fee was $5000. This is a significant commitment if you are just starting out or a 1-3 person shop. As Donald previously announced, the Board has approved a membership tier for companies with less than 10 people and $1 million revenue to become members for a $1500 membership fee. Companies like ModularMind and ANCiT Consulting who have recently joined the Foundation.

We still need to do more to expand community participation. There are lots of other things that we will continue to implement to make it easier. For now, if you know any companies, large and small, that would like to grow their participation please send them our way. If you have any ideas on how to make it easier to participate at Eclipse, for companies or individuals, please let us know.

Meet the Eclipse Community at CeBIT 2010

2010-02-23T16:17:45+00:00

From March 2 - 6, we will be at the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

With the help of the European Marketing Group, members of the Eclipse Foundation are teaming up to showcase Eclipse technologies and solutions at CeBIT 2010. Drop by the Eclipse Island, Booth #D38 in the Open Source Park, Hall 2, to meet representatives from EclipseSource, Actuate, SOPERA, Bredex and the Eclipse Foundation.

Visit the demo theater and see the RCP, RAP, BIRT, and Swordfish in action, as well as products based on these eclipse technologies such as Yoxos and GUIdancer. And, enter the drawing to have a chance to win great prizes every day.

I'll be there on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and would be delighted to chat with you.

For more information, go to http://wiki.eclipse.org/CeBIT2010

Ralph

Comments

Eclipse Board Election Facts (2010 edition)

2010-02-23T15:55:37+00:00

You have hopefully seen one of the announcements that the elections for committer representatives for the Eclipse Board of Directors is now open.

Rather than explaining why you should vote for me :-), I thought it would be useful to summarize the key election facts:

You are voting for a one-year term starting April 2010. Voting is open as of yesterday, for three weeks until March 12, 3 pm Eastern time. Check out the committer candidates and their vision statements.
To vote, check if you received an email from emo@eclipse.org on Feb 19, 2009. It contains the URL for voting, as well as the required voting password. If you haven't received a voting password, you are probably not (yet) an Eclipse member, and have to sign the membership agreement first. To understand why this is required, read this page, then read this page to make sure you fill out the form correctly. No voting privileges without signing the form!
The Board will have 20 directors, as follows:
- Fourteen directors for the strategic members, one seat per member.
- Three directors from "sustaining members". There are six candidates on which sustaining members (companies) get to vote.
- Three directors representing the committers. There are five committer candidates.

EclipseCon 2010

2010-02-23T14:34:49+00:00

Jeff Norris from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab is one of the keynotes at EclipseCon 2010. Jeff is a great speaker and typically has lots of really cool videos of robots in his talk, so I am expecting his keynote to be a highlight of the conference.

Jeff is also a great Eclipse community member. Late last year he approached us about making an even bigger impact on EclipseCon. He wanted to help the Eclipse community promote Eclipse e4 by creating a programming contest that required attendees to use e4 to build a command and control system to drive a real robot.

Fast forward to today and we are announcing the e4-Rover Mars Challenge. Expect something a bit different this year at EclipseCon. In the registration area, we are going to have a LEGO Mindstorm robot setup in an arena that might look a bit like Mars. Thanks to Jeff’s team at NASA, Boris Bokowski and some of the other e4 committers, attendees will be able to drive the robot around a course using a client application written in e4. Participants will collect points for completing the course and compete for high score. Attendees will be encourage to extend and improve the e4 client so it is easier to collect more points and get a higher score. The cool thing is that this will all be controlled by an Equinox server hosted in the cloud on Amazon Web Services.

Of course we also have some very cool prizes. The grand prize winner will get a chance to visit the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Los Angeles, CA. Jeff and his team have agreed to give a tour of their labs, so it should be a fascinating trip. We will also have some LEGO Mindstorm robots to give out to the winners.

A big thanks to Jeff and the NASA team, plus a number of the e4 committers for creating the contest. This will be a great way to introduce developers to e4.

btw, EclipseCon starts in under 4 weeks so don’t forget to register today.

Diversity Matters

2010-02-23T05:30:01+00:00

From Lessons Learned by Eric Reis:

Diversity is the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. As entrepreneurs, more than any other industry, we’re in the meritocracy business. The companies that make decisions based on merit, rather than title, politics, or hierarchy execute faster and learn faster than their competitors. For startups (and other innovators), that’s a decisive advantage.

So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign. What are the odds that the decisions that were made ... were really meritocratic? That’s why I care a lot about diversity: not for its own sake, but because it is a source of strength for teams that have it, and a symptom of dysfunction for those that don’t.

Eclipse project diversity:
Only a few projects with any diversity (props to Mylyn, CDT, and Linux tools!); none in the core.

BitPim and the Samsung M300

2010-02-23T05:08:13+00:00

Jenn has a pay-as-you-go cell phone, while its a relatively inexpensive phone (Samsung M300) it has reasonable battery life, and its small. One of the unexpectedly useful features was a camera, sure its not able to take very nice photos but sometimes your phone is the only camera you have handy “in the moment” (like when the kids go on a mud-puddle adventure).

Unfortunately with the pay-as-you-go plan, there wasn’t any way to get the pictures off the camera. No data service meant you couldn’t email them from the phone, and the phones bluetooth connectivity seems to be limited to headset profiles. The data cable was cheap enough on eBay so I thought I’d take a risk and see what could be done with one.

Once I had the cable, it was time to find some software. BitPim seemed to be the right choice for me (free, and available on Linux). The Ubuntu repositories have a version that works [sudo apt-get install bitpim].

You’ll want to run it as root, or mess with the /dev entries for USB to grant your user enough rights to access the phone. The BitPim software handles the capabilities of the M300 in two ways, treating the one phone as effectively two devices. The first is the “media” version, this allowed me to copy down the pictures from the phone. The PIM version needed a bit more fiddling as it wasn’t actually detected properly. I did manage to get it to download the contents of the phonebook from the phone.

Now it turns out that the Bell Mobility firmware for this phone seems to be different enough from the US version that BitPim simply won’t work for writing to the phonebook. Someone else ran into exactly the same problem as I did. Of course, this was after I managed to delete all 60 phonebook entries that were already stored in the phone. Oops. I think Jenn has now forgiven me.

