Marla Parker's Weblog

Wonderland server on my laptop

With bits and pieces of time last week, and then a big chunk of my weekend, I managed to install the Wonderland server on my MacBook Pro laptop. I wrote these notes for myself as a way to reconstruct what the heck I'd done:

• Verified that I can run Wonderland as a client on my laptop.  Used the Wondertown server, which is part of the ISIG group.  It was not the first time I'd played with Wonderland.  I was not sure whether I had ever done it on this laptop before, but I must have because the minor glitch for Mac OS X was already moved aside per the instructions.
• Followed the instructions to download and install the Wonderland server.  But I overlooked the instructions to set sgs.host in my.run.properties, maybe on purpose because at that time I was only trying to set up the server to run on my machine for the benefit of a client running on the same machine.
• Ran the Wonderland server, which meant starting three different processes, and I think the order matters.
• Finally ran the Wonderland client, but this time by launching it from my local machine, not from a JNLP file on a (much less my) server.  I logged in as me, no password, and found myself stuck in an empty world with an irregular barren earth type landscape and blue sky.
• Encouraged by my minor success, I moved on to Installing Wonderland Web Administration.  Not because I wanted to serve up Wonderland to other machines from my laptop-as-a-server, but because I want to try out the building worlds and uploading art.
• The first step, download the server, I'd already done.  So far so good.  But then it sent me right back to that same page for the Wonderland.war file to download, one of two (with or without local art).  After a moment of déjà vu confusion, I discovered the next to last column, Web, just before the final column, Documentation, indeed contained the two .war files.  So I downloaded the smaller one.
• The next instruction was a very short section, merely: Install the .war file in your web container.  I know what a .war file is and what a web container is, but I've never installed one, I've never even installed an application server (except, I discovered, as a side effect of installing NetBeans).  I chose Glassfish over Tomcat or Jetty because the instructions were the shortest.
• Good choice, because I discovered I already had the latest release as part of a recent upgrade that I did of the full NetBeans release.  But the default domain is, not surprisingly, a developer domain.  So I had to create a cluster domain in order to be able to deploy a .war file.
• After several mistakes, I successfully created domain5, started it, and logged in to the web administration page for glassfish, and deployed the Wonderland.war.
• The next instructions I should edit slightly.  They say: "In your Wonderland server install directory, open the my.run.properties file and add two properties:" but there is no my.run.properties file in the server install directory, it is down two levels.  Did not take me that long to find it (in Contents/Resources), but I did have to search for it.
• Next I started the Wonderland server again.  Did not try using the jnlp to access the server that I had deployed before installing the .war file, but that is such a corner case I don't care if it would have worked or not.
• Next I went to my local machine:8080/Wonderland and sure enough, got the launch page that looks just like the one at Wondertown, only this one was running on my server.  I clicked Launch and was able to login just like I had done twice before, getting the same barren world as I did running the client directly on my laptop instead of via the jnlp file.  Phew!
• Then I thought: hmmm, would this work from my daughter's PC?  It was Saturday, she wasn't around, so....  but I failed.  It loaded the application but she (I as she) could never get the login to complete.  Turns out that was indeed because I had skipped the step above, setting sgs.host in my.run.properties.  This time it worked!

Now it is time to try to install the WonderlandWorldBuilder.

Wifi4CREA

I spend a few hours every two weeks doing some internal communications work for a volunteer group of Sun employees working with Engineers Without Borders here in the SF Bay area. I make an agenda and take copious minutes for our bi-weekly call, edit our wiki, and I talk with people internally about potential EWB projects that might dovetail nicely with actual work projects at Sun, such as engaging students in projects using Sun technology.

So far, we have exactly one official EWB project, which means we successfully submitted their sixteen page project proposal form (daunting at first, but worthwhile in the end) and won their approval. The project, Wifi4CREA, aims to bring cheaper, faster, and more reliable internet access to the CREA - Panama reseach station in the Cocobolo Nature Reserve. CREA = Conservation through Research Education and Action. The improved connection will serve the researchers, the school visits to the center and lastly the local village. One of the other volunteers, Marco, has pictures and information about his trip to Panama here on his blog.

Through our local EWB San Francisco Professional chapter, the wifi4crea project was selected to represent EWB on a really cool site I did not know about before: Global Giving, a million little earth-changing ideas. We have until November 21st to raise $2k via this site, so please contribute! No amount is too small nor too large. We will use the funds to purchase the hardware we will install on the next trip to Panama, possibly as soon as January.

Westmont 2

I visited Westmont High School today and helped the Intro Programming students set up a public_html/index.html file to use as a journal of their programming experiences. Their journals are "public" within the class, unlike the rest of their home directories which are set up to be private, visible only to the student and the teacher.

Some of them had already created applets, but they just loaded them into the browser directly from the file system. Now we will have them put applets into a subdir in public_html when they are ready to share them with the rest of the class.

Most important, to me, I showed them CodePoint 2008, the first annual Greenfoot Coding Contest, and urged them to enter. Some of them are under 16, some of them are over, so in theory, the class could win in TWO of the three categories for the contest! Hey, it is most certainly possible. They asked if I would enter myself, in the third category of everyone else who is not in school. I said yes of course! And I will, though since we sponsored the prizes I wont be able to win, and since I'm not a seriously experienced Greenfoot player yet I would not win in the general category anyway.

Here is my non-game scenario, in its current state.

Your browser is ignoring the <APPLET> tag!

---

Made with Greenfoot - www.greenfoot.org

In my copious spare time, I want to add some user controls to control the two booleans that I currently set manually in the code: bounce (makes the balls bounce off the edges of the world or else fly right through and come out on the same trajectory on the opposite side) and dirByColor (makes each of the seven colors start out with the same direction of movement, a direction that is unique to that color).

