Eric Arseneau's Weblog

eric<.>arseneau<@>sun<.>com

I just got a development kit with some cool toys in it, which is way cool.  However, it did come with a not so nice surprise. You see, up until now I already knew there were a few different kinds of USB connectors

• USB A - the big boxy looking one
• USB B - the wide narrow one
• USB mini B 5 pin - the one we use on Sun SPOT
• USB mini B 4 pint - I know about this one because there are 400 of them sitting in a cupboard in the lab, due to my screwing up in thinking that ordering a USB mini B cable would be enough to get the right thing :(

One of the projects I've been working on, PlaySIM, used a new USB connector I had not seen before, it seems to be a

• USB To Go mini B connector - scratch head to see what the functional difference is between the mini B and the togo mini B?

So when I got this dev kit I started with on this blog entry, I was not surprised to see this mini B connector again.  What DID surprise me, was

• USB To Go mini A connector

Why?  I dont get it?  Is there really a need to have a USB A & B type connector?  What do they diferentiate? Is it actually physically required?  Is is a scam by cable sellers to get another round at this?

What makes me really laugh is the couple of blog entries I've seen where all the mobile phone manufacturers, including Apple, are supposedly going to use "micro" USB connector as a standard.  So does this mean

• Yet another USB A & B pair of connectors coming out?
• Which connector will they all use?  You think they will use the same actual one, or use different ones as they get as confused as we do with all these different seemingly useless connectors :)

If someone can help me understand this I would really appreciate it.  Will be more than happy to post an update including extra information.

Now, let me go to my USB cable bin and see if I can find the right one to get this board working :(

It has been way too long since I last blogged and forget how easy it can actually be.  So here is a thought I wanted to share with all, what is a good interview question.  Well this article seems to like "What do you do in your spare time?"

The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

Even if you had learned about all of Captain Sullenberger's activities, you might have considered his obsession dysfunctional. Wouldn't you rather hire someone well rounded? Someone who has interests beyond the particular? Someone who might be a better communicator?

But people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person's obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.

Maybe its due to the fact that I am  somewhat obessessive that this rings true to me, your mileage may vary :)

I saw Guy Kawasaki for the first time at a Palm conference doing his presentation on Rules for Revolutionaries.  If you have never heard him do a talk, find a way to get to one he is very entertaining and provides a lot of useful information.  I tried to find a video of his Rules for Revolutionaries, but could not find one.

I did find one he did for PARC Forum, entitles By the Numbers.  I didn't watch the whole thing yet, but from skimming it has his usual style.

Look at his latest blog entry Everything I Need to Know About Entrepreneurship I Learned From My Comrades in Moscow , and tell me that does not bring a tear to your eye, or laughter into your heart :)

One of my favorites 

With the caption "Celebrity endorsements don’t have to be expensive.".

I love it :)

Just ran across the Sun Labs Open House 2008 Kiosk and saw that there was a recording of the presentation I did available to the public.  The slides are here and the video itself is here.

The thing that is really cool here is that this page covers a lot of the presentations we did this year, and there are a number of them which you should take a look at.  I was going to draw your attention to some of them here, but the list has so many cool ones that I don't think I could do a fair selection.  On top of that, who says you will be interested in the same things I am :)

Go to the  Sun Labs Open House 2008 Kiosk and check it our for yourself.

I have to say that the experience of being interviewed by Al, and then seeing the article he wrote, was a real pleasure.  During the interview he said that he wasn't a techie, but I think he's wrong.  He was able to pick up on all of the really important points and put them together really well for this article.  I was really impressed.  I would check out some of his other articles, which you will find in the archive.

Go take a look at the article Go Small or Not at All 

This blog entry is long overdue.  Squawk was officially announced as Open Source January 2008 at Mobile, Media, and eMbedded Developer Days.  I got the opportunity to do a presentation on what Squawk is and what we are trying to do.  The JTVOS is also included in this video, as the event had too many topics to give them all 60 minutes, so a number of us got half of that.