I’ll reference the excellent HowardForums for all your cellular information needs. And a pointer to a Samsung page which provides a data access utility (that sadly still fails with the firmware I have).

Managing Multiple Heroku Accounts

2010-02-23T04:33:39+00:00

I’ve been using Heroku for some time now. Well, ever since the Heroku Gardens days — which was over a year ago. Seems longer. Anyway, I’ve got a handful of apps on Heroku. Some prototypes and some in production. I also have multiple accounts in play. The only problem is that this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to manage. In case you travel down this path, here are some tips.

Requirements

The following assumes you are on the MacOS, already own multiple Heroku accounts, have installed the Heroku gem, and have deployed a Ruby on Rails application to Heroku before. Otherwise, read the Quickstart docs and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Credentials

Let’s start with your credentials file (i.e. ~/.heroku/credentials). This file is usually created for you by the Heroku gem when you setup your first account. It is a text file with your account login (i.e. email address) on the first line and your password on the second line. To setup multiple accounts, I’d suggest the following:

~/.heroku/credentials - Your current account that is in play.
~/.heroku/account_1.credentials - Your first account.
~/.heroku/account_2.credentials - Your second account.

When you need to switch accounts simply copy the contents of the account you are switching to over the existing credentials file (example: account_2.credentials now becomes credentials). I wrote a couple of simple Ruby scripts to automate this:

switcher.rb - Makes switching between your accounts a breeze from the command line.
credentials.rb - This will echo your currently active account from the command line.

You can add the following aliases to your ~/.bash_profile file as follows:

alias heroc="ruby <path to where you unzipped the script>/credentials.rb"
alias heros="ruby <path to where you unzipped the script>/switcher.rb"

Now, from the command line, you can simply type “heros” and “heroc” to use the scripts. Of course, you can use whatever alias you want.

Security Keys

Right, so we have the credentials files out of the way but there is one last step. You need to associate your public key with each account. Here is my suggestion:

Change directory to ~/.ssh
Create your private and public keys for each account by running the following command: ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "<email>" -f ~/.ssh/<account>.identity
Type heros <account> to switch account and add the new keys for each: heroku keys:add [path to keyfile].pub

For each Heroku account beyond your first, you’ll need to make use of the SSH config file (i.e. ~/.ssh/config) as follows (thanks to the Heroku support team on this one):

Host official.heroku.com
HostName heroku.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<account>.identity
IdentitiesOnly yes

Also, for each account beyond the first, you’ll need to switch to each app directory and type the following command: git remote add heroku git@official.heroku.com:<your app>.git. This will allow you to push and deploy your changes back to the Heroku servers and finalizes your setup.

Workflow

From this point forward, you can switch between accounts as follows:

Change directory to the app you want to work on.
Type heros to switch to appropriate account.
Make changes to your code.
Type: git commit -a -m “Your comments.”
Type: git push heroku.
Have a beer.

ianskerrett

2010-02-22T18:30:52+00:00

Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk has written extensively on the rising importance of data, especially large amounts of data, in the IT industry. Stephen is usually right about these types of trends so I have started to look how this might impact the Eclipse community.

Predictably, we are seeing some early vendors making it easier for developers, especially Eclipse developers, to integrate big data analytics into their applications. For instance, Aster Data has just announced an Eclipse plug-in that is an integrated visual development environment for building MapReduce and SQL-based analytic applications. btw, it is also nice to see that Aster Data has recently become a member of the Eclipse Foundation.

This InfoWorld article ‘Databases primed for social networks‘ also led me to Neo4j database which has the Neoclipse Eclipse plugin for visualizing social networks within Eclipse.

Time and time again, developers lead the acceptance new technology. Tools that make it easier for developers to embrace large amounts of data will surely make Stephen’s predictions come true.

Protected: Theater Room - Baseboards

2010-02-21T22:15:46+00:00

Article Series - Home Theater Renovation

Protected: Theater Room - Original Setup
Protected: Theater Room - Dismantled
Protected: Theater Room - Ceiling
Protected: Theater Room - Walls
Protected: Theater Room - More Walls
Protected: Theater Room - Baseboards
Protected: Theater Room - Reassembled

Previous in series Next in series

ianskerrett

2010-02-20T13:51:07+00:00

Wow, we have received over 200 concepts for a new Eclipse logo. Some I really like, some are just ugly. Now we need to start narrowing the choices so we can make a decision.

We are going to do two rounds of community voting to determine if it makes sense to update the existing logo. The first step is creating a list of 10 concepts for the first round of voting. The list of 10 will be narrowed by community vote to a list of 3 for the second round. The second community vote will determine a potential selection. Each round we will automatically include the existing Eclipse logo.

I want to be clear that changing the logo is a big deal. It will be a big deal for the community and the actual implementation alone is a big effort. Therefore, the EMO (ie. the Eclipse Foundation) will make the final decision on changing the logo.

Now we need your help to determine the list of 10 concepts. If you have an opinion, take a look at the Gallery and then please nominate 3-5 concepts you like best on this bug. Please remember, we aren’t looking for a brand new logo, we want something that is an update/modernized look on the original logo. The deadline for nominations is Tuesday, Feb. 23 at 3pmET.

btw, when you are looking at the Gallery, you can enlarge each concept by clicking on the magnify glass.

Give it a shot, it might work

2010-02-20T13:00:49+00:00

"Give it a shot. It might work." Made me laugh. An optimistic caveat delivered by CTV when browsed via Chrome (turns out it does work). Of course, they don't actually give you the opportunity to not "give it a shot" as the modal dialog prevents all other choices.

So, I mock it a little, but personally I think it's better than many of the checks we see for browser compatibility. Some web sites, are very specific and annoyingly refuse if the browser is not exactly the one they tested with. So, good on ya, you optimistic Silverlight developers ! but next time you can try out our long running VM team phrasing - "totally bogus, never been tested, should work" as a positive alternative.

