Planet OTI

8GB Memory Upgrade / PAE Mode

2012-02-02T02:33:29+00:00

I’ve been doing more video processing lately, some of it HDTV quality, this was really demonstrating that 2GB was not nearly enough RAM for my system. Memory prices have dropped a lot since I did my frugal upgrade, at the time (early 2010) I spent $54 on a single 2GB stick. The other day I picked up 2x4GB for a mere $35 from CanadaComputers. Sure we’re now 2 years later, but to get four times the RAM for less?

In general I’ve had good luck with Patriot products, and looking at their warranty it looks like the have the standard limited lifetime warranty you’d expect.

My motherboard has 4 slots for RAM, so I could have left the 2GB stick in and added the two additional – but I decided against mixing things up. I figured 8GB was plenty for now, I can easily change my mind later. Installation was a snap, literally under 10mins including juggling all those cables.

Amazingly I got it right the first time, the BIOS showed me 8GB. Now as I’m running a 32bit version of Linux, I wasn’t surprised that the operating system couldn’t see all of my new RAM.

$ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 3482728 kB

So Linux can only see 3.3GB, I suspect why the value isn’t 4GB is due to the onboard video stealing some away from the OS.

The obvious upgrade path is to install the 64bit version of Ubuntu. It seems the smart path forward is to wipe and start again, however given that I’ve got a 1TB drive and it’s 60% full that’s going to be a long copy / install process. I mentioned this to a friend at work and he suggested that instead I use the PAE kernel, I’m glad he suggested it.

Physical Address Extension (PAE) is very easy to add to an existing 32bit Ubuntu installation. Assuming you’ve got a CPU that supports the feature (and with any current hardware you will), it’s a simple one line install.

$ sudo aptitude install linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae

After the install, a quick reboot and we’re running the new kernel. If you’re doing a clean install, recent versions of Ubuntu automatically add the PAE kernel if you’ve got enough RAM.

Now we can see all of the RAM

$ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 8072420 kB
This works out to 7.7GB, again some I believe is donated to the onboard video.

Why might you want to use PAE instead of running a 64bit version? If you elect to use 64bit mode, then all of your memory pointers need to be 64bits wide (aka double the 32bit size). This can cause some serious memory bloat depending on the type of application.

It should be no great surprise, but there is some work involved in getting applications to work in 64bit environments. For some applications, recompiling is all that is needed – however many have hidden dependencies on certain data structures being 32bit in size. It is for this reason that lots of software is still stuck back in 32bit – the mitigation is to run 32bit compatibility libraries.

With PAE, while the kernel can see all of the memory (up to 64GB) – each process is still limited to 32bit addressing (4GB max). You also miss out on some of the 64bit extensions to the instruction set, so you are leaving a little bit of performance on the table.

When I get around to doing a full wipe and re-install, I’ll likely move to a 64bit version of Ubuntu as it seems to be the recommended approach. I’m certainly glad I can put that off for a while longer and use PAE to get access to the increased memory with almost no effort.

Creating a build you can trust

2012-01-31T04:29:58+00:00

‘The build is broken’ is something I’ve heard too many times in my software development career. Concepts like continuous delivery and devops make it all that more important to have a build that you can trust. In the Agile ALM Connect session, Build Trust in Your Build to Deployment Flow ,Yoav Landman, founder of Artifactory, is going to demonstrate some of the techniques for using tools like Maven, Gradle and Artifactory to automate builds that release applications which are fully traceable, managed and trusted!

Yoav has also participated in my Agile ALM Connect speaker Q&A series. He answers my questions about Artifactory and his company JFrog.

1. You are the founder of the Artifactory open source project. Why did you decide to create Artifactory?

I started Artifactory in 2006. I was working as a consultant at the time and migrated a couple of large client projects from Ant to Maven 2. I was frustrated by the absence of good options to manage dependencies and hosting artifacts in house. There were a couple of tools out there, but they all lacked basic features such as searching and artifact uploading and were basically very immature, since the whole domain of Binary Repository Managers, didn’t exist yet.
In an effort to fill this gap I decided to go and write my own tool as an open source project and created Artifactory. The quick adoption of Artifactory lead me to create JFrog around it. Actually, the final straw that pushed me to start the project was a complete outage of the Codehaus server for a couple of days, which left some of my clients in the dark as they depended on artifacts from the Codehaus repository which they removed from their local caches.

2. We hear a lot about continuous delivery and devops. How is this effecting the build process and what issues do you think need to be considered?

We are dealing a lot with continuous delivery in JFrog as part of our Artifactory on the cloud service, Artifactory Online. For us, the main effect on the build process is that artifacts are deployed much more frequently, which makes good binary management critical.

Artifactory, as a repository manager is not just the target to which build results are deployed for usage by dependent builds, but also the source from which applications are deployed to production, and even where RPMs are installed from to newly provisioned machines. We are using the properties feature of Artifactory to tag artifacts that were moved to production so that they can be easily identified. Another important aspect is that snapshots can often be treated as releases, and so traditional staging/release workflows no longer fit the requirements of continuous deployment.

3. If someone wanted to get started with Artifactory where would you suggest they start?

I think the best starting point would be downloading Artifactory from jfrog.com and watching this one-minute setup screencast. For someone who has never used a binary repository and wants to understand the benefits of using a tool like Artifactory, I’d suggest looking at this short intro. Other than that, Artifactory is real easy to set up and get up to speed with, and the online help in the UI makes it really useful to understand how to get around. Finally, there is of course the user guide and the users forum for getting more help.

Goodbye WordPress

2012-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on converting this blog from WordPress to a static site generated by some custom Python scripts. Yesterday, I finally made the switch.

Everything looks pretty much the same as it did before, but things should feel a bit faster. Most importantly, it’s a lot more pleasant to write posts in the new system, so hopefully I’ll get back to blogging a bit more regularly.

If you see anything that’s broken, send me an email or let me know on Twitter.

Dev + Ops = Getting Software Deployed Faster (DevOps)

2012-01-27T04:22:36+00:00

DevOps is one of those terms you hear a LOT about lately but I am not sure it is really well understood. However, if you are going to be successful at Agile ALM it would seem natural you would want to bring the operations side of IT closer into the development process. Puppet is one example of an open source project that is implementing some of the DevOps concepts.

When we put together the program committee for Agile ALM Connect we specifically wanted an expert from the DevOps community to make sure the program had a healthy devops slant. Therefore, I was thrilled to have Lukes Kanies, the founder of Puppet and CEO of PuppetLabs, agree to be on the program committee and also speak at Agile ALM Connect on ‘what is devops’ and introduce Puppet. We will also have Kenn Hussey talk about Geppetto, an Eclipse-based Puppet IDE.

In my Q&A series with Agile ALM Connect speakers, Luke answered three questions about DevOps.

1. ‘DevOps’ is a term that is used quite a bit lately. How do you describe the term DevOps and why should developers care?

DevOps is in to operations what Agile is to development. Operations needs to be a competitive advantage, adopting new technology quickly and with minimal business interruption, but in many cases the business goals have been lost and the new focus on policy and compliance has allowed IT to become a cost center. DevOps is about operations teams working closely with everyone involved in product delivery to make sure that business needs come first. This often involves a lot of automation, but the main thing is about making sure the customer comes first, just like in agile development.

Developers should care because organizations following devops practices will do a better job of supporting them, getting their software deployed faster and more easily.

2. You are the founder of the Puppet open source project. Why did you start Puppet?
When I started Puppet, the tools and practices in IT had barely changed in ten years. I was afraid that it would still not have changed in ten more years, and I saw an opportunity to build a better tool and help make the lives of sysadmins better. Based on how passionate our user base, we seem to have struck a chord.

3. What advice do you have for people that want to learn how to use Puppet?
First, start small, and fix the most painful things first. Trying to boil the ocean by automating your whole infrastructure will just frustrate you and have little reward, but if you start by automating the small, menial work in your infrastructure you’ll have quick rewards and, even better, more time available in your day to work on the hard and important stuff.

Review: Harmony Link

2012-01-27T01:50:51+00:00

When it was announced back in September 2011 I was quite excited about the HarmonyLink. I got one as a gift this Christmas and after some initial efforts with it, my enthusiasm is a little dampened, but I still think the device has a lot of promise. There are some serious flaws that need to be addressed by Logitech before it can replace my Pronto TSU 2000.

I was surprised that it didn’t use the same Harmony Desktop software that worked with the 659, then I got excited because it appeared to be web based. The model is log into website, configure your Devices and Activities on the web and sync to your device – nice. Sadly if you try to log into your account on myharmony.com from a non supported platform you get this message:

The following platforms are supported:

Microsoft® Windows XP or Vista with Internet Explorer 7+, or Firefox 3+

Microsoft® Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8+ or Firefox 3+

Intel Mac OS® 10.4.8+ with Firefox 3+ or Safari 4+

The reason for this is they use a custom browser plug-in to do the initial setup of the device. This sort of makes sense, as the HarmonyLink is a wifi device that needs to be told how to connect to your wireless network. The initial setup seems to be the only time you’ll need the USB cable provided. I also found it a bit uncomfortable being asked by a website to enter my WPA2 password.

Logitech could have made things much simpler. Provided a very simple utility on Windows and Mac OSX to do the device initialization. Of course you need to program the device to enable it for your wireless network, they have all the code they need to do this in a reasonable manner so it seems like just a dumb design decision to include it as part of the browser plugin.

Security fail: The website myharmony.com also wasn’t able to accept a < character in my password. It gets better, the Android app (and apparently the iOS app too) doesn’t remember your password. So you need to type it in from time to time. Strike two for password security. They do require at least 4 characters, I can think of some great four letter words that might fit. So the user is torn between using a strong password or a convenient one. Everyone who might want to use the remote may need to know the password, that’d be strike three on their security story.

Setting up the devices was pretty reasonable, it does require that you know the model numbers of your equipment but will provide suggestions if you’re close to the right name. I had trouble locating the IR4PS3 device (for control of the PS3) in the device database, I ended up succeeding by entering Sony as the manufacturer and IR4PS3 as the model – then the correction offered by the website (IR4PS3/IR4PS3) worked.

The remote is setup around the idea of Activities, such as “Watch TV”. This is a bit different than the flow I have setup with my Pronto so it’ll take some getting used to. They have three basic activities: Watch TV, Watch Movie, Listen to Music. You can have multiples of one type of activity and give them unique names, but they provide only 4 icons – which is very silly given how easy it should be to have many different icons.

They very first time you connect to the HarmonyLink using your Android or iOS device running the remote control app, you’ll likely have a firmware update and a sync of your data from the web. The Android app hung on me during the firmware update leaving me waiting and waiting. It required a reboot of my Android tablet and I was back in business.

I haven’t warmed up to the Android version of the app yet. The power off path wasn’t immediately obvious to me, I’ll have to see how others that get a chance to use the remote once I shake out all the major issues react to it. Responsiveness to button presses is pretty good, there doesn’t feel like there is any appreciable lag. You can edit the button layout, with the exception of the 4 way navigation pad which seems fixed (this is unfortunate as the IR4PS3 mapping for ‘ok’ doesn’t map to X).

I was disappointed to discover that there wasn’t a web UI on the HarmonyLink itself. You must use a supported device (Android, iOS) and run the app. I’ll need to break out Wireshark and take a look at what needs to be done to fix that.

As I started with, I’m still optimistic this is going to be a nice addition to my home theatre – but only once they address some of the shortcomings. Engadget gathered a long list of great comments which felt pretty much on target. There is also a suggestion thread in the Logitech forums. I hope Logitech is listening.

AMD - the good parts

2012-01-19T18:58:03+00:00

Based my blog post yesterday "More on why AMD is Not the Answer", you might guess I'm an AMD-hater. I strive to not be negative, but sometimes I fail. Mea culpa.

I do have a number of issues with AMD. But I think it's also fair to point out "the good parts".

my background

I've only really played with a few AMD libraries/runtimes. I've been more fiddling around with ways of taking node/CommonJS-style modules, and making them consumable by AMD runtimes. The AMD runtimes I've played with the most are almond and (my own) modjewel. My focus has been on just the raw require() and define() functions.

But I follow a lot of the AMD chatter around the web, and have done at least reading and perusing through other AMD implementations. To find implementations of AMD, look at this list and search for "async". The ones I hear the most about are require.js, Dojo, PINF, and curl.

And now, "the good parts".

the code

Browsing the source repositories and web sites, you'll note that folks have spent a lot of time on the libraries - the code itself, documentation, test suites, support, etc. Great jobs, all. I know a lot of these libraries have been battle-tested by folks in positions to do pretty good battle-testing with them.

the evangelism

Special mention here to James Burke (not this one), who has done a spectacular job leading and evangelizing the AMD cause, both within the "JavaScript Module" community, and outside. In particular, he's been trying to get AMD support into popular libraries like jQuery, backbone, underscore and node.js. Sometimes with success, sometimes not. James has been cool and collected when dealing with jerks like me, pestering him with complaints, questions, requests and bug reports. Some open source communities can be cold and bitter places, but the AMD community is not one of those, and I'm sure that's in part due to James.

