Planet OTI

MacWorld

2009-01-06T20:53:56+00:00

So another MacWorld keynote has come and gone. There was plenty of coverage in the Mac community, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but here’s a capsule summary of the announcements:

New versions of iLife and iWork, both of which have enough features that I’ll have to buy the upgrades. From my p.o.v., the most interesting enhancements are:
- facial recognition and geotagging support in iPhoto
- (what looks to be) a much improved version of iMovie
- in GarageBand the ability to learn to play songs by particular artists as taught by the actual artist using video, on screen keyboard/fretboards and control over playback speed, etc.
- Support for remote control of Keynote presentations via iPhone/iPod Touch
- MathType and EndNote built into Pages — Dennis will love that
- Online support for viewing and commenting on iWork documents via a new “iWork.com” site, which is currently free in beta, but eventually will be a pay service. (I’m actually not sure how interesting this is in practice — Now, if you could edit them online…)
A new 17″ MacBook Pro, with a non-removable, 8 hour battery life. (Of course, they used to claim 5 hours, but I never got more than 3.5, so this effectively means a real-world battery life of 5 hours — definitely not too shabby.)
A new pricing model for iTunes: songs can be $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29. That’s in the U.S., of course, so it remains to be seen what happens in Canada.
All iTunes music moving (by the end of Q1) to be DRM free. This is great for people buying new music, but it should be noted that they did not wave the fee for upgrading your existing tunes to the new format. When I checked today, they already wanted >$60 to upgrade my existing purchases, and that can only climb as more tunes get converted. Oh well.

Some cool stuff there, but I was disappointed that there was still no word on new Mac Minis. My G5 PowerMac is getting pretty long in the tooth now, and since I basically just use it as a server (for this site, among other things) I’d love to replace it with a new Mini with a current C2D and a Gig of storage. Particularly since it now looks like Apple is phasing out support for the G5 processor.

gpx and exif

2009-01-06T06:56:34+00:00

Using a GPS

We got our first GPS last Christmas, in preparation for our trip to Ireland in the spring (awesome trip, BTW). That was a Garmin nüvi 270, which is the basic hardware device preloaded with maps of the US and Europe. Buying a device without the Europe maps, and then adding them back would have been a little more expensive. The device was quite useful on the trip.

As I'm a man, I've had more need for the device than my wife, and I had been leaving it in my car. So for my birthday this year, my wife got me a basic device, the Garmin nüvi 205. She wanted 'hers' back. When I started hiking a bit more this fall, I took it with me on the hikes, because it sucks to get lost. I could also kinda figure out where I was based on the shape of the track the device was generating, compared to maps showing trails.

The big problem with taking a nüvi hiking is that the battery only lasts 4-5 hours. It never ran out, but came close a few times. Another problem people may have with older devices is that they don't seem to have the nice tracking function that is really what you want in the device, to show you visibly where you've been on the map. Our one year old nüvi 270 doesn't do the tracking thing, near as I can tell. Lastly, it's not terribly convenient to slip into your pocket; it has a very sensitive touch screen and a easily switched on/off switch at the top. I found an old Palm Pilot leather case, with a hard 'front side' to prevent accidental touches through the case, that ended up being a perfect fit (saving $20 or on the Garmin case; I'm a pack-rat), but still a tight fit for the pocket, and you have to slip it in and out the case just so.

For Christmas, my wife ended up getting me a Garmin eTrex Venture HC, which is the basic GPS hiking model. The maps, compared to the nüvi suck, but that's ok, even the default Garmin maps don't include enough detail for hiking. This device handles track data much better than the nüvi, in that you can pre-load a bunch of tracks into the device and then display them while you're hiking. I've got a bit of a long-winded procedure to generate tracks from existing trail maps and Google Earth (see below), which then shows me something close to the actual trails while I'm hiking.

Besides being used for live tracking, the other thing I've been wanting to do is to correlate the pictures I've been taking while hiking with the GPS, so that I can associate a fairly precise location with the pictures. So that's how I spent a bit of my xmas break; writing that program.

What is GPX?

GPX is a XML file that your Garmin device will poop out giving you a braindump of what it knows; "favorites" you've set up, track logs for where you've been, etc. The file format is described pretty well on this site. The only thing I couldn't quickly figure out was the units for the elevation; meters.

The GPX file will contain a list of points, where each point has the following properties - latitude, longitude, elevation, and time - which it collects every so often (you can configure how often this happens). Here's the GPX file from my most recent hike to White Plains Nature Preserve - http://muellerware.org/kml/White-Pines-Nature-Preserve.gpx.

Actually, getting that GPX file can be a little tricky. You'll need to connect your GPS device to your computer, and for Garmin use the software they provide on a CD to pull the GPX file out, or for the Mac use RoadTrip. For RoadTrip, I always create a new folder for each GPX file I want to create, copy just the stuff I want from the "most recent import" (or whatever), and then export that folder, which exports it to a GPX file with the same name as the folder. A bit non-intuitive, but you'll figure it out.

Once you have the GPX file, you can open it directly in Google Earth. Google Maps doesn't appear to directly eat GPX files, but will eat KML files, and you can easily convert a GPX file to a KML file using the gpsbabel program.

What is EXIF?

EXIF is a standard for metadata embedded in image files. The site http://www.exif.org/ explains all, I guess. The spec is a bit dry. All sorts of metadata can get added to images by your camera, including all the camera settings used when the picture was takem, model information, and for this purpose, GPS information.

Here is an example of the sorts of information that gets stored as EXIF data for a photo.

Two great tastes ...

So, now that we have a bunch of images, and a GPX file, it's a SMOP to get the time of the photo, calculate the GPS coordinates given that time, and then stamp them back into the photo.

It looked to be a difficult slog to deal with the EXIF data myself, so some reading quickly led me to the exiftool program which can do all manner of slicing and dicing of EXIF data for your images.

The program I wrote reads in the GPX file, and then for every image pulls out the time the photo was taken with exiftool, and calculates the GPS coordinates for that photo, stamping that data back into the image with exiftool.

The program, gpx2exif, is housed here: http://muellerware.org/hg/gpx2exif/, is written in Python, may required version 2.5 or above, and also requires that you have exiftool installed.

In addition to stamping the images with GPS data (actually, creating new copies of the images with the GPS EXIF data), it also creates a KML file you can load into Google Earth to 'test' the locations that got stamped. In case your camera's clock is not synchronized to the GPS (hint, hint). If your times are off, read the exiftool help, there's a way to adjust the times of your photos in one swell foop.

Once you've got the GPS data stamped in your images, sites like Flickr and Picasa will show you "map" versions of your sets, and do other stuff with the geo data. The map view for my White Pines set at Flickr is here and the map view for the same set at Picasa is here.

