Eric Arseneau's Weblog

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

I may be turning 42 years old shortly, but I can still feel like a kid.  My co-author got this really cool little toy and I wanted MINE.  Well mine arrived at the prompt 2:15 FedEx delivery.  Its small, cute, a toy and not very big deal, but it is still making me grin like an idiot :)

If I could find more "simple" things like this that made me smile this much, I could revert back to being a total kid :)

Update: It comes apart!!!  Oh what fun I can have now :)

I've been reading in various places about how the battery in my laptop and my cell phone should be maintained to maximize battery life.  Here is an extract from an Apple site (http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html)

Standard Maintenance
For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time. An ideal use would be a commuter who uses her MacBook Pro on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing. If on the other hand, you use a desktop computer at work, and save a notebook for infrequent travel, Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month. Need a reminder? Add an event to your desktop’s iCal.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to use my computer's at their full capacity.  This means that when I am at home, I leave my laptop plugged in 90% of the time.  This gives me a couple of things

• I get full CPU and IO power to have the computer service my every whim as quickly as it can.
• When I need to go mobile with my laptop, my battery is fully charged

If this goes against the recommended way to work with a laptop, WHY don't laptops come with utilities and ability to discharge the battery while they are plugged in?

If I had such a utility, and I knew I was going to be at my machine for the better part of the day, I could just start the utility and let it do its magic.  As it stands, I am stuck unplugging and using the machine in its less than optimal settings until the battery dies.  I don't like it, so someone please fix it.

Note, with the new 17" Apple Mac Book Pro, the battery lasts a long time.  Meaning I get to spend more time in this less than optimal state.  I understand that I can maximize my power savings settings to decrease the lifetime of the battery.  But then, what to do when I am on the road and want my power savings to maximize the lifetime of the battery. 

Being a Canadian, I have to say I LOVE Tim Hortons, Tim Bits anyone?

BUT, with a Starbucks on every corner and a supposed recession going on, this blew my mind

Tim Horton's a Canadian doughnut place that, ... [Tim Hortons]

Here is a rant, why doesn't every OS provide a software update service?

I may be the only one, but I doubt it, but the idea of having MANY small little services that are running to check for recent updates.  Even worse are the ones that check as I launch the app.  Has anyone told these people that when I want my document/App, I want it NOW.  If you go off and check stuff every time you launch, it seems absurd to me.

I have and am using various ones now, App Fresh and Version Tracker. These are cute and do mostly work, however I need to regularly run these apps to get my updates AND not all applications update the same way, so I have to manually have to do the upgrade anyway.

Now, provide a registration service on every OS. Each application must provide a URL to get access to information about latest releases.

Why is this not being done already? If it is, then why is it not on my OS of choice yet :(

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 :)

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.

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.

This is totally off topic for technical stuff, but I really had to share my thoughts on an event I attended today.

I attended the Change of Command Ceremony for the Marine All Wheather Fighter Attack Squadron 121/Green Knights. I am not a person who is really for war, however something came to light today that I really wanted to share. The key thought I had was that ware involves people, however obvious that may sound, until you really get close to some of these people and what their lives are like, I think it is very dificult to understand some of the implications.

I saw an impressive display of dedication and of course REALLY cool planes today. I had TWO F/A-18 Attack Hornets take off about two 400 feet away form you is quite an impressive display of power and NOISE. The traditions involved in this ceremony were very evident, but also seemed to make sense even for an outsider such as myself.

In all of the discussions I have seen from the two sides, those for and those against the war, I have yet to see anyone address the following facts and their importance:

1) The decision to go to war was made my a few key people. So arguing pros and cons and reasons for going to war should be had with these people, and not the people who are "doing" the war. You think it was a bad decision, blame President Bush, not the people who are doing the war.

2) The people doing the war are in a situation where their commander in chief, the President, has decided that we should go to war. These people are doing what they been commanded to do. Blaming them for the war just does not make any sense to me. Blaming the President, yes, the people doing there jobs, NO !!! These are people doing their best of a bad situation. I now believe that having a "Support our troups" sticker on my car is a very appropriate thing to do. I would go one step further and have an additional sticker that would indicate my feelings about the war itself. The two are totally distinct issues.

3) The people who go to war, have a family's at home. Family's that must persevere through a lot worry and support for their "warriors". Having their loved ones purposefully in harms way must take a very strong person to handle the worries every day. I am very impressed not just with the people doing the war, but the people back home who keep their lives and homes together for the eventual return of their loved ones. Providing support for the people back home I think is just as important as supporting the warriors. They may not be in harms way, but they have to deal with the implications of having their loved ones in harms way.

I hope this did not come out as a political discussion. It is the warriors and their family that I am writing about. The choice of going to war, right or wrong, is/was not my intent here.

Lets SUPPORT our TROUPS !!! Then figure out what we want to do with our thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of war.

Thank you for your patience in reading this.

Well, I have moved from the Sun Tools organization to SunLabs. I've gone from working on Tools to enable Enterprise developers to more easily build Web Applications to working on Java virtual machines for small devices. Way too cool.

It turns out that I ran into one of the founders of Smalltalk, Dan Ingalls, while out for a stroll on Sun campus. It was really cool since I have spent most of my life as a developer being a Smalltalk programmer. I then find out he now works for Sun. Well we had lunch a couple of times, our release of Creator 2 was coming to an end, and I realized that I could have some fun working with Dan.

Well, it HAS been and IS a LOT of fun. The project I am now co-Principal Investigator on is Squawk. It is a Java written in Java and is targeted for small devices without requiring an OS. Styled after Squeak.

(2006-01-31 20:09:45.0) Permalink

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