Thanks for all your hard work James!

the async support

AMD is an acronym for Asynchronous Module Definition. That first word, Asynchronous, is key. For the most part, if you're using JavaScript, you're living in a world of single-threaded processing, where long-running functions are implemented as asynchronous calls that take callback functions as arguments. It makes sense, at least in some cases, to extend this to the function of loading JavaScript code.

If you need to load JavaScript in an async fashion, AMD is designed for you, and uses existing async function patterns that JavaScript programmers should already be familiar with.

support for CommonJS

This is a touchy subject, because when you ask 10 people what "CommonJS" is, you'll get 15 different answers. For the purposes here, and really whenever I use the phrase "CommonJS", I'm technically referring to one of the Modules/1.x specifications, and more specifically, the general definitions of the require() function and the exports and module variables used in the body of a module. These general definitions are also applicable, with some differences, in node.js.

When I use the phrase "CommonJS", I am NEVER referring to the other specifications in the CommonJS specs stable (linked to above).

AMD supports this general definition of "CommonJS", in my book. Super double plus one good!

Aside: I'm looking for another 'name' to call my simplistic notion of CommonJS. So far, things like simple require()y support, seem to capture my intent. But you know how bad I am with naming.

the design for quick edit-debug cycles

One of the goals of AMD is to facilitate a quick edit-debug cycle while you are working on your JavaScript. To do this, AMD specifies that you wrap the body of your module in a specific type of function wrapper when you author it. Because of the way it's designed, these JavaScript files can be loaded directly with a <script src=> element in your HTML file, or via <script src=> elements injected into your live web page dynamically, by a library. This means that as soon as you save the JavaScript you're editing in your text editor/IDE, you can refresh the page in your browser without an intervening "build step" or special server processing - the same files you are editing are loaded directly in the browser.

the resources

Beyond just loading JavaScript code, AMD supports the notion of loading other things. The things you can load are determined by what Loader Plugins you have available. Examples include:

Coming from the Java world, this is familiar territory; see: Class.getResource*() methods. For the most part, I consider this to be amongst the core bits of functionality that a programming library should provide. It's a common pattern to ship data with your code, and you need some way to access it. And, of course, this resource loading is available in an async manner with AMD.

Aside: I'm not sure what the analog of this is in the node.js world. You can certainly do it by hand, making use of the __dirname global, and then performing i/o yourself. I'm just not sure if someone has wrapped this up nicely in a library yet.

the build

At the end of the day, hopefully, your web application is going to be available to some audience, who will be using it for realz. It's unlikely that you will want to continue to load your JavaScript code (and resources) as individual pieces as you do in development; instead, you'll want to concatenate and minimize your wads of goo to keep load time to a minimum for your customers.

And it seems like most AMD implementations provide a mechanism to do this.

More on why AMD is Not the Answer

2012-01-18T15:40:59+00:00

Follow-on to Tom Dale's blog post "AMD is Not the Answer" and James Burke's response "Reply to Tom on AMD". I pretty much concur with everything Tom said. Here are some points brought up by James:

need an alternative

James says:

what is missing is a solid alternative to AMD. In particular, "use build tools to wrap up CommonJS modules" is not a generic solution. It does not allow for generic dynamic loading of resources, particularly from CDNs. Dynamic loading is needed for big sites that still do builds but want to stage loading of the site as the user uses it.

I don't think using build tools precludes you from building wads of modules that can be loaded dynamically. Generic solutions bother me. See: J2EE.

ceremony

James says:

On his concern about too much ceremony -- this is the minimum amount of ceremony:

    define(function(require) {
        //Module code in here
    });

On the other hand, here's some code pulled from dijit.Calendar.js:

    define([
        "dojo/_base/array", // array.map
        "dojo/date",
        "dojo/date/locale",
        "dojo/_base/declare", // declare
        "dojo/dom-attr", // domAttr.get
        "dojo/dom-class", // domClass.add domClass.contains domClass.remove domClass.toggle
        "dojo/_base/event", // event.stop
        "dojo/_base/kernel", // kernel.deprecated
        "dojo/keys", // keys
        "dojo/_base/lang", // lang.hitch
        "dojo/sniff", // has("ie")
        "./CalendarLite",
        "./_Widget",
        "./_CssStateMixin",
        "./_TemplatedMixin",
        "./form/DropDownButton"
    ], function(array, date, local, declare, domAttr, domClass, event, kernel, keys, lang, has,
                CalendarLite, _Widget, _CssStateMixin, _TemplatedMixin, DropDownButton){
        //Module code in here
    });

This isn't just ceremony. It's ugly ceremony of the sort that's difficult to debug when you screw up.

module consumption

James says:

the alternative he mentions does not handle the breadth of JS module consumption

The simple require()y story of npm modules seems to handle the JS module consumption pretty well, for node.js. For the browser, you can use npm modules with Browserify or other "build tools". Where is the equivalent of npm for AMD? Or maybe npm already contains AMD modules? Or let's say I want to just use a single module out of Dojo in my app. How do I do that?

Snowmageddon Day in Ottawa

2012-01-14T14:12:54+00:00

Today started off with ice rain in the morning followed by something like 10-15 cm (4-6″) of snowfall. It wasn’t very cold though, around -2˚C. Riding in these conditions is a real workout and tests your balance, power stroke evenness and ability to unclip in an instant! Yes it’s a bit nerve wracking but usually on a street like Carling, that 3rd lane is abandoned anyway and you can just ride the rut left by OCTranspo buses. The bad incident was the driver of a Leon’s truck who clearly had no idea how to actually drive a truck. It first passed me too close then just started to merge over into me. I’m not a stationary object, I’m moving between 20 and 30 km/h. You can’t just pass with a big truck and then merge over. The bus drivers get this because they’re trained to manoeuvre large vehicles.

It’s Going to be an Exciting Year

2012-01-06T11:00:47+00:00

Welcome to 2012 folks, its going to be a busy and exciting year. There will be a number of important new projects, programs and initiatives across the Eclipse community. When we’re done Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation is going to be quite a different – and even more interesting – place. So in no particular order, here is a sampling of some of the big things I see coming.

As of the Juno release, Eclipse 4 is going to be the base platform for the Eclipse ecosystem. This means that our download page will only have Eclipse 4.2-based packages. Eclipse 3.8 will also ship as part of the Juno release, but currently there are no 3.x releases planned after that. Although an enormous investment has gone into the backwards compatibility layer for Eclipse 4, it is obviously going to take testing and effort by the Eclipse projects and the many Eclipse adopters to migrate to Eclipse 4.2. So if you haven’t started testing with the Juno builds, now’s the time to start planning for it. Eclipse 4 is a complete re-write of the platform user interface, and brings a lot of value to the ecosystem, including a lot of improved APIs, more flexibility and a refreshed user interface. And its API is 100% binary compatible with the 3.x platform.
The migration of the Eclipse community to git is going to be a significant event during 2012. Shutting off CVS in December will be a major milestone. And we are almost done getting the Gerritt code review tool up and running for all Eclipse projects. To make all of this happen has been a ton of work by the webmaster team, the IP team, and you, the community. We’re hoping that using git will make it easier for our community to experiment with, and contribute back to Eclipse projects.
A Common Build Infrastructure for Eclipse projects is a new service we plan to provide for projects at Eclipse. It has long been a complaint that getting builds working and running reliably is one of the biggest PITAs in running a project. The goal of the CBI is to reduce that effort, and to provide a core hosted service on eclipse.org infrastructure that all of our projects can use. As part of the initial proof of concept, we’re tackling the toughest build of all: the Eclipse platform. Admittedly, CBI is going to take a lot of work, but we are actively recruiting for a full-time staff member to manage this, and to act as a resource for our project community. This is definitely one of the biggest and most exciting new services we’ve worked on for our committer community. So please get involved, and provide your feedback and your requirements.
We will also be launching a new service for members – providing Long Term Support for Eclipse releases. There is a fundamental mismatch between the maintenance window for Eclipse releases and the enterprise products that are built and ship on top. Eclipse release trains at least offer SR1 (September) and SR2 (February) maintenance releases on a regular basis. But an SR2 eight months after a major release is small solace to anyone with a requirement to offer support or maintenance on a product or application for five or more years (as many organizations do).
As we are rolling this out, it is important to note that the Foundation is not going to be providing support or maintenance directly. Rather, we will work to connect organizations seeking support for Eclipse software with those offering it in order to cultivate a vibrant ecosystem. To help service providers be more efficient and effective, the Eclipse Foundation will provide the infrastructure for the code repositories, bug trackers, build farms, test farms, software signing, intellectual property management, and governance for managing the projects. We will be the trusted organization doing the drudge-work so that others do not have to. In other words, in classic Eclipse style, the Foundation will be acting as an enabler for the ecosystem.
Orion is going to ship its 1.0 release later in 2012. There is a ton of work still to do, but there is no doubt in my mind that Orion is an important new technology for the Eclipse community – a whole new tooling platform for the web, in the web.
EclipseCon is moving to Reston, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. We hope to attract a lot of new attendees from the East Coast. In addition to the new location, we’re also adding an entirely new co-conference: Agile ALM Connect
And last but not least, we will be creating a number of new Industry Working Groups. IWGs such as Polarsys and M2M are going to be a large focus area for the Eclipse Foundation. But what is an IWG? Basically, they complement Eclipse open source projects with more support from the member companies that are interested in working on them and adopting them.

I see 2012 as a year of significant, and positive, change for the Eclipse community and the Eclipse Foundation. We are certainly not resting on our laurels! I encourage everyone to get involved and contribute to these new initiatives.

Filed under: Foundation, Open Source

Anatomy of an Orion Page

2012-01-05T21:19:02+00:00

When we first started building Orion, the site had two pages, a navigator and an editor. Over the course of our release 0.2 development, we grew quite a few pages as we added function. As part of this effort, we worked on the visual design for the pages, with most of that focus being on the overall visual style of Orion and the layout of the header.

Are we anatomically correct?

For our current release, we want to put a "fresh coat of paint" on the pages, but as I've looked at some of our most problematic pages, I've come to realize that we first need to stop talking about things like "headers" and "footers" and start talking about the common, semantic elements that appear on all Orion pages. I'm not talking about HTML elements per se. If we can define and agree on the list of building blocks, then we can talk about how to represent them in the DOM and arrange them visually. The work in progress is documented on the Orion wiki. In this article, I'll describe some insights I've had while working on this anatomy.

In an extensible system like Orion, it's important to think about anatomy vs. layout because we want to allow plug-ins to contribute functionality to existing Orion pages, as well as provide links to pages from another site. When I get a bug report that says, "how can I put a link in the Orion header" or "how can I put a command on the navigator toolbar," I like to ask what the link is for and what is the user workflow, because perhaps that link belongs somewhere else on the page. Hence the focus on anatomy vs. visual layout boxes.

The current list of body parts (no pun intended) is something like this. (The wiki page will be kept up to date with our thinking and explanations of each.)

Branding
Legalese (the fine print)
Discovery links
Expected links
User Info
Notifications
Search
Task (static page title)
Resource

Dimensions
Hierarchical Location
Name

Related Task Links
Task+Resource (Page) Level Commands
Resource View Controls
Resource Content

Here's a picture of how these elements might be organized on a page. (Note this is an anatomical picture, I'm not proposing that the Orion header adopt ice cream colors.) Most (all?) sites put the branding on the top left corner and legalese at the bottom, but of course if we stick with semantic definitions when structuring a page, this doesn't have to be true.

Some insights

The body parts that might need some explaining are the ones where I've learned something about our page anatomy and have attempted to use terminology to further qualify an element.

A link is a link is a link?

With links, I find it helpful to differentiate links by thinking about their scope and purpose.

Discovery links are there so the user discovers pages that are helpful in the overall site workflows. If you are coding js in Orion, perhaps you'd like to know about "site xyz." (Hmmm....as I type this explanation I realize I haven't mentioned "advertisement" in the anatomy.)
Expected links are links you might need to find someday, but you'll expect them and be willing to go looking for it. For example, how do I get support? How do I open a bug?
Related task links are links that are directly related to what you are doing. For example, if you are looking at the git log for some repository/branch, it's highly likely you might want to see the git status for that branch.

We also have links that represent commands. These are buttons or links that let you act on a specific thing on the page. But the scopes, placement, and visual representation for these commands will be a future topic, so let's ignore them for now.

A resource by any other name?

Another discovery for me is that it's not enough to talk about "the resource" that a user is operating on. I'm not talking about the page resource/URL, I'm talking about the way the user thinks about the resource they are working with. At a minimum, a resource has a fully qualified (hierarchical) location and a name. But if you add version control to the mix, then you might also want to talk about a particular version of that resource, or perhaps a particular repository. I'm still looking for a better word, but for now I call these dimensions.

Allowing the user to consistently find (and change) dimensions can help the usability of our workflows. Let's take a specific example involving git. Today, in the Orion editor, I can be happily editing my js file. I can even use the breadcrumb to open a navigator within this hierarchy and find related files. But why can't I switch to another branch from the editor? We could hard-code a "switch branch" command into the editor page in the toolbar, but if we instead generalize this idea and have a way to show, and switch, dimensions in a common place on the page, then it will be easier for plug-ins to contribute dimensions and for users to have a common place to go to switch the resource content on the page.