What's next

Turns out you can do all sorts of interesting analysis of the data in the GPX file, like:

calculate distance travelled
calculate speed
figure out when you stopped for a break
plot data onto Google Maps or Google Earth
generate elevation maps

You should be able to do all this stuff in a web browser, in fact, by writing the analysis code in JavaScript. Given that you can access Flickr cross-site via their 'JSONP'-ish support, associating photos with the GPS data is something you can also probably do in the browser. We'll see. I'm a little worried that the number of data points and expensive math required will be a bit much for normal JavaScript processing; I may need to use a Google Gears worker to offload some of that processing.

Notes

exiftool rocks; I was was happy to not have to deal with reading/writing EXIF data myself.
My camera stores times in "local" format. Would have been nice if it used UTC. Do any cameras do this? I made an assumption that the camera, and computer you are running gpx2exif on, are running at the same local time. Again, use exiftool to "fix" this, if it's wrong.
I still can't figure out the secret to the findall() method ElementTree. bugger. Seems like a great API, I just can't use it. The XML processing wasn't that complex, so minidom, which I'm very familiar with, was fine.
Neither Flickr nor Picasa will do anything with your EXIF GPS data unless you specifically tell them to; presumably for privacy reasons. For Flickr, the setting is here; for Picasa, the setting is here.
The resulting map views from Flickr and Picasa aren't terribly pleasing to me; in fact, the KML "test" file I produce from gpx2exif is way more interesting. I think because you can see the actual trail, but also the markers I used (default ones) work better than thumbnails that Picasa uses, and the markers used by Flickr can't be disambiguated when they're too close, like they can in Google Earth.
On the Garmin eTrex device, if you "save" a track that you've made (hiked), it will strip the time values out. Make sure you export the track off the device before saving; the time values are (obviously) critical to determining the locations for your photos.
To pre-load a set of trails for a park onto the device, I do the following. Get a version of the trail maps (prolly from a PDF from the park site) and convert to a JPG file. Bring up Google Earth, find the park, and add an image overlay for the image file you created; set the transparency down so you can see the trails and Google Earth detail. Hopefully there's enough detail in the image, and Google Earth so that you can move/resize the image overlay close enough. Then create some new line segments in Google Earth, tracing over the trails. I couldn't figure out how to export those line segments directly out of Google Earth, but if you "mail" the folder they are in to yourself, you will get a KMZ file, which is just a zip file containing a KML file. Garmin tools like RoadMap don't eat KML, but you can convert the KML to a GPX using gpsbabel, and then import that. Voilà; trails to follow on my device.
When traveling long distances now, I've become completely dependent on the GPS, and it's very nice to have when you're not on the interstate. In fact, I've been actively avoiding interstates as much as I can now; traveling back roads through small towns is much more fun. You basically don't have to keep track of where you are, what roads you're on, where to turn, etc. As long as you got the destination plugged in right. And then I find myself racing against the ETA the GPS displays prominently. I called my wife at one point when I was coming home from hiking trip and the conversation went something like this:

wife: So, where are you?

me: I have no idea.

wife: Well, which way are you coming home?

me: I have no idea.

wife: I don't suppose you know when you'll be getting home?

me: 4:37

ORRC Y2K9 race: Guaranteed PR

2009-01-04T23:25:31+00:00

ORRC has been running a race out in Forest Grove on the first weekend in the new year for quite some time. This year it was the Y2K9. From what I can figure, since Y2K, the race has been getting 10 meters longer each year . For example, last year to this year: 20.08 km --> 20.09 km. This works out great as each year you get to try a new distance and are guaranteed a PR for that distance :-)

This year was the first year that I have made it out to the race. It was tough, fun and a good checkpoint for how my training has been going. I really like how strong my legs felt just 3 days past a 100 mile week. The bootcamp training is definitely making me stronger...likely both mentally and physically. Still need to work on the tempo towards Surf City to reach that 3 hr goal. I see some good hard tempo runs in the next 2.5 weeks to get the lead out!

I started out fast on the downhill but it was fun and didn't feel too taxing. The first few miles were quite slippery with ice on the road and sidewalks. After about mile 4, the ice became much less of an issue. It was still cold: I think we were at about 25-28 F. I was very happy to have my gloves and embedded hot shots. By about mile 9 my face was pretty much numb. Man, I am really getting wimpy living on the west coast! The course is well marked and there are 3 aid stations spaced out appropriately. Portions of the 20 k are shared with the 10k. Made for a nice boost to have people to try to pass.

The course is rolling with some nice ups and downs to make you mix up the muscle groups. I think I did really well on the uphills but I need to work on the downhill turnover and speed. I was able to get in a nice groove on the flats.
Yet again I went short on fuel. My pace and path up the last grunt hill around 12.1 miles is something we all would laugh at if it made it to You Tube...I am sure I looked drunk :-)

20.09 km (12.48 miles) - 1:24:02
Splits:
Mile 1 - 6:20 Mile 7 - 7:07 Last little bit - 3:29 (my drunken hill!!)
Mile 2 - 6:34 Mile 8 - 6:26
Mile 3 - 6:50 Mile 9 - 6:47
Mile 4 - 6:38 Mile 10 - 6:49
Mile 5 - 6:42 Mile 11 - 6:52
Mile 6 - 6:45 Mile 12 - 6:38

Full results are up at the Timing by Zornick site.

Good fun for the first race of the year with a first place in my age group and seventh overall.
Ronda kicked butt taking second overall and first master woman.

I will plan to do this race again next year and get another PR!

Christmas Eve Church Service 2008

2009-01-04T22:55:54+00:00

With the history setting winter weather we have had in Portland this past week most, if not all, Christmas Eve church services were canceled.

Not to be deterred, Cole planned a Swanson family service complete with home made program.

He designated himself as the "priest" and piano player with Leah as the special music and assistant. Trisha and Grandma provided the catering. Apparently I was the silent benefactor :-)

We opened with Christmas carols with Cole and Leah doing the piano accompaniment.

Cole then read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke.

This was followed by candle lighting and prayer time to remember those in need and to thank God for all the wonderful things in our lives.

The service wrapped up with chocolates and cookies provided for all the parishioners and service participants.

Merry Christmas to all from the Swansons!

Product Review: Samsung SyncMaster T240 LCD

2009-01-04T02:44:07+00:00

The Samsung SyncMaster T240 is a 24″ 1080p LCD. I just picked one up at my local computer dealer PCCyber for a pretty decent price of $300 CA, lower than I’ve seen at the big box stores and a pretty amazing price for a 24″ 1080p LCD (for comparison, shopbot.ca is showing prices ranging from $299 TO $462).

Pros

Great value for money
Great text sharpness
Good color fidelity
No noticeable motion blur in games or movies
As bright as you could want
Monitor frame is pretty sexy

Cons

Poor off-axis viewing especially text
Slight loss of definition in the blacks
No adjustability to the base

Discussion

For about two years I’ve been using the Samsung SyncMaster 225BW. At 1680×1050 and 5ms response, I bought it primarily as a gaming monitor. For this it was fine, although in truth I was never happy with the color fidelity and text was ok but not fantastic. By contrast, my previous monitor, a ViewSonic VP201s had great color and text, but being an earlier panel technology, showed motion blur in gaming. Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison since that Samsung was a consumer level monitor while the ViewSonic was a professional level one. Since I don’t just use my computer for gaming, I’ve never been happy with this trade off.

