Marla Parker's Weblog

Beginner NetBeans and Ruby
I have not done any serious programming for, oh, about 15 years. I miss it. So I decided to play around with NetBeans and see if I could learn Ruby. I picked Ruby because it seems quite popular and I really like the approach of Rails. (See I know all sorts of things about programming, I just haven't done any myself in forever.)

I'd used NetBeans before, but not recently. I knew that the new and wonderful NetBeans 6.0 came with Ruby support so that seemed like the perfect excuse for me to get started and work my way through some tutorials at least.

I have an old PowerBook G4. So I hit the big Download NetBeans IDE 6.0 button on the front page, picked the Ruby column and got netbeans-6.0-ruby-macosx.dmg, which installed perfectly as far as I could tell. It ran just fine. It even had a Ruby link in the Start page, so I must have done something right.

Or close to it. I cannot remember if the Hello World example in the Getting Started With Ruby and Rails tutorial is what refused to work for me or the Depot Application project that tries to get going if you click on that inviting Ruby link on the Start page, but anyway, I retreated to the Installing and Configuring Ruby Support page pointed to by the Getting Started page.

It says to download and install the version of NetBeans IDE 6.0 that contains Ruby. Ok already, I did that. Then it says if you don't have that, do all this other stuff. I thought I should be able to skip all that other stuff. So I went on to Using Database Servers With JRuby. I got MySQL all set up properly. Then the directions wandered off into the weeds as far as solving my basic problem of getting any Ruby to run in the IDE. Hmmm.

I went back and read that first section that I skipped because it was for IDE 6.0 installations that do not have Ruby support (but I've got it, don't I?). The key bit seems to be Step 5 on that page:

(Optional) Select the JRuby and Rails Distribution checkbox to download and install the JRuby software and the Ruby on Rails framework.

Note: You must have either Ruby or JRuby software installed on your system in order to use the Ruby and Rails distribution. If you do not have this software, you must either install this plugin, or download and install JRuby or Ruby software before working with Ruby projects in the IDE.

In the Plugin Manager, under the Installed tab, it says I have JRuby and Rails Distribution installed. But it is greyed out. Hmmm. Looks like that means I cannot uninstall it, which would be ok, but I'm not sure. And do I really have it installed? and if I do, would that mean that Ruby should run on my machine, at least within the IDE? (My questions to the users@ruby.netbeans.org list have not been answered, so I have no clue.) Is there some other step I need to take to get Ruby and Rails installed on my machine, independent of the IDE?

I figure there must be, since it is not working. So I go on a quest (which took maybe a year) to do that and finally succeed here: http://rubyosx.rubyforge.org/. Bless them.

At last I was able to run the little Depot sample application and it worked, and the Hello World worked also. I went on to other things feeling only slightly discouraged that after all that work, all I'd accomplished was to run the sample application!

The Power of One
My mother, born in Kenya, enthusiastically recommended that I read The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay. (The book has multiple covers, here is the one that matches the copy I read, and I think the best cover. One cover with a small boy and plane on it makes no sense to me at all.)

Wow, was Mom ever right! It is a wonderful book. Exquisite writing, exciting action, and yet another tale of growing up different, but what a tale! I never would have expected to enjoy a book so much that is largely about .....boxing!!?

I love books with characters that are complex and believable, especially when the author picks characters that represent people we are unable or unlikely to personally get to know in our day to day lives. This is such a book. I look forward to reading the sequel someday, even though it is something like 900 pages long and probably not as good. Courtenay has written a dozen or more books, and from the reviews on Amazon, some are not so great, but high praise seems to be: this one is as good as The Power of One.

I see there is a movie, but I'm not sure I want to see it. Would be difficult to make a good move out of such a rich book. Just too much to put in a movie. Plus, the apartheid violence is evil enough in the pages of a book - I really don't think I need to see any interpretation in video, thanks anyway.

FreshBrain activity ideas
I've been reading the FreshBrain blog every week or so and participating in the forums on freshbrain.org. I used to work for the Headbrain (I'm not making this up, that is his username on the site) and I'm very excited about what this new non-profit is trying to accomplish.

I am especially interested in participating in the Eco/Green part of this sprouting community, or maybe now they are calling it Eco/Green Science, even better! I hope I'll be able to contribute some activities that would be useful or accepted or whatever the word is for however the site will work. For example:

The fun with kml files that I blogged about. It was really easy to manually create a kml file that works with google maps or google earth and shows placemarks with pictures from family vacations, with links to more pictures. For the activity, it might make sense to do a really tiny example by hand, not necessarily to create it but just to look at it, and then say you can do this by hand or you can use this tool to do it faster.

Another direction to take is to try the kml file you create with the other tools: NASA WorldWind, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Adobe PhotoShop, etc.

