Roumen's Weblog

Day Seven - Sessions, Sessions, Sessions (and Sessions)

As the title suggests, being at Java One means seeing lots of sessions. You cannot see everything and in my case it's mostly a fight between tools sessions and web tier sessions. Mostly, tools win for me, I'm visiting many NetBeans and Eclipse talks. I think we're both doing pretty well concerning the presentations, only my NetBeans colleagues are showing more demos. Actually I haven't seen any bigger Eclipse demo yet, which is a pity. I wonder why is that because as a developer I consider slide presentations as less entertaining than real demos, which can also show much more about how good the tools are. On the other hand I have to admit that Eclipse presentation are well prepared. Alltogether it's a good opportunity for me to learn what's new in the Java developer tools space.

The interesting thing is that on this Java One NetBeans and Eclipse are two projects having most of tools sessions. The other tool vendors such as Borland, BEA or Oracle have very few sessions. IntelliJ's IDEA is missing completely. Are the others giving up? Well, it's hard to fight competition which gives development tools away for free, isn't it?

I've enjoyed the NetBeans J2ME demos today, being able to debug your J2ME application inside your mobile phone via bluetooth is kind of cool. Just deploying an app via bluetooth is quite impressive. And the visual editor, well, it doesn't look like Java I know from the older times. I've learned today also a bit more about building applications above NetBeans platform. I have to try the newly introduced wizards in dev builds which help you with lots of the wiring. I have one idea for a little application I could build above the platform to try this out. I'll blog about it once I'll write it.

As I have found out, few more courageous NetBeans guys went to visit the Eclipse booth. Well, they got the T-shirts without having to collect the buttons. That's not fair! I had to walk all around to visit six other booths to get the Eclipse T-shirt! Anyway, so far there were no fights and no bruises, actually we're very friendly to each other. The competition will start again once we come back home. Ian, I am still looking forward to the photo you've said you'd make ;-)

Few photos from today...

Petr Jiricka's Flash Demo of EJB 3.0 with Glassfish

Petr Jiricka from the J2EE team has created a nice flash demo of upcoming EJB 3.0 support for next release of NetBeans (it kind of works already).


Well, Java EE development will be really simplified with usage of annotations.

An Interesting Idea

Somebody had this cool idea - I wish I remembered who was it to give credit - to combine planetnetbeans.org and planeteclipse.org. Well, I wonder where this could be hosted, probably neither at Sun nor at IBM. How about Javalobby? :-) What do you think, Rick?

Photos from Java One

A group of few bloggers has agreed to publish photos from Java One here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/javaone2005

Enjoy!

Feedback On the NetBeans Day

I'd be interested to hear some feedback on the NetBeans day and especially on demos I did with Honza. I'm on the learning curve with giving speeches and doing demos on public so I'd be glad to know what I need to improve. If you've visited NetBeans day, please spend a minute or two by letting me know what you think about it - I'd appreciate if you would share your thoughts by sending me a short e-mail. Thanks in advance!

Day Six - Java News From Java One

Java has grown again quite a bit since last year. I've watched a clip which summarized the biggest events from all the Java Ones in history and it is pretty impressive. As they say, Java is everywhere.

There's one thing that kept annoying me for a while, which was that some of the people think Java is suitable for every solution. I come from the scripting world, I've been using PHP daily for 5 years and I just could not get why all the Java people are obsessed by the idea of having Java as the best solution even for the smallest web applications. Don't get me wrong, I think that Java is just great but for some types of small applications which you hack in few hours it is just too big. It feels like using chainsaw to cut a piece of bread. Use the right tool for the right job, as Borland guys say.

What makes me happy is that it seems that some of the Java folks are getting it. Java is not the best language for everything and it needs to interoperate well with scripting languages. So I'm glad for projects like Coyote and hearing Graham Hamilton say he wants to make sure that Ruby runs well with the Java platform. Scripting is powerfull, look at all those VB folks. Yeah, I know what you think, they're not real programmers. But the language they're using allows them to program fast rich applications, no matter how lame they are. So I am glad to see interoperability of Java and scripting languages is an issue which will be adressed in future versions of Java.