The T240 provides better color fidelity and text than my previous Samsung, is fast enough for gaming, and at 1920×1200, has tons of real estate. Just tonight I was watching an episode of 24 while reading an investment outlook report (ugh, but that’s a different discussion). And I must say that playing Company of Heroes at 1920×1200 on a 24″ monitor is spectacular.

To try to compare apples and apples, I will contrast it with the Lenovo L220X I use at work. The Lenovo is 2″ smaller, but more importantly, I’ve not been impressed with it’s color fidelity or text rendition. Albeit I’m comparing with two different graphic cards too, but what I noticed with the Lenovo is that, being a high gamma panel, it seemed to miss the mark in color balance. Even if you’re not doing color sensitive graphics work, color balance is still important for text readability if you use TrueType text on WindowsXP or Vista (which you likely do since it’s on by default) because TrueType dithers the text with antialiased pixels of blended color. If those colors aren’t right, the text can look blurred or odd, reducing readability. It took a lot of research and several rounds of adjustments to get the color settings to a point on the Lenovo where text was acceptable for day to day work. The Samsung on the other hand had immediately readable text. And at a suggested retail of $499 CA for the Lenovo, the Samsung is a great deal giving you better text, better color, a larger screen, for less. The Samsung T240 isn’t the clearest text I’ve seen (my old ViewSonic still wins for this), but is the clearest I’ve seen so far in a monitor of this size and resolution.

One fault I’ve noticed with the text is that you get some artifacting if you look at the text off-axis. This isn’t just about being at an odd angle to the monitor, but occurs during normal usage because at 24″ you’re going to be off-axis to the edges. Specifically, I’ve noticed that text at the top of the screen appears slightly bolded, and text at the bottom slightly thin.

The T240 is a nice looking monitor. Traditionally, desktop monitors have been nothing more than a panel with some black or gray injection molded framing and a few controls. The Samsung is a more sophisticated looking piece of consumer electronics, likely taking some design influence from trends in large format living room LCDs and Plasmas. You could thus consider it’s use in places other than the desktop, such as in a living room or bedroom. Although it has a nice looking base that complements the overall styling, you cannot raise or lower the panel. Also, I’ve not been able to tilt it, although the specs claim you can. This lack of adjustability was disappointing to the point where I considered returning it. The base does swivel, although I’ve always found this to be the least useful adjustment.

In conclusion, I’m happy with the T240. Not ecstatic, but happy. Great as a gaming monitor, good as a work monitor. For $300 I have better color, text, resolution, and size than I had before, and I don’t see anything in that price range that can compete. My impression is that Samsung gives you good value for money in a 24″ 1080p monitor.

I’m out of garbage bags?

2009-01-03T17:24:09+00:00

Ok, I’ve finally run out of plastic grocery bags that we’ve been accumulating forever. In the switch to easier to use and more robust grocery bags we haven’t been collecting the plastic ones. Every week we use a few in the kitchen garbage and it seems I’m all out! Now what the hell am I supposed to use? Real garbage bags? Do you know how much those cost? Damn this environmental shift....

Korg DS-10

2009-01-02T18:24:27+00:00

This was one of the things on my Christmas list this year that I didn’t get[*], so, during boxing week, I wandered down to my local EBGames and picked one up. It’s a cart for the Nintendo DS that provides software emulations of a pair of Korg MS-10, semi-modular analog monosynths and an analog drum machine. It also provides a simple step-sequencer, and has both a traditional keyboard and a “kaos pad” input device. Here’s a couple of screen shots:

I haven’t had it long enough to do anything interesting with it, but if you want to see what it’s capable of, just search for “DS-10″ on YouTube — last I looked there >1000 videos of people making music on them. Among other cool features is the ability to sync up to four DS’s running over wifi, so if anybody else picks up a copy, let me know.

Anyway, here’s my first attempt at making some sounds on it; it’s dreck, but it gives you some idea of what it sounds like:

2008 12 31

(wait for it, it starts slow.)

* Note: I did get a kick-ass, ice crushing blender, a GPS, a bottle of the 2000 Dun Bheagan Islay and numerous other cool gifts, so I’m not complaining at all.

Slow Cooker

2008-12-30T01:58:33+00:00

With winter weather here, we tend to pull out the slow cooker much more often. It still gets used in the summer months, but not nearly as much as the BBQ. As an aside I did manage to keep my promise to myself and dig out the BBQ to make some tasty steak fajitas this winter.

You can make a lot more than just stew in a crock-pot. Here are a few of my non-stew favorites:

Spaghetti Sauce
Beef Vindaloo
Clam Chowder
Pulled Pork
Chili Con Carne

With a 6-quart pot, we can usually make enough to cover dinner plus either another whole dinner for another night or a couple of lunches. Generally most of the recipes taste better the longer you cook them, and if I’ve been thinking far enough ahead I cook on low for 2x the time (so 4hrs becomes 8hrs).

Let me also recommend a great recipe book: Canada’s Best Slow Cooker Recipes ISBN 0-7788-0024-5. Generally you can pretty easily convert many normal recipes for use in the slow cooker, just cut the liquid by half (or more) - a little experimenting is all it takes to have dinner ready and waiting with almost no effort.

Read on if you want the recipes for my list of favorites above.

(...)
Read the rest of Slow Cooker (327 words)

From the Slate?

2008-12-24T00:25:18+00:00

It's a literal translation from Dutch "van der lei". Oddly enough, the name "Vanderlei" is a very common first name in Brazil. Just have a look at all the people with that name who are famous enough to be on Wikipedia. And that does not include yours truly. So some random Brazilan dude snatched up vanderlei.blogspot.com way back in 2005. Apparently, my Dutch ancestors made quite a name for themselves while plundering Brazil way back in the 1600s. That might explain why my great grandfather was nicknamed "Xingu."

EclipseCon 2009

2008-12-23T21:49:53+00:00

22 is the number of people who last year registered for EclipseCon on December 31, New Years Eve. Each year New Years Eve is one of the most popular days to register for EclipseCon since it is the last day for the very early registration prices.

This year, people should register before New Years Eve and spend December 31 relaxing with family and friends. If you are going to EclipseCon, why not just register now; it takes less than five minutes.

Happy New Year!

Eclipse's Platform is pretty good

2008-12-23T12:00:01+00:00

I was reading "Why Platforms Are Letting Us Down" and, gosh darn it if, according to this person's measures, Eclipse as platform isn't doing so badly:

Why are we building a platform?
How will we monetize this platform?
Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
Can we support the platform for years to come?