My high-school freshman daughter went on a bike ride and then came home and used google map, I think, to make a map of where she went with annotations. It was not a kml file, though. I did not look at it closely enough to understand how it could be published, as that was an option.

A student posted a reference to the Cyber School Bus in the Fresh Brain forums, and wow, what a cool site that is! I wonder if some activities could be created around doing something on or with that site. Maybe not in eco/green, but whatever.

Those are the FreshBrain activity ideas that I wanted to list so I don't forget them.

Online Community Summit 2007
October 4-5, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Online Community Summit 2007 in Sonoma, CA. I love this meeting because it is small, exciting, and full of interesting learning. This year, I especially enjoyed talking with or listening to presentations by:

• Holly Pendleton of Catholic Health Initiatives, a $7B nonprofit corporation I'd never heard of, about her work with the internal online community of staff working at CHI hospitals and other healthcare facilities around the country.
• Peter Cohen of Amazon, who is passionate about the possibilities unleashed by their Mechanical Turk.
• James Nauta of the American Academy of Pediatrics, about the difficulty of creating online communities where practitioners or patients can share best practices with one another without running the risk of illegally "practicing" medicine over the wire, e.g. by implying a diagnosis or suggesting medication that turns out to be ill-advised in some specific case. What a difficult problem!
• Paul Resnick of the University of Michigan School of Information, whose research into community participation reminded me of a workshop I attended once where we played variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• Neal Sundaresan of eBay, who explained to Roger and me why snipers are actually healthy for a micro-community on eBay, e.g. the group of collectors who buy and sell antique golf clubs made of wood.

...and many more. Thanks to Josh Ledgar for his copious notes on the days of the event, and Bill Johnston's report back and this picture he posted to flickr:

The biggest piece of serendipity to grace the event for me was via the Ride Board, through which I met Deborah Grove. She alone was brave enough to accept my offer of a ride at oh-dark-thirty when I drove from Los Gatos to Sonoma in time for the pre-conference Online Communities for Social Good meeting Thursday morning at 8:30. (We stopped in Millbrae to pick up coffee and my former java.net colleague, Helen Chen, now with MATLAB Central.)

I say it was serendipity for me because Deborah started blogging about Green IT and consulting in that exciting field this year. She had so much interesting stuff to share, I of course cannot remember it all now, over a week later, but I have my homework cut out for me, starting with reading her blog.

fun with placemarks
I am really happy that the JUGs Community on java.net has made such great progress recently in creating their own worldwide JUGS Map using a kml file.

I followed their Check it out! link and quickly got sucked in to the world of kml and created this map:

View Larger Map

It works better if you view the larger map,and some of the placemarks are practically on top of each other if you are zoomed out to the whole world. Click on the placemark to see the info and picture - be sure to look at the ones in Norway. I created this quickly only because I had already spent an inordinate amount of time creating a more detailed one for my family pointing at more places and with links to the complete photo albums. This stuff is so easy my kids could do it (HINT HINT!!).

Update: What weirdness is this? I came back to this blog and found that the placemarks defined in this file were not showing. In fact, they don't show if I load the file manually in the location box on maps.google.com, either. So I copied the file from blogs.sun.com to my home server, and voila, it works again. The images referenced in the placemarks are still in blogs.sun.com/marla/resource, and they show fine. But if you load up http://blogs.sun.com/marla/resource/trips3a.kml in maps.google.com, it says "File not found at http://blogs.com/marla/reso...." I don't know where it is getting blogs.com from.

If anyone has a clue, I'd love to be enlightened. While you are at it, feel free to load the kml file into Google Earth and see if you can figure out why the double picture at Otter Point (in Maine) only shows one picture in Earth, though it reliably shows both in Maps.

Community Corner 2007
It is more than a month until JavaOne, so I'm happy that there are so many mini-talks proposed for the third java.net Community Corner on the wiki already. At the moment, there are ten or more talks from one very active project, but I've contacted that team and asked them to spread their talks out a bit across all three days, instead of having most of them on Wednesday, and maybe move a few talks into demos at the three pods in the Community Corner.

If you are a member of java.net, you can propose a mini-talk yourself, or volunteer to help staff the three demo pods in the Community Corner, all on the wiki. Just be sure to follow the directions, please!

Here is a picture from last year (courtesy of Aaron Houston, who send pictures out so conveniently that it is easier for me to borrow one of his than to find one elsewhere):

Come to JavaOne, and come meet other java.net members, project owners, community leaders, staff and volunteers, hang out and listen to the mini-talks.

What a change...
The big news today is of course a change but I'm personally more delighted with the internal change. Sun's senior management have been on the open source path for a long time, and lots of other staff throughout the company have been with them all the way. But a lot of other people, the majority at first, were too busy with their own jobs to pay attention to the early open source movement.