Drilling down

The high level anatomy mentions "Resource Content" but we know there all kinds of ways to represent something, depending on how complex it is. The following terminology helps me talk about the different styles of pages we have:

A single content area is appropriate when a resource is best viewed as a unit. The Orion code editor is a good example of a resource that is best viewed with a single content area. Sometimes I think of it as "the real body of the page."
Sections organize the view of the resource into separate pieces, so that you can work with different aspects of a resource at a time.
Outliners help to navigate a content area. For a single content area, they may simply move the content in a structured way (like the editor outliner). For a resource organized in sections, they may navigate the sections (or help you to swap sections in and out on a page).

By formalizing the sectional nature of pages, we can make it easy in the future for plug-ins to contribute additional sections to a page, provide common places for the user to find commands that apply to a particular section, and common controls for expanding/collapsing or organizing sections.

HTML5: to section or not to section?

When I use the word "section" above I am really talking about a way to organize the viewing and manipulating of a resource. But I didn't want to use that word if it didn't jive with the notion of an HTML5 section. So I checked the HTML5 spec for guidance regarding HTML section elements, and I think this is the right word to use, and that we will end up with HTML5 sections as the tags for these elements on the page. In particular, the spec says, "A general rule is that the section element is appropriate only if the element's contents would be listed explicitly in the document's outline." That seems to hold up to the way we are using them.

What does this mean to our technical page architecture?

I'm not sure yet, but of course I'll guess.

For plug-in developers, we'll formalize our markup surrounding sections and how to describe them in a plug-in. I don't think we'll have plug-ins contributing sections per se in Orion 0.4, but I think we'll start down an implementation path that will make that possible. And we'll probably see a plugin's preferences rendered in a section on the preference page.
Inside the Orion implementation, I'd like to see the javascript code talking about the page in terms of tasks and task types, path, name, dimensions, etc. Some common code can map this information to a header (or footer) template, the breadcrumb, etc. If we decide we like combo boxes for changing dimensions one day, and later decide to use drop down menus, it shouldn't be the page's concern at all.
Having isolated our javascript code from the common templates, the page implementation code shouldn't even care how the DOM is structured in particular. But long run, it'd be nice to see the Orion page template get simpler, using HTML5 body header, footer, and sections within. Then "something outside the page" (CSS? JS? both?) can apply that to a layout that makes sense for the particular Orion installation, without mandating a particular JS library or approach for making that happen.

What I do know is that in Orion 0.4, it will be easier for you to move between pages in your workflow. And in part, that will because of this anatomy and its corresponding implementation. But while you are using Orion, I don't want you to think about that. Hopefully, you'll just instinctively know how to find what you are trying to do, and think, "wow, these guys always get those links and buttons in just the place I expect them to be!"

OPPO DVD Tray Repair

2011-12-27T14:00:16+00:00

Recently, I ran into a bit of trouble where my OPPO DVD player would not open/close the DVD tray. When listening to the player while pushing the open/eject button I could, sometimes, hear a bit of rubber making a stressed sound - like rubber on rubber. That said, I could never recreate the situation consistently as I would sometimes hear a noise but mostly no sound would be made at all. After that, I searched the OPPO support pages but didn’t find any information related to this issue so fired off a quick email explaining the issue to OPPO support and this is what I got back:

Disconnect the DVD player’s power cord from the power source for no less than 15 minutes.
Ensure that the tray is not sticking to the front of the tray opening by running a small flat object along the entire edge of the tray.
Gently shake your DVD unit.
Reconnect the power cord.
Press Eject. If the tray does not Eject, make any note of any mechanical noises.
Press Eject and press in the tray.
Press Eject again.

I had disconnected the power before but had never thought of shaking the unit (which, yes, I was surprised to see as an instruction). When shaking the unit, I grabbed the left and right side shook it in both a vertical and horizontal pattern. Upon reconnecting the unit, the DVD tray would open and close again. BTW, I do want to mention that I had upgraded the unit to the latest firmware.

Anyway, I thought I’d pass this along in case anyone was experiencing this issue because I’m not accustomed to shaking my HiFi equipment for solving issues.

scam

2011-12-20T01:34:18+00:00

begin:vcard
fn:Michael Van Meekeren
n:Van Meekeren;Michael
org:Van Meekeren Farms Ltd.
email;internet:michael@givethemawink.com
tel;work:+1.902.678.2366
tel;cell:+1.902.691.1178
x-mozilla-html:FALSE
url:www.givethemawink.com
version:2.1
end:vcard

Hi you may have received an email from my yahoo.ca account indicating I
am stuck in the UK with no money. This is a scam please ignore it.
Sorry for the bother.

Michael

User Registration Disabled

2011-12-11T14:28:55+00:00

Due to the increasing amount of spam related to auto-generated user registrations on this site, I have decided to disable further registrations. This also means that only legitimately registered users can leave comments on this site. Should you have a burning desire to leave a comment AND register as a new user, contact me directly.

In the future, I will be releasing new software that will make all of this easier (including commenting) but I’m still a little ways away from achieving this goal (which is also why I haven’t been posting much on this site).

First Snowy Ride for Fall 2011

2011-12-03T21:27:31+00:00

First, well second actually, snowy ride of Fall 2011. Just put the studded tires on the night before. Seems every fall I have to figure out the layers I used to wear the year before. Like, oh it’s -5˚C plus a bit of wind so I need a T-Shirt plus an IceBreaker Merino wool long sleeved shirt and just the stretchy pants. Nope, don’t need the T-shirt if I can put up with cold for 10 minutes. Also, if I wear my winter bike shoes and it’s above zero my feet sweat like crazy. Was thinking I should write a web app that just tells me what to wear based on the temperature, weather. Anyway, a slightly longer video. I do try to keep them short.

Waterproof Samsung Windows Phone?

2011-11-30T07:10:38+00:00

No, this is not an inside scoop on some new technology, rather an experience report on full submersion of a powered on cell phone.

The other day my 8 year old son and I were down at the beach skipping stones and chasing ducks. Said son, being the adventurous type, was wading out in the water about 5 feet off-shore when he spotted something shiny. I suggested he pick it up. Lo and behold he came up with a sparkly AT&T Samsung Focus Window Phone.

We had no idea how long it had been there. We looked around at the people on the beach to see if anyone was frantically searching for something. No one. The screen was blank and I didn’t want to try and turn if on so, we took it home to figure out what to do.

On the way home we speculated about how the phone could have gotten there. The water is pretty shallow and boats don’t get that close. It’s too far away to have just fallen out of a stroller’s pocket. There’s no tide and the water level is consistent so the distance to the shore is constant. It could have been throw (but why)? Perhaps it had been there a long time and some summer tourists dropped it while swimming?

At home we decided to open it up and see about drying it out with a view to turning it on and finding the owner. Amazing how much water that little block seemed to have in it. After getting the easy parts out (battery, sim, …) it became apparent that there was more water underneath the circuit boards. I found a great step by step disassembly series on TechRepublic. Within about 10 minutes my son and I had the phone in pieces on the kitchen table. We stopped short of separating adhesive bonded parts as we wanted to re-assemble and operate the phone.

After soaking up the obvious water we looked for someplace warm but not too hot for it to dry. Our new oven has a “Proof” setting that is used for rising bread (about 100F). Hmmm, not 100% sure on that one. Heat register? That could work but small parts, kids, cracks, … Not a good combination. In the end we opted for putting on a small piece of paper on top of the cable TV box.

I checked it the next day and it seemed dry but I figured a bit more time would not hurt. After about 24 hours of drying we reassembled the phone, put in the battery and turned it on.

Well, whaddya know?! It booted up just fine. About 1/5th of the battery power left — it could not have been in the water that long. Unfortunately the phone was locked with a pin code so we could not immediately find the owner. Also, we could not test that it still worked as a phone. Bummer.

I decided to call AT&T and see if they could locate the owner. You’d think that this sort of thing happens all the time but the person I talked to said that they can’t do anything and that I’d have to take the phone to a AT&T store. Luckily there is one on the Microsoft campus where I work so I figured I’d take it in the next day at lunch.

Just before lunch the next day I plugged in (and turned on) the phone to ensure it had some charge when I went to the store (not really sure why but it made sense at the time). Shortly there-after it buzzed with a text message. “Call me at 425 436-2″. The rest of the phone number was cut off and the phone locked so I could not see it. Sigh. Then a little while later the phone rang. I answered but could not hear anyone. This time however I could see the number so I called it back. It was the owner, looking for the phone.

Working at Microsoft I see a lot of these phones around and figured the chances where high that it was a fellow ‘softie. Indeed it was. In fact, he worked for a former roommate of mine from 15+ years ago! Small world.

Apparently he and his family had been at the beach a couple hours before us and, like us, were hanging at the water skipping stones with their kids. Now, you just gotta imagine that a cell phone would skip real well… Our best guess is that their 3 year old somehow got the phone, had that very thought, and flung it into the water unnoticed. Needless to say they were pleased to have reconnected with the phone.

We made arrangements to meet. When we did we tried out the calling and to our mutual surprise, it worked flawlessly. It would be interesting to see how long that will last or if some parts will start to corrode. Either way, I think its pretty impressive.

In any event, we had some fun dissecting the phone, they got their phone back, my son learned about “doing the right thing” and I learned that Samsung phones can take a licking. Not bad for a Saturday at the beach.

p.s., Later that week I bought a Samsung Focus S and a Focus Flash for me and my wife. While this was more because we wanted Windows phones, I have to say I was very comfortable with the purchase decision having seen what the phones can withstand.

Foundations Considered Useful

2011-11-25T10:00:32+00:00

Blogosphere and twittersphere are both abuzz this week as a result of Mikeal Rogers’ “Apache Considered Harmful” post. I thought the article made a number of important points about how the software world is changing, and changing very rapidly. However, I think that follow-on articles such as “Has open source outgrown the Apache Way” are pushing the hypothesis a little too far. It’s one thing to point out the dynamism of GitHub, and the rise of social coding. But stretching that to the assertion that open source foundations no longer have a role is just wrong.

Disclaimer: I run an open source foundation, so obviously I have a vested interest in this debate.

First, I would like to point out that Eclipse is absolutely committed to moving to git as fast as we can get there. We’ve even announced a date by which we intend to shut down our previous standard SCM, CVS. At some point we also intend to discontinue Subversion support for Eclipse projects as well.

Many in the Eclipse community know that I was personally a skeptic about the value of adding git. I was worried that having three SCM systems at Eclipse was too many. In addition to the resources required to support three SCMs, this kind of variety can act as a barrier to entry for both contributors and adopters. If folks have to learn multiple SCMs to interact with Eclipse projects, that is a PITA for them. In short, I was resisting change.

Fortunately, there were many good folks within the Eclipse community that convinced me I was wrong. You know who you are. Thank you.

The argument that ultimately swayed me was that git brings a social dynamic to contribution that the other SCMs we used lack. Adopting git is a strategic attempt by the Eclipse Foundation at social engineering. If we can lower the barrier to contribution at Eclipse, then we will make our community stronger and more innovative. That is ultimately the reason why we’re doing this. This has required investments by our IT team, and as we adopt Gerrit we are modifying our processes for IP management as well. We know that you can both use git and do excellent IP management, because we are already doing exactly that.

Next up is to do more work with GitHub to make it even easier for the broader community to fork Eclipse projects and contribute code back. We are consciously embracing the whirlwind.

I would point out that the model we have at Eclipse where we have a professional staff and some resources at the Foundation makes this kind of change easier to do. Once we’ve made up our mind as a community to push in a new direction, we have the people and the resources to make it happen. We’re not always fast enough to please everyone, but we get there.

But is git and GitHub so powerful a force that the Eclipse Foundation should just roll over and die? I honestly don’t think so. There are some unique values that an open source foundation like Eclipse adds to the equation that are absolutely necessary.

The first thing to understand is that what we are trying to build at Eclipse are not simply open source projects, frameworks or code libraries. Our mission is to ship product-ready software platforms that major corporations and enterprises can safely use and distribute in their products. This involves a level of co-ordination and process that goes far beyond what you can do at GitHub.

A small sampling of the core value-add that happens within the Eclipse Foundation and its community would include:

IP management. Although we often get criticized for being overly focused on the topic, nobody does IP management better than Eclipse. Which is a huge part of fulfilling our mission of delivering product-ready software platforms. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it is absolutely a core value, and one not easily replicated.
Predictability. The Eclipse community has shipped its major platform release on time to the day for eight years. Last year’s release was 46 MLOC, so we are talking about a non-trivial amount of code. The processes that we have in place to co-ordinate the activities and release engineering for 60+ projects absolutely require some amount of centralized support.
Branding and community. The Eclipse brand means something to people. Millions of developers around the world use Eclipse or Eclipse-based products every day. They have confidence in the software and the community that delivers it. Looking inside the community, there is definitely a pride and a sense of community that comes with being part of Eclipse. Anyone who has ever been to an EclipseCon has seen this firsthand.
Industry collaboration. Obviously GitHub has been wildly successful in fostering community-led open source. However, there are lots of instances where large and conservative corporations are looking at how to get involved in open source. In many cases, their business motivation is to collaborate with other industry players to create shared industry platforms. The kind of work that goes into facilitating these ventures goes far beyond picking a license and starting to hack some code. The processes that organizations like Eclipse and Apache bring to the table for project incubation, development processes, license management and IP contribution management are critical success factors.