We don't have an App Store a.k.a. a Plug-in Store for our platform, but we (collectively) have answer for all these questions:

The Foundation itself doesn't monetize the platform, but we enable the Eclipse members to build profitable Eclipse-based businesses. We (collectively) know how to, and are, monetize the platform.
We know how much the platform costs to maintain and the Eclipse members and Board believe that cost is sustainable, even in today's economic gloom.

So, yes, we are (you all are) building a great platform - let's keep it up!

DVD vs Blu-ray

2008-12-23T03:59:20+00:00

I was a fairly early adopter of the DVD format, buying my first DVD player (a Toshiba 2109) back in 1998 for a bit more than $700. That player is still going strong and doing duty at my sister in-laws place, replacing their Sony player that stopped working reliably. I’ve got more than 250 DVDs in my collection, and friends and family regularly borrow and watch them.

It took me a while to make the leap to Blu-ray. Initially the format war gave me a good reason to stall. My previous projector being a CRT didn’t have HDMI inputs and was not capable of a full 1080p display (1080i worked fine). Moving the Blu-ray also means fewer people are able to borrow the media and enjoy it.

Eventually my will power crumbled, I think what tipped me over the edge was the pack-rat in me. The sheer volume of data that the Blu-ray format represents is just so cool, so many bits - in such a neat package.

The first Blu-ray movie we watched was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The menu system and intro to the disc look really sharp, much more crisp than any DVD menu. I did find that the special effects (groundhogs) tended to look a little unreal. I was very pleased at the detail visible in long shots, it never felt constrained like DVD can at times. In general terms the amount of detail helped make the picture much more engaging, things just looked “wow” all of the time. Any time there was a limitation in detail, it seemed to be specifically the directors intention (ie: depth of field) vs. a limitation of the format.

I did have a chance to compare directly to the DVD version, switching between my PS3 (for Blu-ray) and the Oppo 980 (for DVD). For Indian Jones, the special effects seemed to blend better into the overall image - they were more convincing on the DVD. On the flip side, you could tell in the direct A/B comparison which was the Blu-ray and which was the DVD - there was clearly more fine detail in the image. However, in isolation - both looked really good. Similarly Wall E on DVD vs the Blu-ray version had similar observations - in side by side A/B comparison it was easy to see the extra details in the image, but if you switched to the DVD for a minute or two you quickly forgot and didn’t feel that you were missing anything.

It is probably important to note here that to see the difference you may need to have a fairly high end system, and a pretty big screen. I’m using the Epson 1080UB and a 80″x45″ screen (more than 6 feet wide). The first row of seating is about 11 feet away, so its a big sharp image that helps make the difference more obvious.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the challenges for Blu-ray. Today the cost of the media is generally more expensive. Large displays are certainly getting more common, but considering that DVD will look really good - without a direct A/B comparison Blu-ray may be a tough sell at the increased price point. The Blu-ray players are also more expensive, and they are relatively slow compared to a DVD player (for menu operations and start-up).

I still intend to buy movies on DVD, but I suspect that the majority of my future purchases will be Blu-ray. While DVD does look awesome with my setup, Blu-ray is awesomer.

ianskerrett

2008-12-22T14:49:29+00:00

I am pleased to announce we are organizing an Eclipse Banking Day in London on February 12. As with similar events in Frankfurt and New York, the goal is to encourage senior technical people from the financial services community to share their experiences of using Eclipse and open source software.

We have another great agenda that features Eclipse experts and technical leaders from different financial institutions, including J.P. Morgan, Barclays, la Caixa (a large Spanish Bank) and Bank of East Asia. The banks are doing some really interesting things with Eclipse technology, so it is great they are willing to share their experiences.

There is no cost to attend the event but you need to pre-register and you need to work at a financial institution. Special thanks to Actuate, itemis, Sybase and WeigleWilczek for sponsoring this event and allowing us to offer it free of charge to attendees.

How to get your code into an open source project

2008-12-22T12:00:00+00:00

Richard Jones wrote a nice article about how to get your code into an open source project: his points 1.x and 6.x are extra relevant:

1.x Don't write lots of code, dump it on the project right at the end and walk away.
6.x Don't just add your feature to the code. (Write the documentation as well).

Recumbent hunting

2008-12-21T14:51:55+00:00

I’ve been riding Mountain Bikes to work for over 16 years now and I think I’m due for a change. My current bike is a full suspension beast with XTR and Disc Brakes. Pretty cushy but not great for speed or comfort. I usually ride somewhere between 1200-1600km every season now but would like to get into some distance cycling as well as my commute. I was looking at some road bikes but lately when I ride, remember I’m getting old, I find my butt, back and neck hurt more than they used to. Mostly my neck. I could solve that with a more upright commuter bike for sure. But, I’m thinking, why not try something different.

Recently I found a link to the following page regarding bike styles and what impressed me was the chart with speeds at 250 Watts. 250 Watts seems high for me at the moment and likely what I would consider “honkin’ it”. However, when I get home from my 13km commute and my average speed on knobby tires and a heavy mountain bike is 29 km/h I must be putting out some decent amount of power. I’ll have to ask Dean at work since he’s been doing power training for the last year.

So without going for the most crazy profiled recumbent I should get a reasonable speed boost and forego all the other problems I have. I’d actually like to be as close to traffic height as possible since I do sometimes ride in traffic and I’d also like panniers. I have to haul everything on my back currently since my bike is fully suspended.

There’s only really 1 dealer in Hull that carries recumbents in Ottawa so I think I’ll have to make a Spring trip to Toronto or Montreal and sample some.

Here’s a great site called ‘Bentrider Online that is very up to date with recumbent information.

US Patent #7,464,384

2008-12-19T21:01:30+00:00

Patents are only for the old machine
© Alexandre Dulaunoy

When I retired from IBM some years ago, I had a couple of pending patent applications. I always wondered if and when the patent(s) issued, whether or not I would hear about it.

Early this week, I got notification that one of the applications had been granted last Tuesday, and I’m now recorded as the inventor of US Patent #7,464,384 “Method for inter-object communication”

Word came not from IBM, but from an outfit which sells plaques commemorating the issuance of patents. I still haven’t heard and don’t know if I ever will, from IBM.

The road to patent issue can be long and winding. I’ve looked at transaction history for this patent on the US Patent office’s web site and see this history (some details omitted):

03-14-2002: Application filed
11-02-2004: Non-Final Rejection mailed to IBM
02-01-2005: IBM response after Non-Final Action
06-10-2005: A second Non-Final Rejection mailed
08-01-2005: IBM responds again
09-28-2005: Patent office mails a Final Rejection
11-16-2005: IBM submits an Amendment after Final Rejection
12-09-2005: Patent office mails an Mail Advisory Action
12-14-2005: IBM files Notice of Appeal
02-14-2006: Appeal Brief Filed
06-06-2006: Yet another Non-Final Rejection
09-06-2006: IBM files another Notice of Appeal
11-06-2006: Appeal Brief Filed
12-06-2006: Appeal Forwarded to Examiner
12-06-2006: Appeal Brief Review Complete – a quick review!
02-26-2007: Another Non-Final Rejection
05-24-2007: Another response from IBM
08-02-2007: A second Final Rejection

What had been going on was an argument between the Patent examiner, and the lawyer representing IBM about the claims in the patent application. The claims are what gives a patent force. Each claim can be defended individually. Most patents contain one or more series of claims starting with specific claims followed by more and more general claims. For example if you had invented the Car, you might first claim a motor vehicle with four wheels, powered by an internal combustion gasoline engine. A broader claim might be the invention described in the first claim with any kind of internal combustion engine, then with any kind of engine. Other variations might hinge on the number of wheels, etc. The original patent application contained 30 claims, and at this point the Patent Examiner had rejected all of them.