The video in question was Jon Montgomery's 4th run on his way to winning gold in the uber scary skeleton event. Nice display of Canadian values too, by drinking a pitcher of beer on his way to the TV interviews. He's welcome on any of our fishing trips anytime.

iEclipse

2010-02-17T05:00:08+00:00

We've been hearing about the upcoming Eclipse-like-but-not-really-Eclipse project hosting service for a few months now. It's clear that, like Apple's iPad, this new hosting will be a third way: not "real" Eclipse projects and not just external projects that are Eclipse plug-ins [1], but some new and interesting third way. That's exciting because in order to succeed, this third way (this iEclipse) will need to enable amazing new opportunities and to solve compelling contributor problems. I've hypothesized what those problems and solutions might be [2], but I don't have any insider knowledge, so I wait with everyone else to learn the Foundation's real secret sauce.

I'm confident that the Foundation will not simply duplicate something already available to the open source community, for example, providing an Eclipse skin over an existing free project hosting site [3,4]. ... I had thought that the secret sauce was going to be inclusion in the annual coordinated release and the major distros, but the latest report to the membership [5] indicated that the Foundation is going to reduce the number of projects included, thus restricting access to the official distribution channels. ... Then I thought that the secret sauce might be publicity and visibility, thereby helping these new projects find their user and contributor bases, but the Foundation's official press release guidelines [6] are all about partnering with companies and corporate projects and explicitly say that experimental and incubation projects will not be mentioned.

So what's it going to be? What is the clear and compelling value proposition for this new iEclipse hosting service? How will it contribute to ensuring the continued health of the Eclipse core? ... I admit that I expected an open and transparent community dialog when putting together a new service for the benefit of the community but, hey, perhaps the reason for secrecy is that they have asked the newly unemployed Jonathan Schwartz [7] to join the Foundation as VP of iEclipse, and they want to maximize the press around that :)

P.S. I still like my idea of a selective engagement scheme for Eclipse projects ("badges") [2]: if I'm elected to the Board, I'll be pushing for that idea.

ianskerrett

2010-02-16T20:59:36+00:00

It is always nice to be recognized with industry awards, so I take great pleasure in the fact the Eclipse Foundation was recognized as a ‘Company to Watch’ but Intelligent Enterprise. I especially like their conclusion ‘Eclipse is the tail that now wags enterprise software development.’

From Intelligent Enterprise:

Eclipse Foundation has built an open-source community and a powerful ecosystem that continues to revolutionize the way software is created and deployed. At the center is a multi-language software development environment and rich-client deployment platform that is open and highly extensible. Eclipse is the tail that now wags enterprise software development.

ianskerrett

2010-02-16T19:09:58+00:00

Last week we officially proposed a new Eclipse project to create an client for the Eclipse Marketplace. As I described late last year, the next step for Marketplace is to integrate Marketplace directly into each Eclipse installation. We want to make it as easy as possible for Eclipse users to access the huge ecosystem of Eclipse solutions. This is one step towards an app store for Eclipse.

To make this happen, the Eclipse Foundation has contracted with Tasktop to create the Marketplace client. In December and January, we had a call for proposals and I am very pleased that we selected Tasktop. Mik and Steffen from Tasktop, plus David Green and Thomas and Hendrik from Cloudsmith will all be contributing to the effort. I am going to be the project leader and help manage the project.

The project has a very aggressive schedule and our hope is to have the Marketplace Client (MPC) available in the Helios packages. I do believe the MPC will be a great addition for the Eclipse community. Please feel free to leave feedback here or on the Community Forum.

Beachcombing

2010-02-16T01:52:45+00:00

A bit of an absence from updating the blog over the past month, due primarily to being busy with work/home. I hope to get back to my regular cadence of something every week or so, and I’m going to start with something lighthearted. There are several more technical articles I’ve got on the go, hopefully I’ll get those cleaned up and ready to post soon.

Late last summer we headed west to Vancouver Island, this is a regular trip as many of my relatives are out that way. We took a break from visiting family and spent some time in Parksville, specifically down on Rathtrevor Beach. The first morning we were there, I took a walk with my daughter as the tide was out. Not five minutes from the cabin I came across a cell phone (pictured above) sitting on the wet sand.

Not seeing anyone around for literally miles, there was a very slim chance I was going to get this back to the owner. I figured I’d see if it was in working shape or not. Turns out it didn’t work, and was likely pretty water logged. Popping it open let me determine the exact model number (Samsung SGH-J706), and based on the SIM card which revealed the carrier it appeared to be a pay as you go phone.

Things started to seem grim when I took a look at the charge port on the phone, not a great sign to see corrosion and salt build up. It was pretty clear this was very likely junk, but I couldn’t just pitch it into the trash. It ended up coming home with me where I got a chance to open it up [you could probably tell that was coming..]

The J706 is a slider phone, the screen slides up to reveal a keyboard underneath. Pretty slick, and I can’t help but think back to The Matrix whenever I have one of these in my hand. Disassembling the slider was educational, I was able to take it all apart – and put it back together.

Unfortunately, once I had it apart it was pretty clear this wasn’t ever going to work again. I often wonder if its possible to repair phones that have gotten wet (you see these on eBay from time to time) but a good soak in saltwater looks like a one way ticket for electronics. The LCD screen seems to have been fairly well sealed, and some of the parts may have been in a working state as well – but it should be evident from the photo that much of it was a complete write-off.

Reassembled and cleaned up, it looked cosmetically fine. The slider mechanism worked smoothly too. In the end, I took it into BestBuy’s cell phone trade-in program: I figured that at least they could recycle it properly. I was up-front with them about the non-working condition of the phone, and they did check it for water damage (there is a little indicator under the battery usually). The representative told me if it had been in working shape it was worth $60, I figured that was the end of the conversation and told him just to recycle it – but he stopped me and said, let’s see what I can give you for it. Turns out it was worth $7.61 – I walked away with a gift card feeling pretty lucky.

Canvas Movie Posters

2010-02-15T18:59:27+00:00

A couple of years ago my brother and I set out to frame our own movie posters since the prices for poster prints can add up quickly. In our case, we bought paper prints from places like All Posters, attached them to foam boards (bought via Michaels) with 3M glue spray, built and stained wooden frames (all done by my brother), and finally we worked with a local glass cutter to encase the prints. The result was OK but not great. The use of the 3M glue proved to be tricky to get right and in some cases resulted in minor bubbling of the prints.

