Eric Arseneau's Weblog

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

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

Wow, its been WAY too long since I last blogged. I used to have an alarm that would go off every week, but I just trained myself to ignore it as I was always too busy. Now, I've decided to change the alarm to once a month, lets see what happens.

There is too much really cool stuff that has gone on since I last posted, but I need to start somewhere. So here goes.

In the past few months, I became a board member of a local non-profit school based in San Diego California. The goals of the school are to teach Software Engineering to middle and high school kids. We do this through the use of Java and other interesting curriculum content. The school was founded by Vic Wintriss and is called Wintriss Technical Schools (http://www.wintrisstech.org). Its been a lot of fun and I have had many opportunities to look at software engineering from a different vantage point, from a kids perspective trying to do really cool stuff in today's day and age.

The school does its best to be flexible with its curriculum and its students. One of my students was getting a little bored with some of the programming we were doing, so we took a little side road. This side road turned out to be fun, in a couple of ours we were able to put together a stop motion movie using some pretty simple tools. It took us another couple of hours to get our video together to post on You Tube, you can see it at
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7QHU4TnOMY - Clay Time

Now to the point of this entry. Another way we are trying to get our students into what they are doing, is to give them the opportunity to make their work more visible and to add some pressure and value to what they are working on. To this end the school is putting on an autonomous robot competition. You will find a lot of information at
  http://www.iaroc.org

The competition is open to anyone who wants to sign up. The web site is primitive and needs work, but it does contain a significant amount of information about the competition. We have some teams from students of the school already signed up. Its been quite the experience for them as they get to work on putting logos togerhter, help with the planning, as well as work on their own robot. Being able to work with physical objects along with software is a very gratifying experience, even indirectly through working with a child.

The competition has three phases

• 1) Technical Presentation

  20 minutes presentation on the technical aspects of the chosen platform and algorithms.

• 2) Urban Challenge

  20 minutes to traverse a maze as fast as possible. Many tries allowed within time allocation. Intent is to have robot learn maze through its multiple tries. Winner is the robot with the fastest time through the maze. Maze is static.

• 3) Gold Rush Challenge

  All entries are placed into an arena with obstacles, the first robot to reach one of three beacons wins. Second place goes to second robot to another beacon, and so on. This challenge is intended to have the robot work through a more dynamic environment than the Urban Challenge.

There will be money and other prizes handed out to the top 3 in the following categories:

• Junior - Grade 8 and lower
• Senior - Grade 9-12
• Open - Any grade, any age

There is a $250.00 sign up fee, however with that you get a Sun SPOT developer kit (http://www.sunspotworld.com) and a Create from iRobot (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=305).

Come take a look and sign up, registration is open.

So, a few days ago I catching up on my RSS feeds and ran into the following article Sun Scrapping Mobile Java, Moving Devices to Standard Java
which then led me to Sun starts bidding adieu to mobile-specific Java. Both of these articles really surprised me, considering I have just recently become a Java ME licensee.

Upon reading these articles, I took it upon myself to e-mail people that work with James Gosling to find out what was going on. One of the cool perks of working at Sun is that I can do this kind of thing and get an actual response back :) Here is part of the response I got:

   If Java ME could talk, it would quote Mark Twain and say that "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

   We're working on clarifications for this dust up.

• JavaME is *not* dead!
• Sun: Plenty of Life Left In Java ME
• Plenty of Life in Java ME technology

One thing that did surprise me however, was that there was no direct mention that what is going on is not that Java ME is necessarily growing up, it is that the capabilities of devices using it today are growing. This does not mean that Java ME is dying, this means that Java ME is able to go down even lower into the device food chain. Remember that Java ME stands for Java Micro Edition. What has happened is that our view of what is Micro has changed from Mobile phones to smaller devices. What was once considered Micro is now capable of running Standard, and therefore Java SE makes good sense.

There will ALWAYS be a need for something smaller to be able to run on small things. The thing that is really cool in this space, is that as small things get to be more and more capable, this means that even smaller things are able to support more as well. This is where I see Java ME fitting in for a VERY long time, and where I plan to put all my effort into.

• By simplifying the development of wireless transducer applications, the Sun SPOT System from Sun Labs will help transform the potential of wireless sensors into real-world products.
• Sun SPOT: Simplified Development of Wireless Transducers Using Java™ Technology

This is a big milestone for us, and we believe is a first for a research Java VM. Here is a quote from the logo page which made me VERY happy: The self-certification notice indicates that your company's product(s), based on the Java technology, meet all compatibility requirements including complying with the corresponding API and Specification and passing the applicable test suites (if any) for each Java technology. This is our first step, as we will be moving forward with adding more platforms that Squawk is certified on.

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