11-05-2007: And another Notice of Appeal Filed
11-05-2007: Request for Pre-Appeal Conference Filed
12-20-2007: Pre-Appeals Conference Decision – Reopen Prosecution
12-21-2007: Mail Appeals conf. Reopen Prosec.

IBM submitted a detailed defense of the claims in the patent.

12-21-2007: Date Forwarded to Examiner
12-28-2007: Mail Non-Final Rejection
04-04-2008: Request for Extension of Time – Granted
04-04-2008: Response after Non-Final Action
05-09-2008: Date Forwarded to Examiner
07-15-2008: Mail Notice of Allowance

IBM’s attorney apparently finally convinced the Patent examiner to accept the most specific claim in the patent. I assume that this is the point at which it was determined that the patent would be issued.

10-14-2008

Issue Fee Payment Received and Verified

10-21-2008

Application Is Considered Ready for Issue

10-14-2008

Amendment after Notice of Allowance (Rule 312)

11-03-2008

Response to Amendment under Rule 312

11-06-2008

Mail Response to 312 Amendment (PTO-271)

11-19-2008

Issue Notification Mailed

12-09-2008

Recordation of Patent Grant Mailed

So it took six years and four months to convince the Patent office of the validity of the application, and just shy of fiver more months before the patent issued.

What a trip!

And to be honest, I’m rather ambivalent on the whole issue of software patents

Could visualization help make better software?

2008-12-18T17:59:09+00:00

Writing software is incredibly hard. Every programmer knows this. The software we write is complex, unreliable, and difficult to maintain. And this isn’t a new thing — the term “the software crisis” was coined in 1968.

The thing about software is that it’s remarkably easy to write a program that mostly works. And it’s difficult to tell the difference between a quick hack and a stable, reliable, and robust system, because the software development process produces almost no visible artifacts.

When you look at a building, it’s easy to get a quick sense of how well-built it is. Which of the two buildings below would you rather be in during a heavy storm?

Besides the program itself, the only visible artifact of the software development process is the source code. And that is only viewed by the programmers, through the tiny lens of the text editor. What if we could make the entire process more visible?

I’m thinking of visualizations along the lines of the comparison of system calls in Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS that I posted a while back. But this is just one idea. What other ways could we visualize Code Smells? (Maybe we could actually smell them!)

Aside from visualizing various aspects of the source code itself, could we show how well tested a piece of software is? We could show how many tests were run recently, what their results were, how good the code coverage is, the number of crashes encountered in the field, etc. With projectors and LCD displays being so cheap these days, there’s no reason a development team couldn’t have a few displays dedicated to these kinds of visualizations.

What do you think? Could this help improve the quality of software? What if companies openly published these kinds of things?

EclipseCon talk accepted

2008-12-16T18:59:44+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!

Contributing to Eclipse

2008-12-16T13:50:55+00:00

Who says you have to be a committer to provide value to Eclipse?

You don't! A very easy way to help us:

Prerequisite: You visited Eclipse Summit 2008.
Action: You give us feedback by filling out the survey questionnaire!
Result: You help us to make Eclipse Summit 2009 an even better event!

That's easy, right? Now you are a good-doer! On the other hand – it wouldn't hurt if you keep working on achieving committer status too :-)

Ralph

WordPress 2.7.0

2008-12-16T04:00:22+00:00

I must admit, I haven’t been impressed with previous versions of WordPress as of late. I probably stopped caring sometime after 2.5.x and only applied a few of the 2.6.x updates out of security concerns. Although, now that WordPress 2.7 is out, my interest in WordPress has been renewed. The dashboard interface is what makes the upgrade worthwhile. It has been greatly improved in terms of ergonomics and aesthetics. If you follow the WordPress 2.7 link posted above, you can catch a quick demo of what I’m talking about.

As for the upgrade process, it was painless (even if you are a couple of versions behind). I recommend the extended upgrade notes for those who haven’t done this in a while. I do want to point out that you might want to transfer your settings from your current wp-config.php file to the wp-config-sample.php file since there has been some changes. After you are done, simply rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and upload it. The reason this is important is due to the extra security settings. Namely, the following:

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

All of which can be easily generated by using the WordPress secret key service.

There are lots of new tweaks that you can do via your Dashboard but one that stood out for me was on Discussion Settings (Settings -> Discussions) page. You can now enable threaded discussion on your site, up to 10 levels deep. I suspect this has something to do with WordPress taking over IntenseDebate. I haven’t had a chance to experiment with this more but plan to shortly.

Anyway, perform the upgrade if you haven’t already. I think you’ll like it. Otherwise, you can read more about WordPress on my WordPress page.

We're with you Ken

2008-12-16T01:17:09+00:00

My friend and co-worker Ken Walker is going through some tough times this year. His wife is fighting cancer and has begun chemo sessions, with associated hair loss effects. Ken has of course decided to join the club and shave his head down to the shiny base which he showcased at the office today. Very slick.

So, on the way home tonight, I stopped in for a number one, all around - very quick and easy - not much styling going on. Now, I don't have much hair in the first place but the hair I do have, I give up, in support, in friendship and in hope.

When Ken did this, his daughter said he looks like an Elf, but when I got home today, my daughter said I look like I just got out of prison. She should have picked Elf, cause last I heard, ex-cons don't hand out Christmas presents.

Ken, Kelly - in solidarity, thinking about you.

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

Games shop

2008-12-14T13:45:04+00:00

5262 Grafton st. I think, is a great little games shop. Hard to find but suprising what is inside. I think I had to duck to get in the tiny door.

Bops, tree hugging, and safe wagers

2008-12-13T12:18:01+00:00

Back in July I wrote about how Apache Harmony's TreeMap implementation had been used (with modifications) to deliver improvements in Sun's SPECjbb2005 score by "a solid 3-5% depending on the platform" according to Dave who also promised that they were "making the necessary steps to give back [the] code changes to Apache Harmony"; even though they are not obliged to do so according to the Apache License.

Did you expect us to sit and wait?!

IBM has just published its latest SPECjbb2005 scores with, amongst other things, an enhanced version of TreeMap from Harmony that gives them a 10% boost, and thereby move ahead in many reporting categories. Derek has all the details, and I encourage you to read them.