At Eclipse we are trying to simultaneously embrace change, while delivering the core values and processes to fulfill our mission of delivering product-ready software platforms. I feel that overall we are doing a pretty good job, and offer more than enough unique value to sustain us for the very long term.

Filed under: Foundation, Open Source

Linking to the power of Orion

2011-11-20T23:58:02+00:00

In my last post, I mentioned our Orion command framework, which allows our pages to define the commands that a user can run on a particular page. We were evolving the command definition to include the specification of what parameters it requires. While I focused more on the UI in the last discussion, now I'd like to talk about how this concept will allow you to link to Orion in interesting ways.

Let's follow a simple example. One of the things a user can do from the Orion Git Repositories page is clone a git repository into an Orion folder. In the first iteration of the command framework, any work done after the user clicked the "Clone Repository" link was done in the command's callback.

cloneGitRepositoryCommand = new mCommands.Command({
 name : "Clone Repository",
 tooltip : "Clone an existing Git repository to a folder",
 id : "eclipse.cloneGitRepository",
 callback : function(item, commandId, domId, userData) {
  var dialog = new orion.git.widgets.CloneGitRepositoryDialog({
   serviceRegistry: serviceRegistry,
   fileClient: fileClient,
   func: function(gitUrl, path, name) {
     // do the real work
   }});   
  dialog.startup();
  dialog.show();
 }
});

But now we allow the command to specify that it requires a URL parameter. We also indicate that there are additional parameters that can be collected if the user wants to specify additional options. (These snippets are intended to show you how things work, but this interface will certainly change before the next release milestone.)

var cloneParameters = {};
cloneParameters.url = {label: 'Repository URL:', type: 'url'}; 
cloneParameters.options = true;  // indicate that we could collect additional options 

cloneGitRepositoryCommand = new mCommands.Command({
 name : "Clone Repository",
 tooltip : "Clone an existing Git repository to a folder",
 id : "eclipse.cloneGitRepository",
 parameters: cloneParameters,
 callback : function(item, commandId, domId, userData, parameters) {
  if (parameters && parameters.url.value) {
   // do the real work
  } else {
   // we could trigger a dialog to get the parameters, or report an error, etc...
 }
});

So far, we've just defined a command. Nothing is going to show up in the UI until we register a command contribution on a page. In the contribution, we can specify the DOM node where the command should be shown, such as a toolbar, and a key binding that can be used to trigger the same command via the keyboard. But the fun really starts now that we allow a URLBinding to be associated with a command. With a URL binding, a page can define a URL (fragment) query parameter that can be used to trigger command, and the parameter name of any value provided in the URL. For the clone command, the URL binding looks like this.

var urlBinding = new mCommands.URLBinding("cloneGitRepository", "url"));
commandService.registerCommandContribution("eclipse.cloneGitRepository", ..., urlBinding);

This means that the query parameter cloneGitRepository should trigger the command, and the value in the URL should be bound to the url parameter in the command. From Orion's point of view, opening the Git Repositories page with the following link calls the same code as if the user had clicked on the command in the UI and typed in the URL:

http://orion.eclipse.org/git/git-clone.html#/workspace/H?cloneGitRepository=ssh://myId@github.com/path/myId.github.com.git

One important note. A command invoked by a URL binding is not called by this URL. Rather the page is opened in a state for collecting the parameters. We just prefill the parameter information, and the user can hit the Enter key to start the clone, or click the More button to provide additional information. Our URL needs to be a stable GET. Reloading the URL multiple times should never alter the state of the resource on the page. So user intervention is always required in order to actually invoke the command. The URL binding, much like a key binding, simply gives the user a shortcut for starting the process.

We think the URL binding is a powerful concept. It allows us to start exposing linkable bits of function in a way that is completely separate from the code that defines the function. Being able to specify parameters in the URL syntax means that some other site can use its own logic to figure out what the user wants, and then link to an Orion page, providing contextual information.

Our favorite simple example is a bugzilla page that could use the product and component information in the bug definition to figure out which git repository the user might want to clone to look at the code. Another idea is the ability to author "cue card" style help systems that could guide the user through some set of tasks in Orion, simply by linking to the various commands involved in the steps.

We can't wait to see what you might do with this idea.

OTA Antenna Build

2011-10-16T15:54:26+00:00

Since I got rid of my cable a couple of years ago, I've been enjoying free over-the-air (OTA) television. Definitely one of the benefits to living in a city versus the small rural area I grew up in! Slowly more and more OTA channels have been showing up but with the digital transition that happened on August 31, now all the channels that I get are digital.

Because my television is older and doesn't have a built-in digital tuner, I've been using a set of old-school rabbit ears to grab the analog channels and then an antenna I bought from Monoprice to grab the digital channels. Once everything went to digital, I wanted to go to a single antenna and connect it to my external tuner.

After reading information on-line and talking to James and Roo, I decided to take a bit of time and built a simple antenna of my own. Being located in Barrhaven (south Ottawa) I was already pretty lucky in that my location allowed me to receive all the local channels already available, so the antenna build was more for fun than hoping to get more channels out of it.

For resources I read through Roo's blog, got some building tips from here (although he did a bowtie), and got the specs from here. I built the GH one, no reflectors, and the specs from the GH4 table.

My material list:

- I went Home Depot and grabbed a 1x6 board from their pile of scrap wood ($0.79).

- got a length of household electrical wire from a friend who happened to be doing some electrical work. I stripped the wire and then used the method of attaching it to a drill to straighten it out.

- bought an matching transformer from The Source.

- used some screws I had around the garage

- bought some washers from Home Depot

- got 2 electrical conduit brackets from a friend (also available at Home Depot)

Basic build ideas:

- I measured out the exact locations for the bends and hammered nails into my workbench. Then I used those to help form the wire into the right shape.

- Attached the copper wire to the 1x6 using the screws and washers.

- Attached the matching transformer to the copper wire.

- Attached a Channel Master 7777 Pre-Amp to the bottom of the board.

- Used the conduit bracket as a holder for the rabbit ears.

- Wired the new antenna and the rabbit ears to the CM7777.

- Nailed a spare 2x4 block to the bottom. This would help with mounting it in the attic.

I placed the antenna in the attic and put it flush against a joist, and clamped it there using a cheap C-clamp from Home Depot. The 2x4 block keeps it from slipping left/right. I am lucky in my location in that I am located almost directly between the 2 main towers and the joists in my attic run perpendicular, so I didn't have to do anything fancy as far as building a rotating mechanism.

Here are some photos of the antenna. Note that this was before I used the drill method to straighten the wires so the final product looks a lot better.

Unfortunately when I had my house built, at the time I didn't think it was worth the $200 that the builder wanted to charge to run a conduit from the basement to the attic so I had to come up with another way to run the wire. Luckily I was able to scan a lot of house construction photos and find a cold-air return duct which was accessible and didn't have too many turns in it, before it hit the basement. So from the attic I ran a coax cable to the basement where all my home wires are. Although they say you should plug the power to the CM7777 as close to the tv as possible, I put it here in the basement because I wanted to get as strong as a signal as possible to multiple tvs. (I have one in the basement by the treadmill, was thinking about running a line to my home computer to experiment with recording shows, etc)

Honestly I wasn't expecting much for new channels, etc but I was pleasantly surprised when I did a new channel scan and 3 PBS channels from the US showed up! Here is a list of all the channels I get: CBC English, CBC French, GlobalTV, CTV, CTV2 (formally AChannel), Omni 1, Omni 2, CityTV, CHCH, TVO (TV Ontario), CTS (Crossroads Television), 2 French stations, and the 3 PBS stations.

So overall I'm pretty happy with the results. The antenna build was quick and cheap. The added extra pre-amp wasn't cheap, but it definitely improves the results over the long wire run. Running the wires from the attic to the basement was a pain in the butt, but not horrible. And now I get all the channels perfectly along with some new US ones.

Flogging my FrankenMac

2011-10-04T23:55:02+00:00

I'm running a FrankenMac. It's a MacBook Pro with Windows 7 and Linux as guest operating systems.

For my talk yesterday, I was showing Fx running as an Eclipse plugin on Windows and Mac. I grabbed a few standard Fx examples, modified them slightly and dropped them in. Here is the ColorfulCircle example running in Eclipse:

For the demo, I had a total 4 Eclipses (two Windows, two Mac) and 6 Fx embeddings, each doing some sort of animation on my machine. The source Eclipses were full development environments with the source of Fx loaded into them. For extra fear, the Mac Eclipses were running JDK7. There were a few browsers running too on both operating systems and the slide software.

You might think that it would lurch, but it didn't. Incredible.

Steve

JavaOne

2011-10-02T00:12:36+00:00

I'm speaking at JavaOne this year with Artem Ananiev. The title of the talk is "Using JavaFX 2.0 UIs with Swing and SWT". I've worked with Artem in the past but never actually met him. That's always cool.

Most of the hassles around interop with Swing and SWT were around threading. It was possible to embed one toolkit in the other, but programmers needed to be very careful to avoid deadlock. The rule of thumb was, "never wait" and use asyncExec() and invokeLater() to communicate between the two.

I'm happy to say that FX and SWT have no such hassles. Both are apartment threaded and share the same apartment.

Steve

IBM Java 7 is now available

2011-09-20T15:43:53+00:00

IBM Java 7 was officially released yesterday, September 19. You can download it from IBM DeveloperWorks.

There are a lot of exciting new features including a number of GC improvements.

The balanced GC policy, which I've mentioned before, is included in all 64-bit Java 7 JDKs. You can enable it with -Xgcpolicy:balanced.
The soft-realtime garbage collector is included for evaluation on Linux and AIX. It can be enabled with -Xgcpolicy:metronome.
The verbose GC format has been completely overhauled. It now provides more information and the XML format has been redesigned to make machine interpretation of the data simpler, allowing both IBM and customers to write tools to process and analyse the data.

Maker wannabee

2011-09-07T18:40:09+00:00

I did do a couple of actual, for reals, hardware things while I was on vacation, which for anyone who knows me has got to be pretty surprising . The first was to put together a little Arduino (actually Freeduino) board:

I have vague plans to take this plus a DAC and produce a midi to CV converter, something like this.

The other project was more prosaic, but probably more useful: I replaced the lawn light outside GCW. Really, this was just removing the old bits, repainting the post, then putting in a new light sensor and headpiece. The result actually looks pretty good:

(click the link to see a closeup)

Anyway, nothing earthshaking there, but there’s nothing like a couple of successes to refuel your interest in making things again. Anybody want to help build an analog synthesizer?

"Don't do what Donny Don't does"

2011-09-02T21:12:56+00:00

Thank to Evan Hughes for pointing out this paper: Conditional statements, looping constructs, and program comprehension: an experimental study.

Not surprisingly, negative conditions are more difficult to understand than positive conditions.

I always try to write conditions to be positive. Sometimes, I'll even include an empty 'if' block so that I can put code in the 'else' block instead of using a negative condition:

if (isInRange(value)) {

// expected case; do nothing

} else {

throw new OutOfRangeException(value);

}

I haven't read the full paper, so maybe the researchers answered my next question: is the problem exacerbated by the syntax for negative conditions used in C-like languages? I find that the '!' operator uses very little horizontal space, making it less noticeable than other unary operators such as '~' or '*'.

e.g. would this statement:

if (!isInRange(value)) { ...

be more obvious if it were written like this?

if (not isInRange(value)) { ...

A week into my vacation and I’m still not relaxed.

2011-08-27T16:06:13+00:00

If anyone has been watching this site for updates, I have to apologize. It’s been (even more) hectic at work lately and by the time I get home, I haven’t had the energy to blog. In fact, the list of things I’ve been avoiding is much longer than just blogging:

getting exercise / biking — nope.
spending time with Deb — not enough, except for when we go out for dinner (but that’s mostly to avoid cooking).
electronic music — not even a new synth was enough to make that happen.
cello practice — holy mackerel the music for the fall is hard; an hour a day wouldn’t be enough to play it properly and I’m doing less than half that.
helping Dennis learn controllerism — bought him the hardware and a copy of Ableton; nothing since then.
web skills development — Deb deserves more than what I built her at Sheeps Ahoy, but it would take months of learning to get there.
walking the dogs — a total of twice this summer. ugh!
work around the house — well, I’ve done some of that this week, at least.
cooking — only when Deb makes me BBQ.

Whew! Even if I had the time to do all these things (i.e. I was retired) I still wouldn’t have the energy for all of them.

Anyway, I’m a week into my vacation, and I’m still not relaxed. However, I am starting to surface (as witnessed by the soul searching above). Hopefully, that’s a good sign. Last week the list looked like:

re-arranged the bedroom
got in a car accident — no one hurt; not my fault
started cleaning out the garage, but there’s more to do this week
helped Deb through a bad bout of stomach “flu”
spent a really fun day with her on our anniversary, including seeing the Caravaggio exhibit at the gallery
put her on a plane for California
played *way* too much of the new Deus Ex game [note: Yesterday they rolled out a patch to fix the long load times: down to 10 seconds from almost a minute before]

We’ll see how it goes this week. I’ll post if I get some new music made. Otherwise (for those I work with), see you next week.