I did try to be a little entertaining but unfortunately I do not quite have the physique to do a striptease justice :)  Proceed at your own risk, the first minute or so are setup confusion, stick with it and you might find it interesting :)

 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/184826

M3DD is on again this year, I'll be there and so will other people you mind find interesting, come and register.

Please take a few minutes to answer the polling question on whether or not you will attend M3DD

Will you be attending the Java Mobile, Media, and eMbedded Developer Days, January 21-22, 2009? (Information & registration: http://developerdays.dev.java.net/) 

http://forums.java.net/jive/poll.jspa?pollID=15

Just ran into an interesting use of my blog just now.  I have just started using the online system for our local library to reserve and renew books.  I took out my wallet, got my library card out, logged in and renewed some books.  I had a couple of books that I could not renew and so had to return them.  So I got in my car and drove to the library.

Once at the library, I realized that I had left my wallet on my desk :(  Picture ID was required in order for me to make some changes to my online account, for some reason the library system will not let me set my notification e-mail online.

With no ID, the librarian was unable to allow me to make changes to my account.  Then I had a eureka moment.  Asked the librarian if she had internet access, which she did.  So I asked her to go to http://blogs.sun.com/eric, where she would find my blog containing my full name and picture.  Presto, I had an online ID !!!

So BLOG!!! You never know when it will come in handy :) 

Coding Horror blog comes up with some fun stuff on a regular basis, Is Email = Efail? is a good one,

What we can to combat the email = efail problem? Take Tantek's advice: whenever possible, avoid sending email. Not because we don't want to communicate with our peers. Quite the contrary. We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us.

So if you've emailed me, and I haven't responded in a timely fashion, I apologize. I know it may sound crazy, but I've been desperately clawing my way out from under this mountain of pebbles. 

Although I don't totally subscribe to what he says, my volume of e-mail is definitely really high.

I don't delete a lot of my work e-mail as I use it to search for information and decisions made.  I have over 12K e-mails just for this year alone, that I have kept.  I am still working out how to organize them all, as searching these can work, but it can get tricky to get the right search incantation.  I now have an Info inbox in which I place e-mails I have searched for and found the exact information I needed, a kind of history of successful searches.

I have sent over 14K e-mails since Oct 2005.  The last time I did the math, it was something like 12 e-mails/day 7 days/week, WOW!!!

After reading Is Email = Efail?, I decided to try and reduce the volume I send out by blogging more and see how that works out.

An article at Tools for Thought blog, titled Overflow: The Dangers of Excessive Focus, caught my interest. Here is the quote that got my attention

Focusing on a goal is only as worthwhile as the goal itself, and mindfulness requires that we periodically reexamine our goals, making sure that they’re still meaningful in light of what we’ve learned since we first defined them.

I find myself distracted quite a bit these days, doing this blog entry while in the middle of coding for example.  There are times where I find that the only solution is to go to the extreme of shutting everything else out.  I've found over time that this causes issues that I could never quite put my finger on.  Well, I think this article points out some of these.

The Mobile Media and eMbedded Developer Days (M3DD for short) 2009 conference is just around the corner now.

M3DD 2009 Conference Information

Last year's conference was sold out, so register today to secure your spot and benefit from early  bird pricing!

I read this totally awesome blog entry that I had to add to my list of clips. The blog entry talks about the different metaphors used to describe software engineering, and I just could not help but laugh, cry and agree with the following quote

"I think we're leaving one metaphor on the table which more accurately reflects the way software is built in the real world: flail around randomly and pray you succeed by force of pure dumb luck. Sometimes it even works. Not very often, but just enough to confuse people who should know better into thinking they're smart, when what they really were is lucky."

From Coding Horror, see Tending Your Software Garden.