It would be interesting to look back and compare the changes Sun and IBM made to Harmony's TreeMap, and merge them for the common good.

While I'm sure Dave's intentions are pure, I doubt the suits will let him contribute his changes back to Apache and all the talk of "requiring innovation sharing in the commons" only applies in one direction. In fact, I'm so sure, that if Sun do successfully contribute their TreeMap changes back to Apache Harmony I promise to give £500 of my own hard-earned money to The Woodland Trust to benefit some real trees.

Too many meetings ...

2008-12-13T04:17:18+00:00

Remember folks ...

Steve

Bloganalysis - I'm a Mechanic

2008-12-12T20:39:10+00:00

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen several blog articles about typealizer a web service which analyzes blog authors personalities based on what they’ve written.

For better or worse, here’s what it has to say about me.

ISTP – The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Debugging mixed-language code in Apache Harmony + Eclipse

2008-12-12T12:11:24+00:00

I've been hacking in managed runtimes for more years than I'd care to mention, and plenty of that time has been spent in debuggers of one sort or another!

...and that's the point. Implementing a runtime requires that you have a suite of debuggers that cover the different target platform native code and the dynamic late-bound language du jour. You have to switch from Eclipse to WinDbg/gdb and back again frequently.

Intel's Software group have (for some unknown reason) been quite low key about their innovation in this space, with the development of an integrated debugger for Java and JNI environments. This advance has been enabled by the combination of support in the Eclipse Java Debug Tools and Apache Harmony runtime.

Now, as you step into a native method from Java, the Eclipse debugger shows a logical representation of the mixed Java thread / C thread stack frames and allows you to inspect variables etc. in either language. They also support the JNI methods that call back into Java so you get full roundtripping. Cool.

For most people who need to debug a system comprising Java and native code this is exactly what you want to do, and its a real time saver to be able to manage the breakpoints, variable watches and flow of control from a single IDE.

Kudos to Chris, Vasily, Gregory, Ilya, et al who made this work. Clearly people who live in the real world!

Go watch the screencast demo, download it and try it out!

Zoë Keating - One Cello x 16 Natoma

2008-12-12T12:00:50+00:00

Track List

Legions (War)
Fern
Tetrishead
Sun Will Set
We Insist
Legions (Reverie)
Frozen Angels
Legions (Aftermath)

Genre

Classical

Review

Every now and then an artist comes my way that turns the world upside down. In fact, this is the album of the year for me. The music is powerful, moving, and will give you pause to listen more closely. What is even more interesting is that she is producing all sounds on the record with just one cello!

I first came across Zoë by listening to a RadioLab interview. Thanks Kate! I recommend you listen the entire interview as well but also sit back and enjoy the live performance of an untitled song that is about 5:45 minutes into the interview. For an MP3 (not something I would normally recommend), the quality is excellent.

Rating

10/10

Live Performance

Watch her play a song in her upcoming album live. The video and sound is gritty but enough to get a taste:

WPvideo 1.10

It ain't bragging when it's true

2008-12-12T01:38:38+00:00

Well, it's finally happened, bursting pride in our accomplishments has exceeded our shyness and Derek Inglis has posted some `braggin` about IBM's J9 performance results.

It's simple - IBM J9 is the fastest Java VM you can get.

Now, you don't see alot of performance chest thumping on my blog, despite the fact that we are frequently in the leadership position. The reason ? Performance is just one factor in our business. It's a lesson learned in many face to face interactions with customers. Surprisingly, not one of these customers run any of the industry standard benchmarks as their key application (ok, not surprising) and bragging about a particular benchmark to them, often results in a "that's nice, how does *my* application run?" followed by "How easy is it to service ? How easy to install, tune and manage ?" and those details matter. It's easy to lose focus when you're winning, so a little humbleness goes along way in keeping your attention on the right things.

So, despite benchmarks being benchmarks, I'd like to do some braggin of my own ... not about the numbers, but about my world class team who delivered these results. Thanks to the Toronto, Ottawa, Hursley, Bangalore and Shanghai teams, way to go!

Of course, being humble is one thing, but we're human and it's been a long year, so I say let's brag a ~~little~~ lot.

... and besides ...

It ain't bragging when it's true, and it's true right now.

You can read the nitty gritty details here.

Test-first programming success story

2008-12-12T01:29:50+00:00

I’ve heard people talk about test-first programming but in truth I had never really given it a good try. Until now.

Working on the e4 CSS support provided a great opportunity. As some of you may know, the e4 CSS code was generously contributed from an existing external project. Unfortunately, some of the IP lineage of the code was tainted with GPL code so some didn’t make it into the Eclipse CVS repository. This left a number of classes missing in the middle of the contribution.

I knew which classes were missing, including their hierarchies and implements, and I was able to generate the method signatures by either quick fixing calls to missing methods or by gen’ing the required interface methods. Now to fill in the method bodies.

A perfect opportunity for test-first programming!

I wrote a very basic junit test (create an SWT label, have style sheet set background color, check if that’s the color in the widget). I then went to every method with missing body and wrote:

throw new UnsupportedOperationException("NOT YET IMPLEMENTED");

I picked this because its a runtime exception and thus didn’t require changing method signatures or callers, and because I’d be unlikely to trigger one in some other code. I then set the Eclipse debugger to breakpoint on all caught and uncaught UnsupportedOperationException’s.

Development proceeded like:

Run test
See where it halts
Write the method
Rerun, repeat!

It was somewhat reminicient of the “laying the tracks out in front of the train” scene in Wallace and Gromit.

What was curious about this approach was that I was completely surprised (and delighted) when it finally ran green. I knew I was getting close based on the places where it was stopping, but still didn’t know how close!

I think the key here was that I had such a good specification of the requirements of the code and this could be easily translated into a test. The test was obvious to write, and the need for a test to guide my coding was also obvious — What else would I do, keep running the same example? Might as well write it as a test!

For more open ended problems the requirements and code sort of co-evolve. Maybe in this case test-first does apply as well, or then again maybe you use the tests as the way to express one side of the evolving contract.

In any case, this experience was an excellent example of how valuable an approach it can be.

Sketchbook: Firefox session restore

2008-12-05T23:03:03+00:00

Since I’m doing a field study on how people use tabs in Firefox, you can imagine that I spend a lot of time thinking some of the smallest details of the Firefox user experience. One thing that’s been on my mind lately is the session restore feature. You know, when you start Firefox, and it asks you if you’d like to restore your windows and tabs from last time? That’s session restore.

It’s definitely a handy feature. I often use tabs like lightweight bookmarks, leaving tabs open to a page that I am planning to come back to. (And in my field study I’ve learned that lots of other people do this too.) If your browser crashes, or the Firefox process sustains collateral damage in a kill(1)ing spree, it’s a relief not to lose all the tabs your were saving.

The Problem

But the interface for session restore has always bugged me a bit. First, it uses modal dialog boxes, which are generally a bad idea. One of great things about Firefox 3 is that it eliminated a lot of the modal dialog boxes (e.g. “Do you want to remember this password?”) in favour of non-modal messages in the notification bar (see Alex Faaborg’s post about this from last year).