That was several years ago. Now I’m researching a different tactic: canvas prints. This would not require glass. Plus canvas would partially work as an acoustic absorber and reduce light reflection from the video source. Ideally, I’d like to obtain high resolution digital images of the movie posters and figure out a clever way to print these images myself onto canvas or fabric. Unfortunately, obtaining high resolution images (i.e. 4500 x 6000 pixels or higher) is proving rather difficult. The alternative is to simply shop for canvas prints, which is easier, and then frame them how you like. Here is what I have found so far:

All Movie Replicas - Offers movie posters, replicas, busts, memorabilia, etc.
Movie Goods - Mostly dedicated to movie poster and related images. They supply canvas prints as well a framing abilities.
The Movie Poster Shop - Supplies movie poster and canvas prints.
All Posters - A popular place for movie poster prints or canvas versions. They also support framing.
The Movie DB - While not necessarily related to shops that supply movie prints for purchase, I thought I’d mention this site since it does supply movie-related information including digital images. Most images are in 1920×1080 resolutions. Good for desktop wallpaper.

For me, I’m not sure if I’ll go down this route, but it is worth considering.

Oracle Keynote on Java Technology and Community at EclipseCon

2010-02-15T14:30:35+00:00

This year’s EclipseCon has a little bit of that “right time, right place” magic going for it. As a significant conference soon after the oft-delayed closing of the acquisition, it provides a good opportunity for Oracle to talk directly to developers about where they are going to take Java. There is both a technology and a community story to be told, and from the abstract it appears that Steve Harris and Jeet Kaul are going to be tackling both topics. Steve and Jeet are the development execs responsible for driving the Java platform and I, for one, can’t wait to hear what they have to say. Phrases like “rational optimism”, “profound opportunity” and “empowered community” in the abstract have certainly captured my interest.

If you’re looking forward to hearing about the Oracle-Sun strategy for Java’s future, EclipseCon will be the place to be. We’ve extended the early bird registration rates for one extra day, until Monday February 15th, so register now! See you at EclipseCon.

Protected: Theater Room - More Walls

2010-02-14T18:56:09+00:00

Article Series - Home Theater Renovation

Protected: Theater Room - Original Setup
Protected: Theater Room - Dismantled
Protected: Theater Room - Ceiling
Protected: Theater Room - Walls
Protected: Theater Room - More Walls
Protected: Theater Room - Baseboards
Protected: Theater Room - Reassembled

Previous in series Next in series

ianskerrett

2010-02-11T15:03:44+00:00

It goes without saying Cloud Computing is a very popular topic in the tech industry. Beyond the marketing hype, cloud computing is changing the way applications are built and deploy. As most people know, OSGi is the component standard used by Eclipse and has many implications for deploying Eclipse-based applications.

We need to make EclipseRT, and in general Java, easier to deploy to the cloud but also look to enhance cloud computing based on the benefits of Eclipse and OSGi. Therefore, I was excited to see Peter Kriens from the OSGi Alliance suggest a workshop to explore what it means to combine OSGi and cloud computing.

The workshop is an all day affair on Thursday, March 25 at EclipseCon. The goal is to bring together cloud experts and OSGi experts to explore what is possible. We already have people from Rackspace, Cisco, SAP, SpringSource, some OSGi gurus and I was please to be introduced to the jcloud project, who’s leader will attend.

We need more people, especially the cloud experts, to participate in the workshop. If you are such an expert or know someone that is, please feel free to send them to Peter or myself.

ianskerrett

2010-02-11T14:17:51+00:00

One of the first things Oracle announced after they completed the Sun acquisition was that JavaOne would continue but in September (in parallel to Oracle’s existing user conference). Lots of people in the Eclipse community like to speak at JavaOne, so I thought people would like to know the JavaOne call for papers is now open. Deadline is March 14.

ianskerrett

2010-02-10T21:49:58+00:00

We are looking at modernizing the Eclipse logo. I kicked off the process a couple of weeks ago and we received some interesting suggestions.

However, I felt we needed to get more variety and more graphic designers involved, so I started a project on CrowdSpring and offered a $500 bounty. Good news is now we are getting a lot more designs.

I would like to get feedback and involvement from the Eclipse community. Unfortunately, CrowdSpring doesn’t make it easier for comments, so please leave any you have on this Eclipse bug.

February 19 is the deadline for new designs. After that we will setup a way to select a short list and a final selection. For those people that like our existing logo, I will be perfectly happy if we stay with the existing logo but I do think we should see if there is something better. Community feedback now is key.

Ignite Goodness

2010-02-10T08:00:07+00:00

I'm a big fan of the Ignite format - very short talks which lead to in-depth secondary conversations - although, much like git, if you haven't actually tried it, you can't really understand what a game changer it is. What's neat is how the O'Reilly folks have provided just enough infrastructure and support to create a global network of Ignite events. Two very simple rules (five minutes, 20 slides) and the rest is left for the community to invent and refine.

In addition to just being an Ignite fan, I bring up Ignite's success because I believe that changing the hard wall of Eclipse rules to a more Aikido-like incrementally increasing process will be all-around good for the long-term health of Eclipse. Is the future more big corporate or more crowd-sourced? (I'm betting on the crowd.)

ianskerrett

2010-02-09T18:32:34+00:00

We are in the midst of judging the product categories for the Eclipse Community Awards. It turns out we received only two nominations for the EclipseRT Application category. The judges have decided they would like to see more nominees, so we have re-opened nominations in this category until February 17 at 5pmET.

This is a new category for the Eclipse Awards so some clarification might be in order. If you are building an internal application, commercial product or open source project that uses any of the EclipseRT technology you can send in a nomination. For example, if you have built a killer web application using RAP or a great server application using Equinox, Jetty and EclipseLink or a SOA application using Swordfish or your using SMILA or ….

I know there are a lot of applications and products using EclipseRT technology. The nomination process is pretty easy and this is your opportunity to garner the fame and prestige of an Eclipse Community Award winner. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

modjewel 0.2.0 - a CommonJS require() function for the browser

2010-02-09T10:21:03+00:00

I decided to get off my butt and bring my "for the browser" CommonJS require() implementation at http://github.com/pmuellr/modjewel into the 20-teens.

some background

Just over a year ago the "ServerJS" group was formed based on the "What Server Side JavaScript needs" blog post from Kevin Dangoor. This effort was renamed "CommonJS" later in the year, and lives on the web here: http://commonjs.org/. Kris Kowal has a nice write up on CommonJS at Ars Technica in the article "CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination", if you don't know anything about it. Note: I'm a sucker for software-based world domination.