Concerning the other news, J2EE 5 resonates the halls of Moscone center in a big way. Today we've presented our planned support for J2EE 5, pardon me, it's Java EE 5 now. A lot of companies are talking about it, Oracle has today emphasized their support in JDeveloper. Well, they're also opensourcing like crazy, it seems to be a new fashion. Sun has opensourced collaboration support on Sunday and announced we're continue with the opensourcing efforts. Actually it's quite a nice thing to see, companies seem to be fighting who will opensource more. I really wonder what Microsoft guys think about it.

I've been to the profiler presentation today as well, finally I know more about our profiler. It seems like NetBeans is first in providing a good solution for dynamic bytecode instrumentation type of profiler. This enables to profile an application without having to instrument all the code up-front and with very minimal degradation of performance. I think we should create a flash demo of our profiler, probably a lot of people do not have a clue how to profile an application as I did before seeing the demo.

The other technologies which are heard here at Java One are mainly frameworks like Struts, Spring and Hibernate. JSF is also being mentioned a lot often. The big corporations are coming with solutions for SOA... well a bit harder to understand for somebody for who designing of business processes is not a daily job.

Right now, I'm trying to download Eclipse 3.1 which was announced yesterday (finally it works after many timeouts). Notice that the Eclipse guys are started to create flash demos of features, too. As Rick Ross says, competition in the Java Tools market is amazing, companies like Sun and IBM are doing so much to give the best of their tools for free. Which makes me wonder when Microsoft will start to do this with their tools (I know they provide Web Matrix for free, but it would be interesting to see the whole portfolio of dev tools downloadable for free).

Alltogether, it's great to be here. If you've never been to Java One, I can only recommend it, it's worth visiting (I know, it's easy to say if you don't have to pay for it ;-)

And here are the photos...

Day Five - Java One Has Started

Java One has started, 10th year of Java was celebrated during keynotes with James Gosling, Jonathan Schwartz has shared with people his newest visions (gee, he is really inspired by electricity) and John Gage told everybody to socialize. Well, if I go drink beer now to a pub with the other people from Java One, I am doing the right thing.

The hall for general sessions is really huge and impressive. There are three huge plasma screens showing the presenter and several thousands of people fit the hall. There's so much to see, I am visiting mainly the tools sessions, I saw Eclipse and NetBeans presentations. I won't comment them here to avoid flaming so if you are interested in how they were, just ask me personally :-)

The parties are great, too, yesterday there was a SDN party with a lot of music and dancing. The best thing on this party was that they had Pilsner Urquell. Finally some good beer here in US. It's hard to wake up and go to the morning sessions, but anyway I guess it would be very tiring to attend sessions during the whole day.

I met in person some interesting people who I knew from before through e-mails, like Tor Norbye, the most excited developer of Creator I know. Then I met Tim Boudreau who has shown me on his computer NetBeans from year 1999, right before Sun bought the product. Wow, this was a geeky piece of software!

I also went to the Eclipse booth and I took their challenge to gather six buttons to get a free t-shirt. Unfortunately they had only XL size. It has a little "I use Eclipse" slogan in front and the list of their supporters on the back. So here is the answer to my quiz question, the guys with who I'm on the photo from last post are from Eclipse. On my right side stands Mike Milinkovich, the Executive director of Eclipse foundation. On my left side stands Ian Skerrett, the director of Eclipse's marketing. So no, it was not Tom and Jerry with me on this photo ;-)

Here are few photos from Monday:

Back to Java One... more tomorrow. Ciao.

A Little Quiz

Java One started today. I'll post more info tomorrow. Before that I have a little quiz for you - do you recognize who is with me on this a bit blurred photo?