The Roar of the Lion, and of "Open" Source Developers

2011-07-25T00:55:00+00:00

I took the plunge this weekend, and installed Lion on my personal MacBook Pro.

First I made sure I had a bootable backup of my Snow Leopard install. Then I jumped in and pressed the continue button in the Lion installer.

All in all it went rather smoothly. Only one real problem, which I managed to fix, see below.

Lion for the Ruby/Rails developer

When I installed Snow Leopard my development environment was broken. Partly because the install wiped out packages I'd installed with macports, but mostly because of the transition from 32-bit to 64 bit. So far Lion has been much kinder. My brew installed stuff seems to have survived the transition, although I needed to install the XCode 4 update, which is once again free for folks with Lion via the OS X App Store.

Admittedly I haven't pressed very hard on the old development tool chain, but, knock on wood, things look decidedly better the day after the Lion install than they did the last time.

More Flashbacks

A few days ago, I wrote about my pre installation thoughts on Lion. Not that I've been using it for a bit over a day, the new scrolling is a blessing and a curse. Although it does work the same was as my iPad and iPhone, there's a fundamental difference between dragging your finger on the 'page' itself and controlling that 'page' remotely using the trackpad. Some of that is no doubt the result of using a mouse for the past 35 years or so. I'll stick with the Lion way and see what happens, no doubt I'm going to have to learn to adjust back and forth as I use different machines, just like I still have to make an adjustment going from my MBP, to my wife's old MacBook due to the latter having a trackpad button while the newer machine does not.

This dredges up another old memory. Back in the 1980s when the PCs got mouse envy, the initial mice for PCs simply generated cursor keystrokes, and many users thought of mice as just being that, devices to quickly generate up, down, left, and right arrow keystrokes. Nowadays I'd guess that most computer users would think this was a silly idea. In reality, the way the user interacts with a computer is affected in ways both drastic and subtle by the device or devices used. Trackpads are neither mice nor are they touchscreens. Interacting directly with a touchscreen, where your finger is the pointer, and there is no separation between pointing at something and clicking on it, is inherently different than interacting indirectly through a trackpad or mouse. And a multi-touch trackpad is different than a mouse no matter how many buttons the mouse has.

While we're on the subject of scrolling, some apps in Lion. Safari for example, don't show scrollbars until you start to scroll, then when you're done they disappear. I haven't seen this kind of scrollbar behavior since Smalltalk-80. By the way scrollbars work this way in Lion in Textmate!

Oh Yeah, I Did Mention A Problem Didn't I

Just about a year ago I wrote about my my spit and baling wire linux Time Machine server. Well, after the Lion install, my Time Machine backups stopped working.

It took me a while to find the answer, but eventually I found the 'cheat' in this post to the Ubuntu forums.

I also saw reports about problems with Time Machine under Lion and third party commercial NAS products including Drobos

It turns out that Time Machine in Lion is using some new features which Apple put into AFP, the Apple Filing Protocol. Netatalk the open-source implementation of AFP, doesn't support the latest AFP 3.3 protocol, except in a beta version.

The Ubuntu forum article, followed carefully, got me back to having my MBP backing up with Time Machine to my Ubuntu box.

It also pointed to this blog post by the maintainers of Netatalk, dated 2 July, which explained their plan to hold back the source of the final version of Netatalk because "...many corporations are using and making money from Netatalk, but in the past none of these cared that the cow they’re milking gets fed, Netgear Inc. being the one exception, thanks for that." As an open-source contributor who has reaped little in the way of pecuniary reward from open-source, I can understand the sentiment. It does come across as a bit of a ransom note, but they are free to do as they want.

But I suspect Lion turned the tide here as the Netatalk article ends with an update dated 23 July (3 days after the release of Lion) saying "Thanks to the new commitment of Data Robotics, Western Digital Corporation and QNAP, there’s hope! Also, we’re reopening development, pushing all sources to the official Netatalk git VCS at Sourceforge. We expect Netatalk 2.2.0 sourcecode tarballs to be available at the Sourceforge download site soon."

Original article writen by Rick DeNatale and published on Talk Like A Duck | direct link to this article | If you are reading this article elsewhere than Talk Like A Duck, it has been illegally reproduced and without proper authorization.

Initial Thoughts on Lion

2011-07-21T23:00:09+00:00

So Lion has been downloaded from the App Store and waits to be installed on my personal MacBook Pro. I'm waiting a few days to see how much smoke appears on the horizon as early adopters run into issues.

There are some interesting aspects of Lion, some of which bring back old memories. This should be a quick top of the head article. But I may well follow up with one or more which go down some of these paths in more detail.

I don't want to come across as one of those old codgers, even though I probably am one, who think everything now has been done before. On the other hand, as they say "past is prologue."

I've been reading John Siracusa's excellent, as usual Ars Technica review of Lion. as I get into the technical details I can't help but think about some of my prior experiences

Lion's new Document and Versioning Model

Lion has a new take on saving documents and the lifecycle of applications. OS X 10.7 now keeps a trail of revisions to documents, provides a Time Machine like UI to view the history, and decouples saving documents from quitting the application. It also saves enough application state to make applications appear as if they never had stopped when they are restarted. All the same documents are re-opened in the state where the user left them, etc. Now where have I seen that before?

I've had the pleasure, well usually a pleasure, of working with a couple of programming language environments which worked like this to a large extent. The first of this was APL, another was Smalltalk. The usual implementation of these languages provides a workspace or image which holds not just the source code of programs, but the actual running state. In both you did need to save the image or workspace before quitting, but both would start up again just where you left things. This was more obvious in Smalltalk since it is a graphical environment so there's more visible state.

Another aspect of Smalltalk was that the source code was managed by having meta-information in the class and method objects in the image which simply pointed to the source code which actually 'lived' in a single file. Whenever a method was saved, or class definition was saved, the changes were simply appended to this 'change log' in chunks, which were just code fragments which could be compiled or evaluated. The browsers just used an index saved in say a method object to determine the offset of the methods source code in the change log.

Of course it wasn't long before people started to build tools to go back and look at, old versions of methods and class definitions. At IBM in the early days, we used a change log browser written by either Jerry Archbald or David N. Smith, actually probably by the pair.

Later things got more sophisticated, OTIs Envy developer provided concurrent access to what was effectively a shared change log and provided both version and configuration control to teams of Smalltalkers. Today Smalltalkers use tools like Monticello which looks to me to be the logical successor to Envy.

Today, many developers, including your humble author, use git as the weapon of choice for version control. A common thread is the use of a write only repository. A little bit more sophisticated than a single linear change log, but ...

Lion's document model appears at first blush to be related. I saw someone speculating on Google+ about whether Lion might be using git. Somehow I doubt it, but I'm sure it was an influence.

The UI in Lion for browsing the history of a document looks pretty cool. I wonder if something like that would work for git?

Garbage Collection

One of the exciting things I had heard about Lion was that it would be improving the recently added garbage collection in Objective-C. As I read the garbage collection section of the Ars Technica report, which comes right after the section on security which got me all excited, my excitement started to fade a bit.

As Siracusa explains it, the Objective-C "garbage collector", which is really called "Automatic Reference Counting" or ARC, looks more like automatic generation of the formerly manual retain and release pragmas used in Objective-C programs before ARC.

The problem with hybrid languages like Objective-C, or C++, which have both managed and non-managed memory objects, is that the garbage collector can't tell whether a 'pointer' in a non-managed memory block which happens to hold the address inside a managed object space, really references a managed object or not, it might just be an integer, or a consecutive run of bytes in a string.

The real memory kicker for me was when in this section Siracusa pointed to a a series of articles he has written for Ars over the years, calling for Apple to move from Objective-C to a language or languages with truly automatic memory management.

Siracusa uses Apple's Copland operating system project, as an example of failure partially caused by not having automatic memory management when it is called for.

The predecessor of Copland was Pink, which was to be the new Mac operating system written in C++, and providing an application API in the form of a framework. There were lots of such plans floating around the industry back then, Microsoft had a similar project, and IBM was looking at all of these, along with Steve Jobs NeXTStep. Because of what I was doing at the time, I found myself on a series of IBM corporate task forces, and I got to visit the Pink developer team, which was cool since they were living in the Bandley 3 building which had been occupied by the band of pirates put together by Steve Jobs to develop the original Macintosh. A lot of those goodies were still there, including the Bösendorfer grand piano.

I had some interesting meetings with lots of interesting people at that time, including Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.

In talking with the Pink developers, it was obvious that they were suffering from a lack of GC, they talked about all the rules they had for using C++ constructors and destructors at method interfaces, which led to a lot of code bulk, and sub-optimal performance. That's a whole story in itself, but I totally agree with Siracusa here.

For what it's worth, Apple pushed Pink off onto a new joint venture with IBM called Taligent, with IBM investment and management. Taligent eventually failed. In the meantime, what was left of Pink at Apple morphed into Copland, only to be killed when Ellen Hancock, who I used to work under at IBM before she was lured away to National Semiconductor by Gil Amelio who then left his CEO job at National Semi to become CEO at Apple and lured her away again.

Hancock was hired to save Copland but decided it was hopeless, and started a search for a replacement. Eventually NeXTStep was chosen for the replacement bringing Jobs back to Apple.

NeXTStep, which was written in Objective-C is the main gene pool for today's OS X Cocoa.

Moving to Microsoft

2011-07-17T02:53:58+00:00

I’m very pleased to announce that I am joining Microsoft to help drive the architecture and forward vision for Visual Studio Pro. This is a very challenging role that underpins a product line spanning development for mobile, Xbox, Windows, server and cloud deployment. I’ll be building on my Eclipse experience, learning a whole raft of new technologies, and helping drive Visual Studio towards the next generation of development environments and platforms. Very cool!

Of course, this move means my focus will shift away from Eclipse. It’s been over 11 years of fun, learning, and great people. In that time the community and the technology have grown from a fledgeling open source Java IDE focus into a world-leading Java technology conglomerate spanning from runtimes to modelling to tools and beyond. I continue to believe in the power and potential of Eclipse.

Looking back, I have hacked tons of code, led teams, started projects, evangelized new directions, written books, explored business models, and generally had a great time. The software we created is used on space missions, bank servers, autonomous salt harvesters, a vast number of developer desktops, and countless applications about which we know nothing. I never would have dared dream all that when we started. It has been my honour and privilege to work with such a distinguished group of people and have such an impact on the world of computing. Thank you all for your contributions and camaraderie.

Of course, I reserve the right to show up at various Eclipse events and share a frosty beverage or two, find out what’s happening at Eclipse and talk about the things happening at Microsoft. Who knows, maybe there will even be some collaboration?! See you around…

Moving to Germany

2011-07-07T22:27:28+00:00

After six years in Ottawa, working for IBM, I have decided to move back to Germany with my family. Today was my last day in the office, and on Saturday we will be embarking on a longer vacation, driving from Ottawa all the way to Vancouver, before we board our one-way flight to Germany.

We'll try to pass by Orion, AB :-)

I may be able to remain an Eclipse committer, but it will definitely no longer be my main job. I decided to join Google at their Munich office at the end of the summer, and expect to be working on web-based tools there.

Over the last year or so, I spent most of my time getting the Orion project off the ground, which is about web-based tools and how tools from various servers can work together. We are code complete for our first tech preview release, which will be announced in a few days. The goal for this first release was to get to the point where we can self-host, and the team will from now on use Orion itself to develop Orion. I've been doing this for the last few weeks already, and it's a lot of fun to never leave the browser, from filing a bug, fixing and testing it, committing and pushing the fix, and closing the bug. There is a lot of potential for Orion, and I will be closely watching its progress.

I will also try this chocolate (thank you, Steve!)

It's been a blast. I've been very fortunate to work with some of the smartest people in the industry, both here at IBM as well as in the Eclipse community. I have learned so much. Thank you!

Anaphylaxis

2011-06-03T14:23:54+00:00

Not sure if I mentioned it already, but I don't really like the taste of honey. I keep bees because they are fascinating creatures with highly complex behavior, both individually and as a colony. The mixture of practical and theoretical skills required to keep honeybees well appeals to me.

Of course, when you say "bees" people immediately think "stings", probably before they even think of "honey". I have all the protective gear, but inevitably as a beekeeper you will get stung now and again. I find that autumn is the worst time of year; understandably perhaps as the bees are protecting their stores built up over summer with little prospect of replacing them before going into winter.

Most stings are harmless enough. Full coverage clothing means that the bee's stinger does go in far, and if it is far enough for me to notice I can take it out easily. However, recently I had two different episodes where the reaction was a bit more dramatic.

In one case I was carrying a hive full of bees to move it to another apiary. The entrance was sealed-up, but a couple of bees were hanging underneath looking for the way in, and took exception to my hand being there nearly squashing them. I got a full dose of venom in my finger, which was un-gloved as the bees were sealed in, right? Rather than drop the hive with 50,000 more bees inside I just had to grin and bear it.