Not only does it use modal dialog boxes, but it’s asking me a question that’s usually unrelated to what I’m trying to do. “Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for next time?” I’m probably closing my browser for a reason, but I have no idea whether or not I’ll need these tabs next time. And asking me when I start up might not be the right time either…I’m starting my browser because I have something to do, and I can’t remember what I had open before, so how should I know whether to restore or not?

Either you’re part of the problem, or…

So I’m thinking — what if we got rid of these questions altogether? What if Firefox always remembered what windows and tabs you had open? But you might not want 15 tabs loading every time you start Firefox up.

A while back, Aza proposed making the new tab screen more useful. His proposal included a separate screen for restoring recently-closed tabs and windows, but it’s kind of hidden in his design. Most of the space in his design is taken up by contextual actions, but when you’re just starting the browser, these aren’t as relevant. Here’s a quick mockup of what a similar screen might look like on startup (mouse over to see the notes):

There are a few things to mention here. First of all, recently-closed windows are accessed from within a history list. Lately, I’ve been thinking that so much of what we do in the browser is revisiting pages that we’ve been to before, so a time-based view makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the history is pretty much hidden in most browsers. So you can see some inspiration here from Google Chrome, which presents the history like a regular web page. I think this makes a lot of sense, because it lets you use the same behaviours that you use on the web, whereas a separate history window forces you to learn a new UI.

Recently-closed windows are presented in a way that looks somewhat like they actually appeared in the window, maintaining the tab ordering. It probably needs to be made a bit more obvious than in this mockup, but you get the picture. Of course you could go a step further here, and make it look almost exactly like a screenshot of the tab bar. This mockup only shows one recently-closed window, but you can imagine having more than one, and they would appear in the history at the time that they were closed. I’ve also incorporated recently-closed tabs into this page. That’s currently available as a menu item under History->Recently Close Tabs, but to me, it’s always seemed kind of tacked-on there. You could also imagine using some of the space here for bookmarks.

What do you think? If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment.

God uses EMF

2008-12-05T13:07:59+00:00

This week Mike M. and I were visiting some systems engineering / embedded systems companies in Germany. We were talking a lot about CDT, DSDP and the modeling projects. On the last day of the trip, I went home and Mike went to another meeting. It was a though week, and I was really happy once I got home and got comfortable on my sofa.

That was when Mike called me. The connection was very bad, lots of static. So I figured he must call from very far away. What he said to me -interrupted by static was something along the lines of “ ... god ...... static .... use ... static ... EMF ... more static ...”.

I have to admit, being almost asleep on my cozy sofa I was really wondering for a moment how Mike had found out. How did he manage to meet the guy? From my former education I knew that HE enjoyed whistling German songs when HE had construction problems to solve and that the celestial corps of engineering was using advanced methods. And the call seemed to come from far far away. So a lot of evidence that HE and his team might use modeling for large-scale intergalactic construction projects.

But then I thought again. It was possible that the connection was so horrible because it went from Germany all the way back to Canada to come back to my home. And it is possible that he just said something like “Oh God – they are using EMF too.” Sounds more like Mike, eh?

But a little doubt is still there. Next time I talk to Mike I will ask him. It really looks like everybody is using EMF these days. Why not HE and the celestial corps of engineers too?

Ralph

Experiments with bugzilla email filtering

2008-12-04T20:57:47+00:00

I’m sure you all suffer from the same problem as I, which is that you can get a heck of a lot of bugzilla email during the course of a day (well, a lot in general, but bugzilla is one I think I can do something about). Not all of it is urgent though. Lately I’ve been finding that my focus and attention is being driven by what comes into my inbox. When that happens, I no longer feel like I’m in control of my day (because, well, I’m not). I’d rather drive what I do based on my priorities, but I still need to maintain some awareness of what’s going on since some issues are timely.

The problem with bugzilla is that you can end up being on a heck of a lot of CC lists. This can be especially true for me when I’ve been doing bug triaging since I tend to CC myself on bugs I’m not sure I’ve vectored correctly. I don’t know about you, but I tend to not remove myself from CC’s even when they no longer serve a purpose.

Sometimes an item will be under heated conversation. For these, my preference is to wait a bit then get caught up with several comments in a row, rather than reading each in turn. I try to do this in recognition of the fact that building up the context in order to understand the latest comment takes time, and I’d like to be more efficient by collating those together.

My current experiment is the following email filter. It’s Lotus Notes, but most modern emailers have similar capabilities. Here I’m attempting to vector all bugzilla email to a dedicated folder which in theory I will check say once a day or every other day (ie. at a time of my chosing, not when the bugs come in). However, I did that in the past and the result was missing out on things people wanted me to comment on. I realized that its not all bugzilla email that should be filtered out, but rather than there is a subset that I want to prioritize my attention to and have in my inbox. The following filter attempts to express this.

Bugs assigned to me, or ones I logged, get priority. and go my inbox. The interesting one for me is the exception “Body contains ‘Kevin’”, which tries to capture the pattern,

“Kevin, do you agree?” “Kevin, can I take this bug?” “Kevin, are you there?” “Wake up Kevin!”

It’s still early but so far this seems to be helping.

I’m wondering how others deal with the bugzilla tidal wave.

more android thoughts

2008-12-03T04:59:12+00:00

I remember right when Android came out, I downloaded the SDK and tried playing with it, and there was some kind of silly show-stopping problem with it on the Mac. Thoughts from then, just a little under a year ago. IIRC, the bug got fixed fairly quickly, but not quick enough for me to get a chance to get back to looking at it in any depth. A long time goes by, and right before this Thanksgiving, I got the urge to look at it again, so I did. Here are some unorganized thoughts.

Note that I still didn't really spend a lot of time with it; the time I spent probably raised more questions than it answered, in a good way. I did the obligatory HelloWorld demo, the Notepad tutorial, and lots of browsing and reading in between.

Please comment if I misspeak about something; lots of guessing and incomplete research on my part here (this thing is big!).

Wow. Lots of stuff here.

Hats off to the team. This thing is huge, and seems fairly well put together, especially considering the size. The source takes up 1.4GB on disk; Linux and WebKit and on and on and on. It's fun just to troll around the source directories to see what's there. But I recommend downloading the wad and browsing with your usual editors/tools.

Rev 1

So sure, maybe it's not as sexy and polished as the iPhone, and sure the devices got shipped with a silly little bug, but I'm willing to forgive early releases. Given the scope of the effort, again, I think they've done a great job. It's early days.

But I'm also not willing to shell out my own pocket money for a rev 1 device or o/s. Just like I (no longer) buy rev 1 Apple products or immediately install new versions of OS X. Tired of playing pioneer.