Day Four - The NetBeans Day (continued)

Following the last post, here are some photos from the NetBeans day:



To find out more about event, you can visit following blogs:

• Overview from Gregg sporar
• Alexis about the Matisse demo
• David Lindt - great photos of the crowd
• Full photogallery from Javalobby

Some of the Prague people had concerns if I'm honest about the success of the show - just ask the others, you'll get the same answer. So this is not just my general positive approach to life, the day was just good.

I liked very much the demo of Matisse which was done by Romain Guy in cooperation with James Gosling. It looked absolutely cool, they created a form for UI of an mp3 player in Java which looked like one of those i-pods. The selection of album was done using looking glass, so it was fully three-dimensional. They've shown very nicely how Matisse helps developers create good looking GUIs - well I have to admit their form looked much better than our find dialog. On the other hand we had absolutely no code prepared so our demo was not so fancy but you could see how to use Matisse from scratch. Have you tried using it it already?

I'm going to Java One... bye for now.

Day Four - The NetBeans Day

The NetBeans day is over now. It was so different from last year. We had problems to place all the people into the place, actually during my session people were standing at the back because there were no seats left. Having too many people interested in NetBeans is a nice problems to have (well, not for those who are organizing the event). Thanks to all who came to see us and I hope that you've enjoyed the show.

Rick Ross' speech was very good, this guy is an excellent speaker. He was so enthusiastic about NetBeans that it almost looked like if we've paid him for the talk (I believe we did not). Jonathan Schwartz was good as well, this guy has a bit different kind of issues than we mortals do, but anyway I think his speech fitted to the rest of the session.

I came to the stage a while after Jonathan, well, I have to admit these two guys placed the bar very high. Anyway, my impression was that the audience was happy to see the features - no visionary talks, just the features they are coping with everyday. Our goal was to show hidden and less known features so we hope with Honza this was useful for the audience. During the second part we spoke about features of NetBeans 4.2 - there was an applause after showing Mattisse. I apologize for not being able to answer all the questions, but as I said, come to Java One and meet the developers working on Mattisse, they will answer all of these questions.

I know I had some small issues with the speech, I have to admit this is the first time I was doing a speech in front of such a huge audience. I'm interested in any kind of feedback so that I can do better next time. Some of the Americans said I was "awesome" but you know, they are Americans so they probably are exeggerating. But we got with Honza also quite some positive feedback from Czech people, which means it was probably really not so bad. Yes, I know there's room for improvement and I promis to work on myself.

I'll blog more about the NetBeans day tommorrow, I'm half dead at the moment. You guessed it, we went to celebrate the event. It was a big success, there's no doubt about it. Even the most pesimistic people said so.

One photo for this day (more will come tomorrow) - this is the Looking glass guy with me playing the Dukulele :-)

Day Two - Exploring San Francisco

I've started my Friday with a really nutritious American breakfast. Then I went to the hotel fitness to burn these calories (I suspect this breakfast gave me more energy than I could spend during the whole day). Actually the breakfast was so huge, that I went for lunch at 4:30 p.m. I took a beef bbq sandwitch, it was very good, but with 6 big slices of meat. Well, I'll have to go to fitness again, or I'll return fat to Czech republic.

I went to see the China town during the afternoon. An interesting thing about San Francisco is that each part of the city has a different and intensive smell. Some of them are actually quite nice, especially those with the smell of good food. Some of them are strange, which was the case with the China town. There's a lot of shops in there, selling eastern goods, it's very tourist-oriented. See some of the photos below.

I like on San Francisco the mix of cultures. You meet here all kinds of people and they seem to be living all together quite well. It's sad that you see so many homeless people around, there's a huge difference between those who have the money and those who don't. I felt so sorry for a guy with a sign "Homeless with AIDS, please help". Too bad you see lots of people like this in here. But it probably belongs to the city, which is so full of life and diversity.