See if you can figure out how those variables are set in the above and below versions of the same scenario.

The giant dot is just dot #1 that I made large because I was experimenting with the img.scale method. Its size is meaningless and has no function at the moment. Scroll down to click on Run to see the dots go, click on Reset to restart them. Not very exciting but it is kinda pretty and it was fun to make it work.

Your browser is ignoring the <APPLET> tag!

---

Made with Greenfoot - www.greenfoot.org

Obviously this could be turned into a game - make a big dot eat the little ones; introduce a new creature that eats dots and let the user control it; give two players control of different dots or colors or etc.

Classroom not School Club, maybe...
My plans for the Play 2 Learn Computer Club are on hold. I met recently with a dear friend, Smadar Agmon, who has built up a substantial math tutoring business in Los Altos in recent years. My after school club idea is just a volunteer effort, but I figured it would be wise to run the idea by her.

Smadar and I worked together as programmers in the mid-80s at Daisy Systems, and now we only see each other once or twice a year. Going to her house feels very time-warpish!

She gave me this advice: take every single opportunity you get to talk to teachers.

So when Bruce Anderson, the AP/CS teacher at the local high school called me on Saturday (!) morning before school started on Monday, I talked to him. He'd just gotten back in town, he apologized for not responding to my email sooner and asked if I wanted to come over to talk? Heeding Smadar's advice, I popped over to the high school right after lunch.

I gave Bruce a little demo of greenfoot.org and showed him the greenfootgallery.org also. He had looked at the website but had not gotten around to the summer task of playing with it for real. He commented that it looks a lot like GridWorld, which he showed to me.

I said, "Oh! that is the thing that Cay Hosrtmann created, right? Do you use that in your AP CS class?"

Bruce replied yes, and they have to use it because it is the case study for the exam. He went on to lavish praise on the books that Cay Horstmann has written, saying they are so much easier for him to read than any of the other text books or programming books! Cay is also a fan of Greenfoot (see here) and Alice. Later, searching for more info on Gridworld, I found GridWorld in Greenfoot.

Bottom line, Bruce invited me to come spend one or two class sessions with his Intro Programming class (not the AP/CS class) to teach them Greenfoot. I'm going to send him my lesson plan to review, just as soon as I write it, or he may send me some suggestions, whichever one of us gets to it sooner!

Depending on how that goes, Bruce and I would like to come up with some dramatic creative compelling plan to increase the number of girls who take his classes. He says they always do very well, and they always expect to do poorly. He told me one year he had more girls than usual because a single girl persuaded all her friends to sign up! They all did great.

Young Developers and Play 2 Learn
I was already a fan of the New to Java Programming Center, but now Dana Nourie has made it even better by creating a page for Young Developers which features one of my favorite tools, Greenfoot.

In fact, I've been playing with Greenfoot myself, in hopes of learning to use it well enough to be able to teach middle schoolers how to use it, mostly for fun, with learning being a happy side effect, at an after school club I have proposed to the school that is closest to my house. (My son is horrified. I told him he does not have to admit to anyone that I'm his mom. He does not even have to come, but I bet he will.) The after school club is by no means certain yet -- the district loves the idea but has warned me: "Sometimes things in education move at a slower pace." So we'll see.

I have also played with Alice, another fun game-tool featured on the new page, but since I can only learn one thing a time....here is a picture of my Greenfoot scenario.

I may eventually turn this into a game, or others might, but for now, I just want to add controls so the user can set parameters that I'm setting right now in the code: bounce off the wall or go through and wrap around to the opposite side, continuing in the same direction; start with random orientation or start with color-coded orientation, so all the blue dots have exactly the same direction of motion at first anyway. Another visually fun thing was to make all the dots jump to the location of the mouse, if you mouse over the field of dots. I'm working on making things happen when the dots meet in space, like delete a dot or merge them (a bigger dot) or merge the colors or start playing follow-the-leader.

When I am happy enough with this to share it, I will post it to the Greenfoot Gallery along with the sources. If I had the experience or time right now to figure it out, I would replace the image above with a playable applet, but that will have to wait for a later post, and a better version of my consequences scenario, more worthy of posting live.

Update.......OK so now I've done the export, a month or something later, and duh, it is so drop dead easy! I should have made it live way back when I did this post.

MarkMail for java.net!

This year at JavaOne, Clark Richey met me in the java.net Community Corner to tell me about MarkMail, a free service for searching mailing list archives powered by MarkLogic Server, a product that they sell. I said sure, go for it, sounds interesting and the price is right. Clark handed the task off to Jason Hunter, and the first week in July, Jason wrote:

We just finished loading the java.net archives into MarkMail. You can now search (and analyze!) in a unified way the roughly one million emails gathered across the thousands of java.net lists over the years.

The traffic growth chart is really quite beautiful, trending up and to the right. You can see it here:

http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Anet.java

Just about half the java.net mails are auto-generated as a result of checkins or bugs. If we remove those, it's still beautiful as you can see below. People are writing more than 15,000 human-to-human emails every month on java.net!

Wow - that is cool, and you quickly get the feeling it is just the tip of the iceberg. He also included a link to show all the messages from sun.com, and various other cool things. We will create a page on java.net with a bunch of sample queries and instructions on how new active mailing lists on java.net can get added to the MarkMail archive.

Just as the java.net FishEye instance (for CVS and SVN separately) is provided for free by Atlassian and Contegix, now MarkMail for java.net is provided free by MarkLogic. If you figure out cool searches that a project or community on java.net might want to include on a home page, please let me know. (If you use del.icio.us, you can bookmark it for:marlacparker or for:java.net.)

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!

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.

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.