I guess I'm most worried about the potential immaturity of the application and UI frameworks. Usually good frameworks require evolution, and I've used lots of "intelligently designed" frameworks over the years, so I'm a bit of a doubter when I see a new one pop up overnight. Might be interesting to get some background on them, kinda like Google has done with BigTable and some of their other technologies.

Here's an example worry: the Touch Mode blog post has me a bit confused. Touching the screen causes selection and focus to be lost? eh? I've been using my finger on PDA touch screens since the Palm. I'm used to touching the screen causing selection and focus events to occur, not to be lost. I'm either not understanding what's going on here, or this seems wrong. And here's a funny little note: "This is why some developers are confused when they create a custom view and start receiving key events only after moving the trackball once: their application is in touch mode, and they need to use the trackball to exit touch mode and resurrect the focus." Um, developers are confused? I think users will be confused by this also, won't they? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here, I'd like to see how well this works on an actual device before passing judgement. Lastly, I'm glad to see that the wiggly mouse is back - it's been years! The referenced mail doesn't go into details, but I've been dealing with self-inflicted wiggly mouse problems since the Smalltalk days. Those were due to bugs though, not design.

Devices other than the T-Mobile G1?

I kinda hate to even provide the link the aurally offensive T-Mobile G1 site, but I'll let you feel my pain.

So what other devices are going to be available? More phones, I guess, but I wonder if anyone will do a non-phone version, like Apple's iPod Touch? I'm currently not willing to pay the data charges for presumably light bandwidth usage (over cell); I'm too much of a cheapskate and live fine with my cheapo phone. But I'm more than willing to carry a device I can connect to wifi.

I didn't see much (any?) information on any newer devices coming out, which is a bit worrisome. Before spending a significant amount of time playing with this, I'd like to know this thing has a future. It seems like a no-brainer to me that device manufacturers would take advantage of Android (many caveats apply), but I'm not willing to bet on common sense.

How would you do a port something like the Nokia N800?

In lieu of new devices, what about porting to existing devices, like (my) Nokia N800? Or say, a netbook?

Turns out folks have ported Android to the N800; see here and here.

It appears what these folks have done is ported the entire stack to the device, starting with Linux. Youch. More what I was thinking was porting the minimum number of things to be able to run Android apps on it somehow. Basically, get something like the emulator running as a native app on the device, as an application container. I don't really feel the need to either blow away my existing device, or run another Linux on top of (beside?) it. And I'd be willing to live with having to run Android apps in a container, instead of as native apps themselves.

We did this sort of thing back when we were working on embedded Java; we had a MIDP environment that could run on the native operating system, with the UI layer (for instance) implemented in SWT. In fact, I assumed this was probably how the emulator that ships with the Android SDK was implemented, but it slowly dawned on me that it's actually running the entire stack, from Linux up, in a virtualization environment of some kind. Wowsa. That's why it takes 23 seconds for the emulator to start up.

To implement an emulator for Android, you need to decide how low-level access you want to support. And the answer is obviously: the "Java" code that you use to write applications. All I'd want to do is run existing apps, which can only (?) access "Java" APIs, so all you have to do is have a matching set of Java APIs that do the right thing on the platform (note the 'all' is italicized).

In terms of implementation, since this is, really, Java source, you could (?) just run the apps in plain old Java. Alternatively, if you didn't have a Java available, you could port the Dalvik VM, and run it that way.

For the N800, there is a Java available (I've not tried it); it's a J2ME flavor, so may not be enough anyway. Might be better off porting the Dalvik VM, then porting the UI bits to Hildon/GTK/whatever; the N800 is already running Linux, so presumably other natively accessed things would have a bit of hope of running out of the box (but not camera, GPS, etc). Webkit's got me nervous.

Lots and lots of caveats here, and it's entirely possible that for some reason or another, you really, really need that Linux kernel to even run the plain ole "Java" applications.

Java

So I'll admit Java isn't my first choice for a language on a device like this. I like the option of Python on Maemo.

But I can live with Java on a constrained device like this; I wasn't unhappy doing embedded Java years ago. One of my pain points with Java is the sheer bulk of crap needed to get anything done, pulling in, eventually, loads of Apache and Eclipse projects to do some heavy lifting for you. The nice thing here, everything is included, or seems to be. But even we if end up needing more stuff (why do I even bother saying "if"), we're talking about a constrained device here, where you'll get laughed at if you want to install a 1MB library to pull in some function. People will have to learn how to write small code. Forced sanity.

Scripting?

Mark Murphy's blog post on using Java-based scripting languages on Android sums up the major points, especially as to language implementations that generate Java byte code directly; those will be a problem, and I think that affects a number of the interesting scripting languages. Presumably, someday you'll be able to generate and load Dalvik bytecode in Android. Maybe there will be a way to load Java bytecode and have it internally generate creamy Dalvik output automagically. Many possibilities.

But I wonder how appropriate scripting languages would be anyway? I've written about this before. If my option is to write Java code, or to write Java code in a Python dialect, I'll just stick to Java.

JavaScripting

Of course there's always JavaScript available, either in the native browser via web applications, or in some other way through the use of the WebView UI View class. And check out this interesting looking method, in that class: WebView.addJavascriptInterface(). hmmm ...

Dalvik docs

Some Dalvik docs like bytecode descriptions, file shapes, etc are available here. Of course, almost no one needs this info, but in case you just had to know ...

I was a little surprised the Java-ness of Dalvik went so far as to support JNI, but I guess that really makes a lot of sense.

Proprietary stuff

The licensing situation with maps is a little disconcerting, and at 11 pages, a bit long. But this feels a lot more like an application-level service than, say, core infrastructure, and I'm fine with people setting limits on application services like this. Of course, the core infrastructure / application service line is a bit fuzzy. I use Google Maps a lot; it's starting to feel like core infrastructure. Google's got us right where they want us!

How about a native desktop version?

Imagine something similar to Apple's Dashboard, only running Android applications. You know I just want to start using that WebView.addJavascriptInterface() API on the desktop ...

I had the same thoughts on MIDP, back in the day, of using it as a container for little useful desktop apps. But that was pretty silly, given the lameness of MIDP.

Again, I think the nice way to do this would be to run the apps "native" instead of in a virtualized Linux box. I think if you looked at some of the common componentry used in Android and Chrome, you might end up thinking that being able to run Android apps in Chrome would be an interesting idea.

Now, you might say "the UI capabilities of Android are too lame to be useful on a desktop!" Thing is, I hear that complicated GUIs are on the outs. Even on the internets! I generally agree with those thoughts, and I have to admit, one of the most interesting UI's I've seen recently was Muxtape (R.I.P.); simple.

Speaking of simple UIs, after watching this video discussing ListView, I couldn't help but to think of our old, dear friend Gopher (R.I.P.?). Once upon a time, I imagined having Gopher server interfaces on everything, so I could have a simple universal client that could talk to anything. Good times.

wife:	So, where are you?
me:	I have no idea.
wife:	Well, which way are you coming home?
me:	I have no idea.
wife:	I don't suppose you know when you'll be getting home?
me:	4:37