So when Danese Cooper, who often told me her goal at Sun was to get Java released as open source, would say something provocative, there really could be lively discussions that started with something like: what is she talking about? Open Source software is like Communism, isn't it? It was pretty entertaining.

Danese is long gone from Sun, but she is celebrating today with this timeline in her blog.

And wow, have times changed. Everyone, really everyone I know, within Sun gets it now. Schwartz and the rest of his team are effective communicators. No more fear and confusion, just a lot of positive energy and excitement.

Grabbing Opportunities
One of my interns, Sonya Barry, has started the assignment that I thought would be most interesting when I wrote the job description: to pick a java.net project of personal interest to her, try to join it and make a contribution, write about the experience, identify any obstacles along the way, and work with the infrastructure or community leaders teams, as appropriate, to remove the obstacles.

java.net is a site for collaboration, so we wanted to run an experiment to see just how easy or hard it is for a random developer to come and collaborate. The java.net Editors decided that Sonya's experience could best be shared through a new blog.

The project she is working on is Mifos and I am sooooo jealous. I've been a fan of MicroFinance since reading The Price of a Dream : The Story of the Grameen Bank, by David Bornstein many years ago. Mifos is in fact a project of the Grameen Technology Center. What could be more cool - microfinance plus open source?

extra intern candidates
I have filled both my intern reqs!

Thank You LinkedIn. This is the first time I've seriously used linkedin for anything other than keeping track of friends who switch companies and/or change their email addresses. I did not use my extended network on linkedin, though now that I think about it perhaps I should have... But what I did do produced 6-8 resumes, most of them good, and including the two interns that I have hired, both from Mills College. Did you know you can export your contacts list from linkedin? So that is what I did: exported my direct contacts and sent them all the same email via bcc. Ellen Spertus forwarded my mail to a grad student candidate, who has accepted the offer, and she in turn forwarded it to an undergrad student candidate, who accepted the offer for the undergrad intern job.

Two candidates that I did not get to interview in person, though I would have if things had spilled over into January, you might consider if you have a need for a part-time intern during school, full time during the summer.

They are Son Pham, a senior at SJSU graduating December 2006, with work experience at four different companies and a long list of language and technology skills; and Khanh Nguyen, a MS/CS student (May, 2007) also at SJSU, who has some open source experience.

My recruiter only sent me four resumes directly, but she was very helpful when it came to generating the offer and associated adminsitrivia. And she did indirectly generate a few resumes more from job boards where the req was posted at local universities. Overall I only got sixteen resumes, and screened maybe a dozen, but I'm very happy to have hired two.

netbeans 5.0 beta and java.net projects

Last night I finally downloaded netbeans 5.0 beta. It was pretty quick - I walked away and when I came back some 15-30 minutes later, it was done. I have a 586 Tadpole running JDS 2, so I'm always aprehensive about installing software, but netbeans installed perfectly easily and quickly.

I ran it, checked out a web page from http://stipends.dev.java.net, edited it, checked it in again. It all just worked!

Hiring update: Still looking for intern candidates. See 544778 (grad) and 544713 (undergrad) at Sun Jobs.

interns wanted
I missed a call this morning at 7:36am, and when I checked it was from Josie Martinez, the recruiter assigned to my intern reqs that were just posted on Friday. Wow! I'm going to enjoy working with this recruiter! I have too many things to do today at work, but happily all of them are good. But all of them take second place after recruiting. I've been at Sun for almost 20 years and I know the rule about a req: use it or lose it. And hiring the wrong person is far worse than not hiring at all. So when I have a req open, I spend time filling it, at the expense of everything else.

I'm looking for an undergrad and a grad student, CS majors or related, in the SF Bay area, because it is during the school year and I'd like to be able to meet face to face on a somewhat regular basis. The work is all on or related to www.java.net, so there is no need to do the work in a Sun office. But there is a need to have regular face to face meetings.

Sun's job posting has changed since I last posted a req. I liked it when I could pass around the url to an actual job. It seems no longer possible, but you can find the reqs 544778 (grad) and 544713 (undergrad) by filling out the search field at the bottom of this page: Search Jobs.

java.net Community Corner

I am really looking forward to JavaOne this year because of the way the community has come together to plan the java.net Community Corner on Mon/Tue/Wed in the Pavilion.

It is a 20x20 booth containing three pods and in the fourth corner, a little 10 seat presentation area where we will be running presentations every half-hour by members of the community!