The normal response to a bee sting is short intense pain followed by localized swelling, redness and swelling, and a wheal around the sting site lasting about a week. The reaction is localized to within ~10cm of the sting site.

My reaction was a bit different. Within ten minutes I had a severe pounding sensation in my head, dizzyness, itchy rash (ironically called "hives") over my whole body, swelling in my armpits and groin, and a feeling of pressure on my chest. Bugger! I had to lie down, took a triple dose of anti-histamines, and waited about six uncomfortable hours for it to pass.

The second time I was mowing the lawn quite close to the hives, and I guess one bee took exception, and without warning stung me on my temple. Bees usually will give you a warning by "head-butting" you a few times, and irately buzzing round you -- this one just went for it! The result was a similar whole-body reaction.

I'm not big on medications, but the thought has crossed my mind about what would happen if I was careless enough to get multiple stings simultaneously. So I've now got an epinephrine autoinjector next to the other bits and pieces in my bee kit.

The best description of the recognition and treatment of anaphylaxis I have found is published by the Resuscitation Council (UK).

Provided you watch and listen to what the bees are telling you, then with proper handling and the right protective equipment, getting stung should be a rare occurrence for a beekeeper. I'm still learning.

Good news! Bye-bye old house

2011-05-28T03:56:56+00:00

In case you missed me cartwheeling around Twitter and Facebook earlier today, we've finally sold our house. Lest I lose my status as a supreme procrastinator, we close on the new house on Tuesday, so yes, we managed to sell our house with 2 days to spare. I know technically our close is way off, but it's just different buying the next house and having no pending sale on this one. They tried to shave some off the price after inspection (um hello that's why we dropped the price) so it was by no means a done deal

Just to recap:

At the end of March our 1.5 year search for a new home came to an end here:

At which point we realized we were in no way ready to sell our current home:

So we did the logical thing and bought 100 rubbermaid containers:

Then rented a big-ass storage container to stash them in:

We proceeded to cram it full of our really, really important junk:

Once we had the room we forced V into child labour:

And used a bit of improvisation to get the house ready for market in two weeks:

Just over a month of viewings sent us on adventures:

Did I mention this was the wettest May EVER?:

So a lot of our time was spent in or near water:

Also?

But I'm fairly our van will smell like wet dog forever (good thing he's cute):

Luckily we avoided this when some pretty big winds blew though:

Some unlucky relatives may have gotten their fill of us (and our wet, smelly dog):

After hours and hours with bankers and lawyers (I have no pics, because really who wants to see that?) we've finally done it!:

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some boxes to pack and movers to call.

Google I/O: Memory Management for Android Apps

2011-05-16T16:52:41+00:00

Though I never made a formal announcement here, some of you may know that I joined the Android team at Google just over a year ago. Last week I had the privilege of speaking at Google I/O in a talk called “Memory Management for Android Applications”:

Android apps have more memory available to them than ever before, but are you sure you’re using it wisely? This talk will cover the memory management changes in Gingerbread and Honeycomb (concurrent GC, heap-allocated bitmaps, “largeHeap” option) and explore tools and techniques for profiling the memory usage of Android apps.

You can watch a full video of the talk (including the Q&A) on YouTube:

You can also download the slides (PDF).

ERRATUM: I’d like to correct one mistake I made in the Q&A, answering a question at 49:33 in the video. I said that “garbage collection is fundamentally kind of asynchronous; if you’re really close to the limit there can be times that you’re trying to allocate so fast that the garbage collector can’t keep up.” That isn’t really true. Dalvik will always perform a full, synchronous GC before thowing an OutOfMemoryError. What I was referring to here was finalization. Finalization is asynchronous, so if you are close to your heap limit and allocating a lot of objects, you may run out of memory before finalizable objects can be freed.

Anyways, I had a great time at Google I/O, and met all kinds of developers building cool stuff on Android. Hope to see you all again next year!

Well then.

2011-03-30T03:08:32+00:00

It appears I've been neglecting LJ. Turns out I have a pretty good reason. (No not *that* reason - that would be FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC and the post would include sparklers and cartwheels)

But. After searching since October'09 we have finally bought a house! Well, I guess technically we have a completed agreement to purchase, the sale will be final May 31st. But that's a hell of a boring way to say it, so I'll go back to 'we've bought a house!'

Much to my husband's dismay it does not have a pool, but he's already plotting, (I can tell). The seller's pictures don't do it justice, but I think it would be a bit creepy to head over there and start snapping pics from the road so they'll have to do:

My next heart attack is getting this house ready to sell. Do you have any idea how much crap will accumulate in a house when you stay in it for 14 years? And have a kid? And hope to have another? I need a house to store my stuff before I can move it into my new house. I cannot wait to see the agent's reaction on Sunday.

Interesting fact: Half of my wool/fabric stash has filled 30 rubbermaid bins.

Possibly related: I am so sick of decluttering that I'm working on a time machine.

Don't forget to vote!

2011-03-08T21:09:17+00:00

If you are an Eclipse committer, please take a few minutes of your scarce time to vote in the Eclipse Board elections. There are only three days left, voting ends on Friday March 11th at 3pm Eastern time!

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.

Thank you!

OpenJDK

2011-01-29T01:00:01+00:00

Yes, IBM joined OpenJDK and it was big news ...last fall... .

Why then no blog entry from yours truly ? Umm, I've been busy! You know, working on a seamless transition, ensuring IBM continues to deliver the best performing, highest quality, Java runtimes on the planet :)

As Mark just announced we are working on the OpenJDK community bylaws - a draft soon to be posted. The goal is to create an environment that enables an open vibrant OpenJDK community. It's a project IBM is joining so we spent time understanding how the project works today and tried to build on the existing model. Any changes were evaluated in the spirit of ensuring an open, transparent, and meritocratic project that can be run in a lightweight and efficient manner. We want to be inclusive and hope contributors feel comfortable joining the project.

In terms of OpenJDK, IBM will be bringing much to the table. Years of deep experience in Java runtimes, and we support a wide range of HW platforms, so we'll be taking our skills and work on earning our commit rights so we can get to it directly in the OpenJDK codebase. I expect our joint efforts will strengthen the Java community, accelerate innovation in the overall Java ecosystem as well as give a boost to the floundering blogging community currently suffering from a lack of things to write about :)

In OpenJDK, if we do it right, we'll see innovation from more than just the big players, and that will make the overall ecosystem richer. In the end, it will be our customers who benefit, from innovation, and a multi-vendor platform they can build their business on.

That said, while we will cooperate on the platform, we're still going to compete like mad on the implementations (delivering performance leadership :)), and if you haven't noticed, we're also gonna have some fun trash talking too.

Eclipse Foundation at OOP 2011

2011-01-20T22:01:17+00:00

Next week, we will be joining the OOP 2011 as an exhibitor.

Together with our members Bredex, EclipseSource, Tasktop and Yatta we will have a shared stand on the exhibition floor.

If you happen to be at OOP, please stop by for a chat!

PS: If you had not planned to go: Visit selected talks and the exhibition floor are free. Just register here.

(Original Post at http://eclipse-membership.blogspot.com/)

Ralph

Comments

Getting Crusty?

2011-01-14T03:58:39+00:00

Wow, this blog is getting crusty. I must admit that I’ve moved a lot of my updating to Facebook or Twitter. However, that’s not really an excuse for not blogging. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, work related activities and a cool LARP’ing game called Amtgard. These are among the few things I should be talking about....

Fall Demo Camps

2010-12-02T16:14:19+00:00

Demo Camps are almost over for me. As every year I tried to attend as many as I can: I meet good people, and I always learn a lot!

Demo Camp Bonn was the first for me in the fall series. Really nice location, good attendance and good talks. Even I start to understand that DSLs, Git and CDO are valuable technologies! Unfortunately I had caught a really bad cold and had to leave early. On my way home the train was terribly late and I was left on Frankfurt main station for quite some time before I could get home.

Dresden was the next stop. The itemis folks could get a room in at the technical university, and in the crowd I could sense a lot of students. Again more interesting talks - as to be expected some modeling content, but I learned something about Maven and Tycho as well.

Then I attended the demo camp in Kassel again. At the university of Kassel Marcel Bruch talked about the Eclipse Code Recommenders proposal (it was the 3rd time that I heard the talk, but Marcel is getting better every time), Nina Geiger from the Computer Science department did a demo of WindowBuilder Pro and the folks from Yatta Solutions were trying to convince us that that modeling is as much fun as programming

It was a good event, and the fact that Yatta signed the solution membership agreement after the talks were done was very sweet.

So now there's just one demo camp left for me. Since demo camps organized by EclipseSource are always special for me, I hope that I will meet many of you in Karlsruhe at the FZI next week. Together with FZI, Andrena and itemis a good program was put together, and I'll make sure that we go out for a beer afterwards

CU - Ralph

Comments

IBM and OpenJDK

2010-10-11T21:49:26+00:00

IBM and Oracle are going to bring their combined resources together to collaborate in OpenJDK. The natural question arises about what this means for the Apache Harmony project.

Apache Harmony has always been clear about the goal of innovating on a compliant and compatible implementation of Java SE. It's also common knowledge that Apache have been requesting a compatibility test kit license for a number of years, and that a suitable license has not been forthcoming. There's little prospect of that situation changing.

So what's best for the Java ecosystem? I believe that compatibility is vital, and rather than risk divergence the right thing is to bring the key platform development groups together on a common codebase. Lessons learned on Project Harmony will be of value to OpenJDK, and I know there is immense mutual respect between the IBM and Oracle engineers.

Dream == Right Brain Party

2010-08-09T22:27:37+00:00

We are all taught in school that we have 2 brains, a left brain and a right brain. Both control opposite sides of our bodies, which is weird by itself:

However, they also are two completely independent CPUs running at the same time. This is even weirder. Imagine your head being a computer with two motherboards, one running Windows, and one running MacOS:

Observe how smart the Apple ad people are. They place the PC guy on the left, where he belongs. He always thinks in terms of languages, logic, order, sequential processing. He is analytical, precise, and great in emergencies. The guy on the right however thinks in colors and pictures, uses pattern recognition, is intuitive and creative, thinks holistically, and has high emotional and social intelligence.

Now, let me get to my theory:

A Dream is your right brain having a party

Good. Nice theory. Now, what do you do when you want to support a theory? You carefully construct a google search for supportive pages, while ignoring the unsuppportive ones, of course. Here is a quote I found doing that:

During sleep, our right brain is fully dominant with a small contribution from our dormant left brain

Hmmm. That means that our logical, ordered, and linear-minded left brain is asleep while our out-of-the-box, holistic, creative, parallel thinking right brain is having a blast of a party.

When you are dreaming, your left brain is never completely out of the picture, of course, which is why you sometimes actually know you are having a so-called lucid dream. An intriguing concept enough to formulate a dream in a dream in a dream in a dream movie around:

Dreams are great, but especially when you are young, your right brain can sometimes really get out of control and make a big mess while it is having its parties. We have a medical term for those occasions and we call them nightmares.

Think of it. My theory makes sense. How often do you hear people say:”I get my best ideas in the shower”? Now, analyze that. Showers are soothing and require little intellectual exercize. Your left brain essentially falls asleep. Your right brain takes over and you experience that oh-so welcome “Aha” experience. It is not coincidence that discoveries or inventions are often met with “That’s funny!”. This is really your left brain complimenting your right brain with that creative thought it would never have come up itself. Think of the PC guy being envious of the Mac guy in most Apple commercials.

Another data point. IBM designates each Friday to be “Think Friday”. There is just one rule for those days, and that is: no meetings. Why no meetings? Because meetings produce endorphins and dopamine neurotransmitters of pleasure for exactly our logical left brain. By cancelling all those meetings, we lull the normally dominant left brain to sleep, so that the right part can take over and day-dream a new patent or business proposal.

See: Dilbert Cartoon

Now, next time you come home and explain to your spouse that you did not do any work all day, but spend all your time in meetings, remember that’s really your right brain complaining it was suppressed all day by that tirant, logical left brain. Your right brain will have its revenge tonight with a couple of nice parties.

Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON 2010

2010-07-24T02:41:59+00:00

In the week of July 21, 2010, I attended my first OSCON conference.

The lineup of presentations is normally quite impressive already, but this year it was even more so with the inclusion of the Emerging Languages Camp. Kudos go to Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Media, Inc.) and Alex Payne (BankSimple) for recruiting such excellent speakers.

As the organizers put it in their own words, “new programming languages are born all the time. Some languages are created to tackle new problems. Some languages are evidence proofs towards a better way of programming. Some are created just for fun or to scratch an itch. The Emerging Languages Camp is a gathering of the creators of recent programming languages, their peers, colleagues, interested programmers, technologists, and journalists.”

The event was spread out over two days at OSCON 2010, with a dedicated room filled to maximum capacity of 120. The event was inspiring due to the enthusiasm with which each and every of the two dozen speakers presented their language, how they made a historical comparison with other languages, how they explained the motivation behind why the world needs yet another language, and the way they gave compelling demos of sample code written using their programming language.