Some of today's photos:

Interview With Trung

A very interesting interview with NetBeans chief architect Trung which also answers some of the frequently asked questions (like when will be the next release of NetBeans):

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/tran_qa.html

Yawn

Well, my body is confused. Another day of waking up early in the morning, today at 4:30 a.m. I envy the people who have no issues with the time shift whatsoever.

Anyway, there's one more news about NetBeans day, maybe you've read it elsewhere already. Jonathan Schwartz will have a short speech during NetBeans day keynotes. I hope he will not bring too much of press people with himself. On the other hand, it would be good for NetBeans if he did...

Day Three - Trip to a Lake Chabot

Today we made a nice trip to Lake Chabot. It's near Oakland and we've hiked around the lake. Well it was quite long, I am glad to be back at the hotel, because I had bad shoes (I should have expected it won't be a short walk, I always forget that in Czech Sun most IT people are really good sportsmen).

Anyway, during this trip I've gained a very important knowledge - what to do in case you meet a mountain lion. I would like to share this information with you. It didn't happen to us, although we were hoping to find one. What a pity.


Tomorrow is the big day. We'll do final preparations tonight... we have forbidden to drink more then 2 beers tonight, well, I'm on the limit already. Look forward to commentaries of the NetBeans day tomorrow.

New Code Completion in Latest Q-build

So it has happened and new code completion is in latest Q-build. You can download it from here (choose 4.1 / Q-Build). It was not a painless process, there were some new bugs introduced compared to the old version, but it works and you can try it out. The improvements are definitely worth it.

I have blogged about the improvements before and demoed some of them as well. I'll be showing new code completion with Honza on Sunday during NetBeans Day as well.

There's one change compared to the list of new features, the parameters for new code completion are opened by pressing Alt-P. The Alt-Space shorcut is used by system on many platforms. I find the change of displaying parameters useful, because in old code completion you didn't see parameter types which was a bit annoying.

Bugs to be submitted into Issuezilla against editor module, subcomponent code completion. Note that we've submitted as QE already quite a lot of bugs so it's a good idea to search if the issue you'll find was not reported already.

Today there will be a Java & Developer tools party in Menlo Park so you can look forward for more news from here.

Day Zero - They Say I Look Like Some US Singer

I have arrived to San Francisco today, around midnight of central European time. Although I was quite tired from the flight, I could not resist going out to see the city.

The first real contact with a San Francisco citizen was with a homeless guy. He was shouting on me: "Hey man! I saw you on television! I know you! You are famous!". I told him he was wrong, but he kept saying it. Then I remembered one visit to a club in Prague where I met Americans. They were like "Oh my god you are xxx" where xxx is the name of some famous US singer.

So I told the SF beggar politely that I'm just a normal person, but he didn't want to believe me. He tried to get some money from me, but he had no chance, I had no change. Anyway it was such a welcome to the city that I would perhaps give him some coins if I had.

If you know the name of the singer I look similar to, please write me who that is, I'm very curious.

Here are my first pictures:

Trams on a rope in hills

The bridge next to SF port

These street trams are so nice. It's amazing they are pulled just by a rope. People are holding themselves so that they do not fell out of the tram. And those hills, it's exactly like from all those movies I've seen with cars jumping down the hill.

I went to try US beer to compare it with Czech beer. I've tried it in a pub next to the port and asked the waiter to give me the best US beer they have. He chose a local brand (something with steam). It was not bad, but it was different. Much sweeter than Czech beer, well... Czech beer is Czech beer. They had Pilsen as well, btw.

As a dinner I chose one of the hamburgers to taste typical US food. To my surprise, it was delicious! It was so rich of ingrediences, like bacon, various types of cheese... and together it just tasted so great! Obviously, it was done from really good meat, not like those we have in Prague. So it's 1:1 Czechs vs. US concerning food and drinks.

I was pleasantly surprised by how nice all people were here to me. Whoever I met, independent if it was in the elevator or in the pub or on the street. This is almost a shock change, because in Czech republic people are rather closed and if they have to serve you, they're almost angry they have a customer. Here, people seem to value their work much more, even if it means selling hamburgers.