You can see the schedule of mini-talks, and lower on the same wiki, the staffing schedule for the three pods: java.net in general, JDDAC, featuring Networked Bay Environmental Assessment and Monitoring Stations, and a third pod that will show off different communities at different times, including Global Education and Learning, Embedded Java, Java Tools, our newest community, Robotics, and others. These are four communities on java.net that are lead by non-Sun staff.

One reason for having this Community Corner outside of the larger Sun booth is so that non-Sun staff can volunteer to work in the booth. Other communities that are primarily Sun-lead, such as Java Desktop and the JDK community, will be represented at pods in the Sun booth. Not doubt they will stop by to hang out in the java.net Community Corner some of the time, too.

In between talks, in our mini-theater, we will have a slide show running so that the screen is never blank. We'll be adding pictures all the time, and we'd especially like to put names with faces of community leaders and project owners. See the Picture section of the wiki for information on how to upload your pictures to be considered for the slide show.

Hope to see you at JavaOne.

Discovering Make: technology on your time

I met with Dale Dougherty and a couple of the other cool folks from O'Reilly a few weeks ago, before ETech. Before the end of the meeting, Dale proudly handed me and my boss a copy of the new magazine Make: technology on your time. It is small, thick, colorful, with a busy cover. I tossed it in my bag and forgot about it.

I work from home. Last week my husband noticed the neglected magazine sitting in my home office and picked it up to browse. I kept working.

"What is this?" (I told him.)

Later: "This magazine is weird."

Later: "Where did you say you got this?"

Later: "This magazine is GREAT! It totally rocks!"

Later, after laughter: "I have to have this magazine. You have to get it for me! Listen to this..." (He summarized some articles, including the Urban Camouflage and the homebrew Apple II story.)

By now, I've more or less read (guiltily at first, and then gleefully) practically the entire magazine. I skipped the longer how-tos of the things I have no intention of doing. (We planned the route of our backyard monorail over dinner. Kids were disappointed that it cannot go up or down hills, but they like the idea of bridging the "ravine.")

Besides the many, many detailed bits of the magazine that I love, I mean specific content in this issue, the best thing is an overall feeling of wild optimism.

OK here is a short list of what I loved in this issue: Backyard Monorails, Fab Lab, Heirloom Technology, the kids' books recommended at the end of Heirloom Technology (I'm getting two from the library, two from Amazon), Gauss Rifle.

So I'll get Mike the magazine, and maybe someday he can contribute to a how-to build an owl box with video, a subset of the larger subject of nest cams.

Nest Cams?

We've had a live feed to an owl box for the past six years, with 4-5 baby owls hatching every year. This year, as an experiment, we let the squirrel who tried to move in last year stay. Results: we now have a squirrel cam instead of an owl cam. The baby squirrel was really tiny when we first noticed it. We are sort of surprised the owl did not chase the squirrel away. Not sure what will happen next year! I think we'll chase away the squirrel and see if the owls will return.

New Tadpole

As of the new year, I got a new laptop: a Tadpole Talin running JDS. Unfortunately it was running JDS 1, but it came with a DVD and instructions for installing JDS 2, which worked just fine in the few hours it said it should take. Did not require much attention from me, either.

I'd been using JDS 1 for some time, but had my old PC as dual boot. The only time I would boot Windows was when I wanted to be wireless or, even more rare, print something.

To my delight, after installing JDS 2 on my new Tadpole, wireless works! I should get some client software to tell me what wireless networks are available and stuff like that, but for now it seems to be good enough. I configured our home WAP to connect to the ethernet device address for eth1, which is easily accessible when I double-click on the second network icon on my screen. I have to su to root and type ifup eth1 to get the wireless working. I'd like to have it boot wired, when there is a wired network available, and try wireless after that. But not enough to figure it out so far. The wireless works wherever it can find a WAP to connect to that is open.

I wanted to switch to Firefox and Thunderbird, too, but conservatively chose to avoid changing too many variables at once. So now they are relegated to the world of round-to-its, as in "I'll get around to it eventually..."

Also not sure I will be able to make it print to my home printer, a Brother MFC-3420C. It eats expensive ink though, even if you never use it to actually print, so maybe I'll get a new printer that is known to work with JDS and has lower maintenance costs, hopefully.

I love being on linux.

Boy Takes Bath

Nicky turned 9 yesterday. Conversation this morning:

Me: Nicky, did you remember to take a bath?

N: (groans, and he has a cinnamon and sugar smile from breakfast that extends right across his cheeks)

M: Go look at yourself in the mirror.

N: I'll wash my face.

M: Take a bath! You're having a sleepover tonight and there wont be time for a bath after school and I don't want you to be stinky.

N: But Mom! I just took a bath recently!

M: When?

N: Like, 5 days ago!

M: Take a bath!

Of course he obeyed me. Next chapter could be titled, "Did you use soap?"