The only problem with events like this is that I now feel inspired to design another language of my own, just because it would be cool and just because I can

A running inside joke of the 2 day session was how to write an accumulator in the speaker’s proposed language. Next time you develop a language, forget “hello world”, and show an accumulator function, if you want to get recognition from your peers!

Some random twitter quotes:

“Q: What kind of programs do you imagine writing with this language? A: I have no idea.”
“There goes Lisp’s Last Great Hope”, as Rich Hickey dashed across the road in front of traffic.”
“When facing a new problem, you may look for the best language to solve it, or create your own”

Below follow the presentations I attended, as short description of each, and some personal highlights. Some I attended but could not make notes for due to brain overload.

Go
Rob Pike (Google, Inc.)

“Go’s approach to concurrency differs from that of many languages, even those (such as Erlang) that make concurrency central, yet it has deep roots. The path from Hoare’s 1978 paper to Go provides insight into how and why Go works as it does.”

Rob gave three presentations at OSCON 2010, and in the first one he specifically focussed on concurrency. The real breakthrough in parallel programming came in 1978 when Tony Hoare published his seminal paper on Communication Sequential Processes (CSP). Communication is fundamental. Parallel composition is multiprocessing. CSP has guarded commands, which allow you to express the willingness to execute a command based on a given expression. Furthermore, the composition language is very similar to the “pipe” construct in UNIX, but not used in any language up to 1978.

From the theoretical basics of CSP, we forked off into many different more practical applications, such as Occam, Erlang, Squeak (SIGGRAPH ’85), Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo, and Go. The important discovery along this evolution was to make communication channels be first class citizens. That means you can send channels over a channel. Process composition works by naming channels to allow goroutines to communicate with each other.

loke/Seph
Ola Bini

“Ioke is a dynamically typed language – a language experiment with a focus on expressivity. It’s prototype based, object oriented, homoiconic and have powerful macro facilities – and runs both on the JVM and the CLR. Seph is a language currently being developed, based on Ioke. It’s a functional object oriented hybrid with explicit concrrency features inspired by Erlang and Clojure.”

Perhaps the most distinguishing contribution of Ioke (pronounce: eye-oh-kee) is the notion of a formalized “decision system”. It is similar to continuable exceptions from Smalltalk, and much unlike exception handling in Java, where developers have to constantly unroll stacks.

Ioke cares less about concurrency, as that was not the topic of study that led to Ioke. Interestingly, Ola reported on that fact almost apologetically, and I kind of agree he should feel a bit embarrassed. Modern languages should be *based* on concurrency as that is the main problem to solve in the near future, with the increasing emergence of multi-core chipsets. My current desktop at work is a 12-core CPU, and at best I can exercise maybe 3 or 4 cores, while most stay dormant
because the programming languages we use to develop contemporary programs have a hard time expression concurrency across processes.

Ioke has a nice mechanism for DSLs. If you are into developing your own language, Ioke may be a language to investigate. Ioke allows you to change the underlying AST while the program is running, which greatly improves expressiveness, at a grand cost of performance, of course.

Ioke has no floats, just BigDecimals. Kudo!

Thyrd
Phil Mercurio (Thyrd Informatics)

“Thyrd is an experimental visual programming language built as a proof of concept. Thyrd is reflective (a Thyrd program can inspect and modify itself) and concurrent. Visually, it resembles a spreadsheet. Underneath is a stack-based functional language in the same family as Forth, Joy, and Befunge. This talk will present the key concepts in Thyrd and some of the directions it might take.”

Thyrd is heavily based on spreadsheets to combine the same representation for both the user interface and the underlying data model. This allows you to define variables, lists, tables, and tree datastructures, based on simple addressing semantics on the Thyrdspace. From a given cell, you can use relative addressing to get to other nodes.

Cell nodes are like spreadsheet functions and are constantly evaluated when dependent nodes change value. Expression evaluation uses a stack execution model, very similar to Forth (and Postscript). Using the “Fold” operator, you can easily develop a MapReduce equivalent.

Debugging is extremely visual by dragging a breakpoint into the code wave viewer. Similar tools have been developed for displaying the internal execution, allowing you to watch the execution stack being animated in a visual display.

I really enjoyed this presentation. At lunch I spoke with Phil and grilled him on scalability of visual programming techniques and performance, and he eluded to both of those being hard problems to solve. Even something as simple as TicTacToe becomes a wieldy set of colorful boxes. Phil remarked that the hierarchical nesting that the spreadsheet metaphor offers does help with navigation, as it encourage the brain to use its specialized spatial memory abilities. That
sorting routine is somewhere to the top right, then 3 down, right next to that purple box.

Parrot
Allison Randal (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)

“The Parrot virtual machine hit 2.0 in January of this year, and the 2.6 production release will be out the day before this talk. A virtual machine like no other, Parrot targets dynamic languages such as Perl, Ruby, Python and PHP. It incorporates an object-oriented assembly language, is register-based rather than stack-based, and employs continuations as the core means of flow control.”

A core component of Parrot is a parsing expression grammar (PEG), plus tree transformations to generate the instructions to run on the virtual machine. The transformations are heavily based on attribute grammars.

The work being focussed on now is “Lorito” (Spanish for ‘small parrot’), to reconsider and refactor the existing VM and improve startup time, resource consumption, and targetting clouds and mobile architectures. Parrot now has 1,200+ static opcodes. That makes it hard to write a JIT. Lorito limits itself to 20 opcodes. Higher level opcodes are encoded in lower-level opcodes to allow JITs to do a better job. Other improvements focus on improved garbage collection algorithms and reduce cost between the various memory spaces. Lorito has only one object system, and hence no cost for going between C and the VM.

Allison gave a passionate and enjoyable overview of Parrot and it inspired me to read up some more on it. Although Parrot is not a language per se, I think the topic was quite appropriate for the audience, as environments like Parrot solve many challenges language designers face and don’t want to necessarily focus on, such as parsing, garbage collection, and JIT compilation.

Ur
Adam Chlipala (Impredicative LLC)

“Ur/Web is a new domain-specific language for programming Web applications, based on a new general-purpose language called Ur. Ur features new abstraction and modularity features that make serious code reuse and metaprogramming possible within a strong static type system.”

The main goal of Ur/Web is to enforce entitlements on subsets of datastructures, in particular related to web applications, such as controlling accress to a subtree of a given web document. It is one of the various approaches to solve the “browser problem”. A great side-effect of Ur is its highly optimized packaging technology that automatically compresses code before sending it to the browser.

Frink
Alan Eliasen (Frink)

“Frink is a practical programming language and calculating tool designed to make physical calculations simple. It tracks units of measure through all calculations, ensuring that answers are correct. Back-of-the-envelope calculations become trivial, and more complex physical and engineering calculations become simpler to write and read, and allow transparent use of any units of measure.”

This was an awesome presentation. Alan started with explaining how he got to design Frink many years ago. A friend of him claimed that 9,5 years of farting creates the same amount of energy as an atomic bomb explosion. Alan had his doubts and set out to disprove the theory using C++. He quickly got stuck and realized he needed a much better language to reason about the numerous units of measure and conversions between them. The end result is a system where you can simply request the output of a nuclear explosion in kilotons, convert that to joules, convert to calories, and simply divide that by “9 years and 6 months”.

Frink empowers such computations by including a smart parser, lots of trivia, and a vast library of conversions between countless physical metrics, such as kilograms, meters, miles, etc, etc. The transformation rules in Frink remind me of peephole optimization tools for IR optimization and use an elegant DSL that is very similar to regular expressions as I used myself to optimize IR opcodes in the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, some 20 years ago.

Another innovative contribution offered by Frink is the adoption of interval arithmetic. Try this: load your favorite compiler or interpreter and add 0.1 to itself 1,000 times. In systems that store 0.1 as a float, you are guaranteed to end up with a number that is unequal to 100, as 0.1 cannot be stored reliably as a binary number. Alan contributes to the IEEE standard that suggests a different type of math that allows you to compare numbers in ranges. Rather than saying x=0.1, you can say x=[2,4], which means that x can be any number in between 2 and 4. In other words, x is all those possible values at the same time. This is almost as cool as quantum computing!

With interval math, Alan convincingly showed how much more reliable complex computations can be, as error margins can be controlled and reflected upon. In this way, we can explicitly compute not only the result, but also the risk behind a certain computation.

Thoughts on the F# Productization
Joe Pamer

“F# was already a fairly mature language with roots in Microsoft Research, Cambridge, and a steadily growing user base when the decision was made to officially support it in Visual Studio 2010. Having just shipped F# 2.0, the goal of this talk is to outline the experiences, both positive and negative, we had in transitioning the F# language and its implementation.”

This presentation was a bit different from all the others, as it did not talk at all about F#, showed no sample code, and did not relate it to any other languages at all. Instead, it was a great meta-topic discussion on the perils of success. Joe elaborated on his personal experience what things the F# team needed to worry about to allow adoption to a larger (and more commercial) audience of the original research project:

books/forums/evangelising
much better error/warning messages
a well-written and well-maintained spec
dog-fooding (use your own language to implement your compiler)
be a first-class CLR language, no shortcuts
clean up the crud collected over the years in the runtime DLL (camelcase vs underscores)
binary compatibility between different versions of runtimes
modern tooling support (debugging, etc)
writing documentation, automatic generation
high quality, localizable diagnostics (changes how you print errors)
figure out runtime deployment
improved experience on alternative platforms (i.e., test on Mono)

It’s amazing how generic this list is. Substitute F# for your own language, platform, or product and the list of lessons learned apply directly to your own project to make it prime for successful adoption. I have been involved in quite a few large projects that went through this very same transition, and it was interesting to see how many deja-vus I had during the presentation. In return for his great talk, I showed Joe the direction to the beer at the local Python User group

CoffeeScript
Jeremy Ashkenas (DocumentCloud)

“CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. It’s a thought experiment that aims to test how far we can stretch JavaScript semantics without adding any runtime libraries or outputting reams of generated code. Recommended for folks who are interested in languages that run in the browser as well as the server.”

Coffeescript has been self-hosted since version 0.5 and solves some of the biggest problems with JavaScript.

As far as the syntax goes, CoffeeScript looks a lot like python It is an awesome language and implementation. Not only is Jeremy a natural presenter, his materials were nicely presented, and various explanations and demos looked very nice. I bet many languages would be envious and hope to have such a great evangelist.

As CoffeeScript translates into Javascript, debugging has to happen on the generated code. I had a discussion with Jeremy afterwards, and explained how we solved that problem in EGL, where we generated two forms of JavaScript code, one with line number information and breakpoints, and one without that. Our tooling used the meta information to support debugging in the original source language. I also suggested Jeremy talk to John Barton of IBM who is working on
improved debugger integration with Firebug. This may help in debugging CoffeeScript.

Mirah
Charles Nutter (Engine Yard, Inc)

“Mirah (formerly Duby), is a Ruby-inspired, statically-typed, lightweight, platform-agnostic language with backends for JVM bytecode, Java source, and more platforms planned. It borrows features from several static and dynamic languages, but with a twist: no runtime dependency on any additional library; everything is done at compile time.”

The goal is to have the best of Ruby, but be as fast as Java, and see where the ship sinks. Very small code base. Only 10K lines of Ruby code.

For almost all samples, the generated JVM bytecodes are much more condensed for Mirah than they are for JRuby. Requires function arguments to be typed. Uses type inferencing to propagate type information to declare locals and fields of more specific types that a dynamically typed JVM implementation could ever get.

It reminded me of the research work on “typed Smalltalk”. I myself have implemented a Smalltalk to Java byte code translator in the late nineties, and the opportunities for optimization are huge when generating to the JVM when type signatures are available. Lookup through reflection API is horribly expensive both in code size and in CPU consumption.

Kodu
Matt MacLaurin (Microsoft FUSE Labs)

“Kodu is a new, purpose-built programming language designed as a first programming experience for kids or folks who want a very accessible intro to programming. Kodu is a visual language embedded in a 3D world, with language features specifically aimed at game design and interactivity programming. While deceptively simple, Kodu also introduces advanced concepts such as concurrency and arbitration.”

Kodu was designed to make it very easy to develop XBox games, assuming an underlying rendering engine.

Motivation is to reduce the impedance mismatch when going from gameplay to editing. Using simple metaphors that are close to the kids’ vocabulary, such as “score” instead of “int”. Furthermore, Kudo provides instant gratification by giving immediate feedback on scripts you just wrote. A debugger is not really needed as recoding is really easy.

OK. I cannot wait to get home, and download Kodu from XBox Live and sit down with my 13 year old and buy our own game. In the past, I have played with systems like Alice from Carnegie Mellon, but it is amazing to see what the latest generation of game engines allow you to do.

I also think the commercial/business software industry has been categorically ignoring lessons from gaming. I have yet to see an XBox 360, PS3, or Wii game that really needs a manual. All UIs are extremely intuitive or simplified to not overwhelm the user and sit in the way of the real aim: shoot monsters. Most commercial software thinks the business function is subordinate to the application framework and applications are over-engineered in the wrong areas. How
many games do you think get 5 stars when they take 4 hours to install, or when it takes 5 minutes to start up?