One of the first items looked at by the CommonJS community was a "module" system, centered around a function named require(). More information on modules and require() is available here: http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Modules/1.1. While most of the folks in the group were playing with server-side JavaScript, I was interested in the browser, so cooked up a crude version of require() in a github project just over a year ago; the crufty old hack is here.

I figured someone else would do a proper version, but haven't really come across anything besides David Flanagan's efforts, documented in his blog posts "CommonJS Modules implementation" and "A module loader with simple dependency management". I have to admit I don't watch the CommonJS stuff all that closely, I probably missed some other implementations.

David's code doesn't have any kind of a license associated with it, so I didn't really feel it was appropriate to use it for a real project. And there were some things I wanted to modify. So, at the very least David shamed me into sprucing up modjewel and I will admit to stealing bits of his design as well.

One thing I learned from David's blog post was that compliance tests exist. Loves having tests. They currently live here: http://github.com/kriskowal/commonjs. Note that David's blog post points to an older version of the tests.

Onto the goodies in the newly improved modjewel ...

nice ui for the compliance tests

As I mentioned above, there's a set of test cases for the require() function. Problem is, they're built for command-line invocation; remember, this CommonJS stuff is more server-side than client-side JavaScript. I was recently pawing through the source for the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, and realized I could use the same "run the tests serially in IFrames" technique here, so I lifted that design. I now have a single page that will load and run all the tests serially, and produce a green/red report card when done. It's not perfect, but it's very handy.

One weird thing to note was that I couldn't find any kind of license on the tests; I ended up importing them directly into my project, which is kind of silly. I should probably run them right out of the github repo.

support for module.setExports()

The existing facilities with modules make it easy to provide access to a number of objects within a particular module. However, for those times you only have a single object in a module, things get verbose. Here's an example: say you want to build and use a module called WebDav (so the file is named WebDav.js) which exports a single function, WebDav.

In the file WebDav.js, you would define the WebDav class as:

   exports.WebDav = function WebDav() {
       // the function is 'named' for debug purposes
   ...
   }

You can then use the WebDav class in another file as:

   var WebDav = require("WebDav").WebDav

All the RY of Java. The "WebDav" passed to require() specifies the module, and the next WebDav selects the function as a property of the exports object the module populated.

Alternatively, with the module.setExports() support you can define the class in WebDav.js as:

   module.setExports(function WebDav() {
   ...
   })

and then use it in another file as:

   var WebDav = require("WebDav")

Better! Very convenient if you have a 1-1 correspondence between classes and modules.

module.setExports() isn't official yet; see the wiki page for more information: http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Modules/SetExports.

preloading modules via <script src="">

The way modjewel's version of require() works is like every other browser-based one: it use synchronous XHR. Which is ok for development-time, but completely unacceptable at deployment-time. So they say. Flanagan came up a preload story for his require2.js file, but the mechanism seemed a little crude.

Instead, I created a command-line utility which will convert a module into a file which can be embedded with <script src="">. So then the story would be that you run this utility as part of a build step, perhaps minize or whatever you kids do to your JavaScript afterwards. In the end, you have a "plain old" JavaScript file to "include". All the utility really does is wrap your code in a function. When this code is executed, it registers the module and the function, such that the first time require() is called to load the module, the function is executed and the module is loaded.

A nice aspect of this is that the order in which the <script src=""> are placed doesn't need to be in some kind of special pre-req order. Including the modules doesn't really load them, it just pre-loads them.

Anyway, it's one answer to the "you can't use synchronous XHR!" argument.

portability

I've run the tests successfully on Mac Chrome, Mac Safari, Mac Opera 10, the IPhone Simulator, Windows Chrome, and Windows FireFox 3.0. IE 7.0 was a no-go.

There is an issue with Chrome, where some tests fail when running against a file:// URL. See issue 1 for more info.

There are some jiggly issues with Windows - of course those being path separator issues (\ instead of /) and new-line issues (CR LF instead of LF). Should be easy to fix. Not sure what to do about IE 7, do I use FireBug Lite to debug that?

Suffrage

2010-02-08T13:14:48+00:00

At the risk of playing with words whose connotations I don't fully understand... Eclipse committers have to suffer - a little bit - to be enfranchised. I mean, to get the right to vote in the 2010 Eclipse board member elections, which begin two weeks from today, on February 22, 2010.

If you are an individual (not employed by a member company) committer: Please click here, and sign and send the membership agreement to the Eclipse Foundation. This will enable you to vote in the upcoming board member elections. There is no cost, and as an added bonus, the Eclipse Foundation is now sending really nice thank-you e-mails to those individual committers who become members.

Why should you do that? Let me try to explain with a diagram:

(thanks, diagrammr!)

Here is the same information in text form, copied from the election process web page:

Each Committer Member gets one vote. Note that committers who are employees of Member companies have all the rights and privileges (including voting) of a Committer Member.

Individual committers must join the Eclipse Foundation as Committer Members by signing the Membership Agreement in order to be allowed to vote.

All committers who are employees of a single company have their votes collapsed into a single vote in the committer elections.

That's right: every vote from an individual committer member (someone who signed the individual membership agreement) is worth exactly the same as the votes from all EclipseSource committers combined, or all Oracle committers combined, or all itemis committers combined, ... you get the idea.

That seems a little bit weird, but it sort of makes sense considering the situation back when the rules were made: IBM had way more Eclipse committers than everybody else, and there was a risk that they would determine the committer representatives, who then could be seen as voting in favour of IBM - leading to an imbalance at the board of directors. So when you think about it, the rules ensure that the committer representatives election is truly independent of any potential company interests.

So, to repeat, if you are an individual (not employed by a member company) committer: Please click here, and sign and send the membership agreement to the Eclipse Foundation. It's free (of charge), it will enable you to vote in the upcoming board member elections, and as an added bonus, the Eclipse Foundation is now sending really nice thank-you e-mails to those individual committers who become members.

More votes mean more weight for the committer representatives on the Eclipse Board of Directors. And if you are an individual committer, your vote weighs a lot!