Mercurial Tip: Checking in regularly with uncommitted changes in your clone

• 7 Version Control Systems Reviewed

• Subversion - Since my project was moved to Squawk @ java.net, was logical to use the same repository mechanism that was the most up to date
• Mercurial - I wanted a local and a server based repository tool, and had heard about git. But as was usual, I procrastinated for a while before taking the plunge, only to find out that our own Java organization (such as OpenJDK) was going with Mercurial, so I went with it. So far very happy with it.

• HOW TO USE MERCURIAL FOR LOCAL SOURCE CODE MANAGEMENT WITH A PUBLIC SUBVERSION SERVER

Here is an additional link I found that I thought should be part of this entry, just replace git with mercurial :)

• 3 Reasons to Switch to Git from Subversion

I've been having some issues with Subversion recently and decided to go out and find out what Subversion/svn clients I could find. Although I don't mind working with the command line once in a while, getting a nice GUI that allows me to manipulate my source code in a visual and logical way is much more what I want and need.

Here is a run-down of the clients I found, along with some pros and cons of each. The initial set of pros and cons are coming from minimal use, as I go through to see if I can find one to resolve a couple of my current issues. I will make an attempt to update the pros and cons as comments come in to this blog entry.

I could not find information in one single location that listed information on this topic, so I thought I would create my own.

• Cornerstone
  • Pros
    • Looks really nice
  • Cons
    • No way to edit the svn:externals property, which makes this tool a nogo for me, as I use externals quite a bit
    • Checking out a large workspace could stand to have a better progress showing. All I got was the usual spinning disc, but no indication of how it had gotten. I know that a percentage complete is hard to do, but at least show me how much data downloaded, which directories done so far, something ?
• iSVN
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • Does not seem to have any development since 2006 ?, so did not bother trying it out
• RapidSVN
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • No browser for folder structure on checkout, need to know what the path is you want. The same went for revision selection.
• SmartSVN
  • Pros
    • Works really well for most operations, this is the tool I've always recommended and use 90% of the time.
  • Cons
    • Could not find a way to recover a delete directory, without using the log trick and doing a search on the resulting log. This is what got me on this quest of looking for other options for an SVN client.
• svnX
  • Pros
  • Cons
    • UI is not very intuitive, setup a workspace in Working Copies window, setup a repository in Repositories window, then double clicked on respository
    • Seems to be very slow, first double click on our repository ran for a long time, over 15 minutes.
    • Switched from one view to another, and it seems that the reason for slow down is that it is doing an svn log, and svn info on the root level URL I gave it, and the result is not cached. So it needs to re-read this information all the time.
• Synchro SVN
  • Pros
    • UI seems ok
    • I like the repository explorer
    • Console is pretty good, gives me a glimpse into the commands used by the tool, so I can learn to use the command line better
  • Cons
    • Treats SVN externals the same as other properties, this is very limiting if you use externals
    • Although I like the repository explorer, its not where I spend most of my time, so having it so prominent seems a little weird to me
    • MDI interface I really dont like
• Versions
  • Pros
    • Nice UI
  • Cons
    • Cannot checkout a directory that defines externals into repositories that require different credentials
    • Treats svn:externals property the same as other properties also, which is bad.
• ZigVersion
  • Pros
    • Was nice, fast, and simple to use.
    • Used it a lot to deal with my migration of source from internal to open source, and was very handy for that.
  • Cons
    • Only supports one working copy for a given svn directory
• scplugin
  • Pros
  • Cons
• NetBeans
  • Pros
  • Cons
• Eclipse
  • Pros
  • Cons

• SmartSVN
• Eclipse
• svn command line client

Creator
• Creator discussion forums
• Creator official site
• JSF

Blogs
• Craig McClanahan
• James Gosling
• Tor Norbye

Cool Stuff
• Self

Blogroll
• Dave Johnson
• Lance Lavandowska
• Matt Raible

News
• CNN
• NY Times

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