Update: I told my son about Kodu this afternoon. Half an hour later, he had downloaded by himself from the Indie game category at XBox Live, and had his first game implemented already. Amazing.

Clojure
Rich Hickey (Clojure)

“This talk will provide a brief experience report on Clojure, a dynamic, functional language targeting the JVM. It will detail the challenges faced in providing a practical and approachable programming language featuring pervasive immutability on top of the commodity infrastructure of the JVM.”

Rich talked about a topic he is working on right now that may make it into Closure, and yet again, may not. I think it should as the concept is very similar to the project I am now working on at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and we agree on need for such and approach.

Rich’s goal is to implement persistence as a stored graph, where each node is immutable. As soon as you write to a node in the graph, a new path is created to provide you a new view of the world with the updated value. Only you will see your changes. Others use their own access paths, which takes them to the old values, not your new values. This persistence model strongly encourages concurrent modifications to the graph, facilitating caching, and replication and redundancy.

Clojure remains an extremely elegant system. I just cannot get used to the syntax, as my mind has been too polluted by C, Java, and more recently Python.

E, Caja
Mark Miller (Google, Inc.)

“E is a clean slate no compromise language, built for object-capability security and distributed computing. JavaScript is one of the leakiest languages ever, created almost by accident, whose massive success imposes severe legacy compatibility constraints on its evolution. Caja is the surprising discovery of E-like security in a simple compatible subset of JavaScript.”

The main goal behind Caja (aka, Dr.SES) is to make JavaScript more secure by making the reference graph be identical to the access graph, and allowing for ‘safe mashups’.

The second goal is to improve concurrency. Tradeoffs are shared state vs. message passing in one dimension and blocking vs. non-blocking in the second dimension.

Mark explained the various meanings of the word Caja, and reinforced another lesson. If you are designing your own programming language, platform, or framework, spend at least as much time at choosing the right name as you do in implementing it.

AmbientTalk
Tom Van Cutsem (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

“AmbientTalk can best be summarized as “a scripting language for mobile phones”. It’s a dynamic, object-oriented, JVM-compatible, distributed programming language. AmbientTalk’s focus is on applications to be deployed in so-called “mobile ad hoc networks” – networks of mobile devices that communicate peer-to-peer using wireless communication technology, such as WiFi or Bluetooth.”

I thought the coolest takeaway from AmbientTalk is the notion of message queues and the fact that network failures are not exceptions, but are to be expected and anticipated. A lot of the plumbing in AmbientTalk concerns itself with talking to partners that we have no physical connection with yet, and dealing with messages that time out after a certain time.

OK, that wraps up my brain dump of a subset of the languages being presented at the Emerging Languages Camp 2010. I am hoping we will see many more of them in the future…

EclipseCon talk accepted

2010-07-23T01:44:22+00:00

Looks like our talk on the Eclipse e4 programming model, which includes a demo of our work on embedding web UIs into Eclipse, has been accepted for EclipseCon (March 23-26 in Santa Clara). Woot!

Archived

2010-07-18T19:01:40+00:00

I've archived the 431 posts from this blog. If you're interested in a specific post, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll pull a copy out of storage for you.

42

2010-06-15T04:15:01+00:00

Arrived at work today and noticed the "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." on my odometer.

Then, The Daily WTF had an awesome post on a spectacular use of binary.

Nice. Twice

Back on the road bike!

2010-04-01T00:29:01+00:00

Yay, I must say getting back on the road bike (well apart from my Hawaiian road biking) is great! I did get my first flat on it precisely 1Km from home. But, whatever, it was nice to have a light bike under me again. Also, the weather is turning very warm as you can see.

So my winter biking turned into a success I think. From near the end of October to yesterday I biked around 55 times and covered around 1500Km on my winter bike. I must say I think I was lucky with the weather, we didn’t get a lot of snow and the roads were pretty dry overall.

Talks at EclipseCon 2010

2010-02-02T18:50:32+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!

Kuku

2010-01-25T01:38:19+00:00

Kuku is from the Guinea and Ivory Coast area. Typically it is a women’s dance performed in a circle. It is a popular rhythm played at all kinds of festivals, including full moon celebrations. I recorded this today because someone I know said they were taking some Kuku dance lessons. 6 drum parts plus some solos

Reason to Run 2010

2010-01-04T05:44:56+00:00

Reason to Run #187: Having a targeted goal is a great way to succeed with a New Years fitness resolution.

Reason to Run had an amazing year in 2009. It was our first year organizing races and we met so many great people. With the partnership of our wonderful sponsors, we were able to raise over $17,000 for the charities associated with our events: the Micah Project, Alex Martinez Memorial Fund, CERN, Caring Bridge and the Catalyst Partnerships.

In April 2009, we had the Spring Burst 5k and 10k, with Pace of Courage 5k and 10k in August and then we finished the season with the Catalyst Challenge in October.

These three events are back for 2010, so add them to your race calendar and come out for more fun with Reason to Run: http://reasontorun.com/races.html

The first event of the year is the Spring Burst 5k and 10k: http://reasontorun.com/springRaces.html and registration will open in early January.

Join us on our Facebook event for the Spring Burst and invite your friends to share in the excitement leading up to April 10th: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=214848049130

Happy New Year!!

Darin and Trisha

www.ReasonToRun.com

Sorsonet

2009-12-25T18:11:41+00:00

Sorsonet is a mask dance from the Baga ethnic group from West Guinea, Boké region. There’s one mistake on the call in that I missed an open tone (well at least that mistake ;-). It has two balafon parts as well. Enjoy!

Tolerance and Respect

2009-12-02T05:18:27+00:00

While I no longer work on Eclipse nor for a member company, I regard many many people in the community as my friends, so felt compelled to write.

I think one measure of the strength of a community, or of a society for that matter, is the degree to which it tolerates viewpoints and discussions which challenge, irritate, or upset it. At best it may learn from them, at the least it can disregard them while it celebrates the fact that those voices exist. That voice could be yours.

There’s been much discussion about the need for openness. But that openness starts with a willingness to listen to, or at least accept, the words of others regardless of whether they align with our own. It begins with tolerance and respect. When as a community we engage in disrespectful acts such as personal attacks and name calling, and entertain the banning of those whom we no longer have the desire to listen to, we are no longer open. We lessen ourselves, and are not much of a community.

Is this who you want to be?

New Standing Desk

2009-11-30T01:51:20+00:00

I've stopped using a chair in my office for over three months now. I've been standing to work instead. The first week was hell, but after that I got used to it. I started the experiment by placing a piece of old countertop on top of a cardboard box on top of my desk. Once I found a height I was comfortable with, I decided to invest in new furniture. Last weekend we drove to Ikea near Detroit and I bought the pieces to put together my new setup.

Diva Premeire: King Arthur's Quest

2009-11-08T20:14:47+00:00

Yesterday was Leah's premiere in the world of theatre in a presentation of King Arthur's Quest at Mary Woodward elementary school.

The play was well produced with cool costumes and it was amazing how well prepared the kids were with only a week of practice. Hosted by the Missoula Children's Theatre, a traveling non-profit that has a mission: The development of life skills in children through participation in the performing arts.

Leah was one of the Camelotians (a citizen of Camelot), specifically a hard working baker. She particularily liked the boogie dragon music production. Ask her about it!

New Horizons

2009-09-17T13:55:41+00:00

I have taken a new job at a new company and unfortunately will no longer be working on Eclipse.

I just wanted to say what a great pleasure it’s been working on Eclipse (again). It’s a really fantastic community around some excellent technology. As good as the technology is, it’s nothing without fine people such as yourselves to tend to it, advance it, and promote it. Eclipse is one of the strongest open source communities and it’s been an honour helping to build that in some small way. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know many of you, professionally and then as friends.

Best of luck and hope our paths continue to cross,
Kevin

PS. For those who would like to keep in touch, I am on linkedIn.

Sarah at work

2009-09-09T20:04:52+00:00

According to my Myers Briggs personality test, “Likes perks in the workplace like being able to bring your dog in”.

She looks like she should be wearing a FedEx uniform. Actually, already close with the black and tan.

Art in the House

2009-07-29T19:52:34+00:00

Recently I decided that I needed more artwork in my house and was looking for something unique. At the office we have artwork in the halls and one particular piece is fractal art done by Phil Northover (Steve's brother) and it caught my eye.

So I contacted Phil and took at look at the different images available on his web site and decided on a couple of ones that I really liked. Together with the help of Phil and Jeem I got 3 prints done. (2 smaller ones and a large one) I took the prints to Display Laminating here in Ottawa to be laminated and mounted.

The final results were fantastic! I am extremely happy with how they turned out. Here is a photo of the larger one which is in my living room.

And what are the odds that 2 out of the 3 images that I selected (out of a gallery of over 50) were the same ones that the guys chose for the front and back covers of the new Butterflies and Zebras CD??

Thanks to Phil and Jeem for helping me put it all together!

Ich liebe Berlin

2009-06-20T00:35:43+00:00

I love Berlin.

This week was my second visit to the city, and the first time that I really had a chance to play tourist. You can find some of my favourite pictures over on Flickr.

The first time I visited the city I knew I liked it, but I really couldn’t articulate why. I had just recently been in Paris and the way I explained it was “Paris is chic, Berlin is cool”. Which is true.

But after looking over the pictures from this week, I realized a least part of the reason why I love Berlin is that it goes past the other major European cities in revealing its past. London, Paris, etc. make a point of showing off their history. Berlin puts the burden of its history front and centre. From the statue of a scowling Soviet soldier, to the unrepaired bullet holes, to the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin gives equal time to its unpleasant past whereas the other cities only reveal their glories. The whole history is there to find on public display, not just the victories.

That’s not to say that Berlin is sombre. The public art is incredible with a very cool mix of classical and modern. The street scene is hopping with some of the best buskers I’ve seen anywhere.

If you haven’t thought of Berlin as a travel destination, think again. It is a very walkable and lovely city with great hotels, restaurants and bars. I will definitely be going back. Next time I hope to be able to spend some significant time visiting the museums. From all reports they are incredible.

Some random thoughts on what to do or see:

If you go the Holocaust Memorial don’t just look at it. Walk through it. If you haven’t been disoriented in the middle of it, you’re missing the point.
I can highly recommend both the Westin Grand and the Intercontinental hotels. Especially the latter, as its location close to the Tiergarten, Zoo and Breitscheidplatz are hard to beat. They’re certainly not cheap, but they are both excellent.
If you have the legs for it, the view from the top of the Victory Column (Siegessäule) is pretty incredible. But your legs will be burning by the time you walk to the top.
The public transit is outstanding. I used the ICE to get there and the U-Bahn, S-Bahn and buses in the city. Clean, reliable and on-time.

Gay animals in the news

2009-06-09T13:39:47+00:00

Perhaps it’s old news now since I was reading this in a month old copy of Maclean’s magazine, but apparently Poznan, Poland, have recently acquired a gay elephant. The controversy appears to be over the fact that after building an expensive enclosure and acquiring this elephant, their hopes of increasing their herd size are rather dashed. That, and the fact that the elephant’s predilections “devaluates the institution of marriage and is an affront to the almighty”. I say, live and let live. You can read it all at Elephant News (for elephants, about elephants, by elephants).

But that’s not all. Those liberal minded European’s also proudly provide home to a pair of gay penguins (I mean though, who can tell them apart? … “Bob?” “No, I’m Ethel”). What’s particularly cool is that they’re successfully raising an adopted chick together. Which just goes to show that caring is more important than anything else in raising a child.

Addendum:
I figure we have gay rights, and animal rights, I’m waiting for the highly specialized “gay animal rights” group to form. I just checked, and “gayanimalrights.org” is open!

US-Canada Hi Speed Rail

2009-04-17T01:41:01+00:00

I travel a lot in Europe and love the high speed rail system. In fact, I am sure that I am one of the very few Canadians that hold a Deutsche Bahn 50 frequent rail traveler discount card.

So I thrilled to see that the Obama administration’s announcement today that they’re pushing for a quite complete high speed rail system for the United States. But I got really excited when I noticed the little northern leg on this map. I poked around a little bit, and yes it seems that a high-speed rail corridor is on the plan from Boston to Montreal.

I wonder what this means for a Canadian high-speed plan? If that linked to the often-rumored Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal rail link, that would be very cool.

Update: There is also a link in the Pacific Northwest that goes up to Vancouver. Boy, I bet Bombardier is licking their chops on this opportunity.

Johanne Marie's Candle

2008-12-14T13:49:31+00:00

Hey,

Thanks for the candle. It's a special Christmas candle that you burn every day leading up to Christmas. We have been faithfully burning it every day. I don't know about you in Denmark but it takes a long time to burn one day down!

thanks again,

Michael

J9 VM patch streams wrathified!

2008-11-03T16:41:46+00:00

Its been a crazy week and a half. Wrath, along with several other infrastructure-related items, has now been backported into all J9 VM patch streams. I'm surprised at how cleanly the backport went - in most cases the streams were Wrath-compliant in under 45 minutes. Our mirror story has paid off big time as each stream only need minor updates. Its nice when you get to see your technology just work.

"Are you suggestin' coconuts migrate?!"

2008-11-03T16:33:11+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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