Word definitions.

Suffrage (from the Latin suffragium, meaning "voting tablet", and figuratively "right to vote", and originally a term for the pastern bone used to cast votes) is the civil right to vote, or the exercise of that right.
...
Where Universal suffrage exists, the right to vote is not restricted by race, gender, belief, wealth or social status. It typically does not extend a right to vote to all residents of a region; distinctions are frequently made in regard to citizenship, age, and occasionally mental capacity or criminal convictions.

Gearing up for Rails 3.0

2010-02-08T13:08:39+00:00

As full release of Ruby on Rails 3.0 draws near, I find myself collecting news, articles, and preparing myself for the transition. Here is what I’ve been reading so far:

I’m sure I’ll collect more as time rolls on. BTW, you can find these links and more on my Ruby page where I continue to capture useful Ruby information.

Ad re: Contribute to Eclipse?

2010-02-08T10:37:44+00:00

Stackoverflow is offering free advertising to open source projects looking for contributors [1], but I don't see any submission from the Eclipse Foundation. Maybe it's still being designed?
Anyway, this is the kind of thing that, if I'm elected as a committer Board rep, I'll be pushing the Foundation to do: outreach to recruit additional contributions of all kinds (code, tests, doc, translations, etc).

Protected: Theater Room - Walls

2010-02-07T03:02:27+00:00

Article Series - Home Theater Renovation

Previous in series Next in series

Can we turn e4 into an orange?

2010-02-04T23:52:49+00:00

Let me write a quick response to Elias' thought-provoking post. I hope there will be other (and not so quick) responses as well - it is important to step back every now and then to assess whether we are going in the right direction. But for now, I didn't want to let the issues he raises without an answer from the e4 team. The question for me is, how can we turn e4 into a juicy and sweet lemon? ;-)

Killer feature: I fully agree that support for styling and skinning is not going to be enough of a killer feature to convince everybody that it is worth stepping up to e4. What could be other killer features? To be honest, I am not sure. I would be interested in hearing opinions on this - please leave comments!

Download size: The 230 MB are easy to explain - this download includes the 3.x Eclipse SDK (167 MB), the EMF SDK (27 MB), some parts of WTP, GEF, and other bits and pieces. If you just look at the e4 bundles, they amount to just over 2 MB. The dependencies of the core e4 bundles (a subset of those 2 MB) are SWT, JFace, Equinox, and the EMF core runtime. It could always be smaller, but the 230 MB are just the wrong number to look at. Unless you are interested in the footprint of e4 + compatibility layer + everything from the current Eclipse SDK, but clearly it is not the long-term goal of e4 to always ship with everything from 3.x.

Different: This takes a little longer to explain, but luckily a good response already existed, in the form of John Arthorne's argumentation from bug 300099 comment 4 (I made minor adjustments to make it fit better into this blog post):

The purpose of injection was to make it easier to obtain services in the general case, as well as to decouple of service user from knowing or caring about who provided the service. I'll offer a couple of examples that I've taken from the existing 3.x code (all from the current ResourceNavigator.java in 3.6):

1) I want to print a message on the status line. In 3.x this is:

getViewSite().getActionBars().getStatusLineManager().setMessage(msg);

In e4 this should be:

@Inject IStatusLineManager statusLine; ... statusLine.setMessage(msg);

2) I want to get the selected resources:

 ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
if (selection instanceof IStructuredSelection) {
  IStructuredSelection ssel = (IStructuredSelection) selection;
  for (Iterator i = ssel.iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
      Object o = i.next();
      IResource resource = null;
      if (o instanceof IResource) {
          resource = (IResource) o;
      } else {
          if (o instanceof IAdaptable) {
              resource = (IResource) ((IAdaptable) o)
                      .getAdapter(IResource.class);
          }
      }
      if (resource != null) {
          list.add(resource);
      }
  }
}
return new StructuredSelection(list);

I'm not sure how we handle multi-selection in e4, but this should be something
like:

 @Inject
public void setSelection(@Named("selection") List<IResource> selection) {
selectedResources = selection;
}

3) I want to associate a help context with my control

    getSite().getWorkbenchWindow().getWorkbench().getHelpSystem().setHelp(
      viewer.getControl(), getHelpContextId());

In e4 this should be something like:

@Inject IWorkbenchHelpSystem helpSystem; ... helpSystem.setHelp(viewer.getControl(), getHelpContextId());

The end result is simpler code, but it also removes a mass of assumptions that
the client previously had to make, about what their containment structure
looked like and where specific services came from. I think we sometimes take
for granted how difficult it can be for clients in 3.x to figure out where to
get particular service from.

Having said all that, we have probably gone too far down the
"non-specification" route in e4. I think it is essential that we provide
interfaces containing specification of things clients must implement (e.g., you
need a doSave() method for parts that are to be used as editors). We can make
the interface optional if we want, but there has to be somewhere where we
specify the behavior expected/required for clients. To me this specification of
expected behavior for clients is orthogonal to service injection so I hope that
we can have both.

EPL Growth: The Symbian Foundation Goes Fully Open

2010-02-04T13:15:26+00:00

It’s not too surprising that the Eclipse Foundation thinks that the Eclipse Public License is a darn fine open source license. It is arguably the most commercially-friendly of the copyleft licenses, and one which is particularly well suited for fostering a community building a software platform.

So in June of 2008 we were thrilled with the announcement concerning the formation of the Symbian Foundation and their selection of the EPL as their community’s license. It was a huge endorsement of the EPL which immediately shattered a couple of misconceptions about it. (I’m thinking of things like “the EPL is a Java license”, “the EPL is only for Eclipse projects” and the like.) But of course migrating a large and mature code base to open source takes a lot of work to do, so the original announcement was basically a promise of good things to come.

Today is the day that promise becomes a reality. The Symbian Foundation is releasing its entire code base under the EPL to the world. This is a major accomplishment for that community, and one which they accomplished months earlier than originally planned. Please join me in congratulating the Symbian Foundation in achieving an important milestone in their voyage to becoming a truly open source and open development community.

Sometimes, bug triage is no fun

2010-02-03T22:54:08+00:00

Here is how I intend to respond to a private email that I received today, about a bug that was filed yesterday. How would you respond in a similar situation?

Hi [X],

Thank you for reporting a problem with Eclipse. But - and maybe it's just me - the private email you sent today comes across as demanding. You are asking us to help you quickly, without investing time on your side to make the problem easy to reproduce for us. I understand that it's frustrating when things don't work the way you think they should work. However, remember that Eclipse is free software, and please consider if you are not already getting a lot more than your money's worth.

So, in your own best interest, could you please use Bugzilla (that way, everybody interested in the issue can follow the discussion), and help us reproduce the problem with as little time investment as possible on our side? I have already asked twice, on the bug, but I will ask one more time: Please attach [a file that will allow us to reproduce the issue] to the bug. I would expect to be able to use [list of steps] to get the source code into my Eclipse. Before uploading the attachment, it wouldn't hurt if you tried the import operation on a fresh workspace to confirm that we will be able to just run it. By the way, the recommended way to produce the file to attach would be [list of steps].

Thanks,
Boris

2010 Elections: Candidates Posted

2010-02-03T19:23:04+00:00

The candidates for the 2010 Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors are now posted. There are five nominees for Committer Rep and five nominees for Sustaining Member Rep, each group competing for three available seats.

We will have the candidates full bios and positions up by February 8th. Voting opens on February 22nd. You can find a full description of all of the key dates here.

I hope to see lots of community members getting involved in the discussions!

ianskerrett

2010-02-03T18:45:42+00:00

Congratulations to the Eclipse PDT team for their top score on the recent InfoWorld review of PHP IDE’s. Out of 8 PHP IDE’s reviewed, PDT tied for top marks. The other top IDE was Zend Studio, of course based on Eclipse.

The PDT project team and Zend have done a fabulous job creating a world-class IDE for PHP developers. Eclipse is clearly doing well in the PHP developer community thanks to their work.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

2010-02-03T17:45:32+00:00

I had an interesting debugging session the other day.

The Rails app I'm working on for a client uses oauth to get user info from one of the popular professional social networking sites.

In order to keep from hitting that site with an oauth request too often, yesterday I worked on a story to add throttling. The client wanted to refresh the data no more often than an application configurable refresh period.

Easy Peasy

Easy enough! I already had a model responsible for keeping the oauth token and returning the relevant data. I added a text field to the model where I could cache the data as a serialized object. Then I added code to the method which returned the data which checked to see if the refresh period had elapsed since the record was updated, and if so, make the oauth request to refresh the data, and save the updated record.

Hang on!

Then I started trying it out, and I got a surprise. The first time I asked for the data, it got fetched via oauth, and the model got saved. I asked again, expecting that the cached data would be returned, but once again the oauth request went out.

After playing with it some more in script/console, and adding some debugging printouts, I finally realized that the problem was that the updated_at field in the record wasn't changing. I saw that the sql query generated by the save was inserting the data value, but not a new value for updated_at, strange!

Alternatives

I'd been using the update_attribute method to change the data value. Just for giggles, I decided to see if setting the value and then explicitly saving the record would fix it. Nope! Exactly the same SQL was generated, with updated_at left unchanged.

Digging deeper

This is the point where I resort to reading code. This project has Rails vendored, so I had no qualms about inserting some debugging alterations to the code. Actually I'm not immune to temporarily monkeying with non-vendored gems to debug arcane stuff like this either.

So the first thing was to find the code in ActiveRecord which writes the updated_at attribute. I found it in activerecord/lib/activerecord/timestamp.rb

  def update_with_timestamps(*args) #:nodoc:
    if record_timestamps && (!partial_updates? || changed?)
      current_time = current_time_from_proper_timezone

      write_attribute('updated_at', current_time) if respond_to?(:updated_at)
      write_attribute('updated_on', current_time) if respond_to?(:updated_on)
    end

    update_without_timestamps(*args)
  end

Those familiar with Rails conventions will realize this as an override to the ActiveRecord::Base#update method using alias_method_chain.

So, in order for the timestamps to be written, record_timestamps has to be truthy, partial_updates? has to be falsy or changed? has to be truthy.

Now record_timestamps is a class_inheritable attribute on ActiveRecord::Base, which allows timestamp recording to be turned on or off for all or particular ActiveRecord classes, and that was true by default. The method partial_updates? determines whether or not the partial update feature has been turned on or off for the model, again this is true by default

This leaves changed? a method added by dirty tracking which indicates whether anything in the record has changed and therefore needs to be written back to the database as part of the update.

So facing this code, I inserted a puts to show me what those three values were.

And the culprit turned out to be the result of the changed? method, which was returning false!

Active Record Dirty Attribute Tracking

The partial update feature, along with. dirty attribute tracking, was introduced in Rails 2.1. Dirty attribute tracking keeps track of the value of attributes when a model is fetched, and partial update only writes changed attributes to minimize the amount of data send to the SQL adapter. They use an instance variable @changed_attributes, a hash mapping the name of any attributes whose value has been changed maintained by the write_attribute method. The changed? method indicates whether any of the attributes have changed. There's also a will_change method which alerts ActiveRecord that a an attribute might change directly, say with something like Book.title.capitalize!

So in this case my model fetched the data via an oauth request, and since the value hadn't changed, dirty tracking determined that the model object hadn't changed, so now updated_at timestamp was written.

I'd run afoul of dirty tracking/partial update before. Back in 2008, I got hired by a startup with a sizable Rails app they'd been working on, which used lots of ActiveRecord callbacks and observers. One of my assignments was to upgrade it from Rails 2.0 to 2.1, but the introduction of partial update made some subtle changes to things like the ordering of those callbacks and observed events which badly broke the application. The CTO quickly came to the conclusion that the upgrade was going to cost more than he deemed it to be worth. So, in our case, the jump from Rails 2.0 to 2.1 was a much bigger one than from Rails 1.x to 2.0.

The Fix

In this case, the fix was considerably simpler, use update_attributes(:data => the_date, :updated_at => Time.now). This worked and ensured that the updated_at attribute gets updated whenever the data is fetched.

One More Little Mystery

After fixing this, I moved on, but one little thing nagged at me. Since the data attribute hadn't actually changed its value, why hadn't the partial update code kept it from being written in the first place?

So I went back and looked a little harder at the active record code and found this:

  def update_with_dirty
    if partial_updates?
      # Serialized attributes should always be written in case they've been
      # changed in place.
      update_without_dirty(changed | (attributes.keys & self.class.serialized_attributes.keys))
    else
      update_without_dirty
    end
  end

Since the data attribute was serialized, it always gets written!

So Is This a Bug in ActiveRecord?

Actually I could make the case that there's one of two bugs here:

Serialized attributes shouldn't be written under partial update if they haven't actually changed, or
The updated_at attribute should be changed if there are any serialized attributes even if the values of those serialized attributes haven't changed.

To be honest, I'm not sure which if either of these is a bug. In my use case, I'd prefer that AR used option 2. On the other hand I can see cases where it would be preferable if updated_at reflected the last time the record actually changed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that the code right now updates updated_at if the only change to a record is in serialized attributes at least one of whose values has changed.

But, I've got other things to worry about right now, so I guess I'll follow Scarlett O'Hara's advice and "think about that tomorrow!"

Talks at EclipseCon 2010

2010-02-02T13:50:32+00:00

I'm involved in two talks at EclipseCon this year.

The first one is a 3-hour tutorial on Monday morning called Working with OSGi: The stuff you need to know. It's based on my upcoming book entitled OSGi and Equinox: Creating Highly Modular Java Systems. I'll be presenting with my co-authors Jeff McAffer (EclipseSource) and Simon Archer (IBM) as well as Chris Aniszczyk (EclipseSource). Should be loads of work. And loads of fun.

I'm also doing a talk on Tuesday afternoon called OSGi Best and Worst Practices. Again, I'll be presenting with Jeff McAffer and Chris Aniszczyk, plus Martin Lippert from it-agile in Germany. Martin really knows how to put the proverbial umlaut in OSGi! Personally, I'm hoping to focus more on the worst practices, since that's more fun. Got any ideas or pet peeves? I've already got one up my sleeve that will involve a shameless rip-off of my favorite Toothpaste for Dinner comic. Well, second favorite, behind this one. And, yes, I can recite the first 50.

Addison-Wesley will also be selling our book at the conference, and Jeff, Simon and I will have copies available to peruse. We'll probably give away a copy or two to some lucky winners.

The conference runs from March 22 - 25. See you there!

The Two Solitudes

2010-02-01T22:17:49+00:00

I don’t think you can go to school in Canada and not read Hugh MacLennan’s the Two Solitudes. So for me it was an obvious metaphor for a phenomenon that has become apparent to me over the past year or so. That is: Europeans and Americans (particularly Californians) view the practice of software development in materially different ways.

I travel a lot to both Europe and California and I talk to a lot of people about what they are building and how they are building it. In my personal and completely unscientific experience the difference between the two regions is stark. I thought it might be interesting to explain what I am observing and see if others see things in a similar way. I freely admit that my experiences could be completely coloured by sample bias (e.g. maybe I’m just talking to completely different crowds in the different regions).

BTW, some of these ideas are distantly related to Michael Cusumano’s book The Business of Software, where he points out that the US is somewhat unique in looking at software as a business. Certainly there are not that many European independent software vendors relative to the US.

It seems that most of the Europeans I talk to are focused on large systems engineering problems. As a result, they largely view software as part of a supply chain, where what they are working on is going to either be part of or in support of a systems engineering product such as an automobile or an airplane. The next largest group that I talk to are fairly typical application developers working in large banks, insurance companies and the like. But here are the interesting bits:

Both of these groups are deeply concerned about software complexity and both are looking to modeling and model-driven development as part of the solution. They view modeling as absolutely strategic to their future ability to develop the software their customers or businesses will need.

I also see a lot more interest in desktop applications as opposed to web applications. Just recently I had two different conversations with groups that are migrating existing web applications to Eclipse RCP desktop applications. This is not to say that Europeans don’t build websites or use RIAs! But in my experience there is a very noticeable difference in the relative interest in desktop applications in Europe.

Now if you’re still reading this, you’ve likely guessed where its going next. My experiences in the US generally and even more so in California is that the Web is king and that anything which doesn’t run in the browser is uninteresting. I also uniformly get incredulous reactions if you ask someone in the US if they’re using modeling or model-driven development practices. They’re all hacking code with small, fast, super-smart teams. It’s just a completely different world in my personal experience.

Do others have similar observations?

The challenge for Eclipse in this context, of course, is to be relevant in both contexts. I actually think that we are doing a good — but not yet great — job of doing so. Projects like e4 are leading the way to making the Eclipse platform more relevant in the Web 2.0 world. But it certainly has a ways to go. The Modeling project has a virtual alphabet soup of technologies in it, but at the moment falls short of a providing a cohesive modeling platform. Something I hope to see the community begin to address shortly.

remote web inspector - baby steps

2010-02-01T15:34:31+00:00

Last week, I did a little work getting a remote debug story between an iPhone and WebKit's Web Inspector limping. Barely limping. More like crawling. Anyhoo, the write-up is here:

http://muellerware.org/papers/remote-web-inspector-baby-steps.html

The Opposite of Open is Theirs

2010-02-01T08:02:53+00:00

Eclipse is at a cross-roads: it has more users than ever before but also less committer involvement than ever before [1,2]. Thinking about this, I'm struck by the similarity between Eclipse's situation and David Weinberger's "The Opposite of Open is Theirs", specifically he says:

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we'll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

or, reworded for Eclipse:

If we allow others to make decisions about what Eclipse is — preferring some plug-ins and projects to others — Eclipse won’t feel like it’s ours, and we'll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

In other words, as long as the official Eclipse distros are controlled by single companies, the growing body of users will continue to be disenfranchised. I think the Apache Foundation epitomizes what the Eclipse Foundation should strive to emulate:

We consider ourselves not simply a group of projects sharing a server, but rather a community of developers and users.

Required diversity, decisions made by contributors, refusal to allow sponsors to control project direction, ... those are some of Apache's open fundamentals. If elected to the Board, I will work for moving the Foundation in that direction. I'm pro-member-company-profits, but not in a way that is anti-open. I want Eclipse and the Foundation to be viable in the long-term and I believe the only way to accomplish that long-term relevance is through a truly open meritocracy.

It needs to be ours and not theirs.