Well, this is what I've heard from the others, but it's the first time I really experience it. Interesting. I wonder when will I start to get sick of this "everyone being nice to everyone". After all, it is not completely honest, is it?

Day One - Jeff's Menlo Park Party

I've just returned from the party at Menlo Park. It was funny, well, at least the second part, which got a bit wild at the end. Here is another picture to my collection of photos with Sun directors and VPs:


But let's start at the beginning... I don't have a car here in US, so I went by train to Menlo Park. I decided to walk from the train station to Sun campus which was a big mistake. For me as a European walking to the end of the 30.000 people city seems to be quite reasonable, but in US this is a hell of a distance. So I managed to get to Sun after one and a half an of an hour of walking around streets full of cars.

As Rammstein sings: "We are living in America, America ist wunderbar". They were looking at me like if I was crazy - I was almost the only pedestrian next to the incredible amounts of cars in the streets. Sigh, why do all the people need so many cars? Why not to use a bike instead? I know it's comfortable, but on the other hand, sitting the whole time in a car is not the best thing for one's health. Enough of complaining about America.

Here are some photos from the party. Enjoy them. I cannot tell any details, people are already angry on me I'm blogging about everything. So I need to be careful, otherwise they may not invite me to the parties anymore!


I'm going to sleep. More about San Francisco and NetBeans happenings tomorrow.

On My Way to US

I'm flying to San Francisco today. Stay tuned for photos and commentaries from my trip to US in next days.

Things I Like on New CVS Support

I've been playing recently with the new CVS support, which will be available in next version of NetBeans. I like that:

1. There is an easy and straightforward checkout. I can run it from CVS | Checkout, no need to invoke a versioning manager, just fill in the repository, local directory, modules, branch and there it goes. I can leave the checkout on background and continue my work with the IDE.

2. Colors are used to visualize the file statuses - green if the file was modified and needs a commit. Red color shows me that there is a conflict with the file and I need to solve it. Blue is used to show that a file is new or modified in the repository.

3. CVS | Diff All Changes. In the old versioning I had to go to context menu to show diffs, but now I'm able to see diffs of all changed files, and I can easily browse them. I can also Commit All Changes. It seems to me that the new CVS support is designed so that features which I really need to use are accessible easily. Take a look into the new CVS menu and compare it with the original VCS one.

4. Next to global actions there are project-related actions. So I can commit all changes in a project on one click from menu.

5. It supports CVS over SSH.

6. When commiting multiple files, I can easily choose whether to commit them as text, binary or to exclude them from commit.

7. Easier working with branches. I can choose the project or directory I want to branch, execute branch command from menu and the branch is created. I find it practical that actions in the CVS menu are context sensitive.

8. Integration with project system. You can share the build.xml file with other people, so you can make changes to the project build script and share them through CVS. You can set easily which project files to ignore not to share unecessary project files. You can import the whole project into CVS repository from context menu.

9. Much more. I don't think the original VCS system was bad, I've been using it succesfully as well, but it was a bit too complex. I like that the new CVS support is light-weight and more use-case oriented.

Why don't we have such support for other versioning systems yet? :-) I know, I know, it's a lot of work. So I'm looking forward to next releases for such nice support for subversion and other versioning systems.

Please Bring a Carrot on Sunday

Today we were rehearsing with Honza demos for Sunday's NetBeans day. We are going to do all demos in two people, as you can see we've chosen quite an innovative approach towards presenting NetBeans.

I have asked my good friend for an advice for presenting in front of a large audience. The main advice was to pretend that all people you are talking to are rabbits. The point is that nobody's afraid of talking to rabbits, so this works well against nervosity. So if you are coming on Sunday, please bring a carrot to support me :-)

New Cover of IDE Field Guide

As you can see, the assimilation process is continuing - it started by the splash screen, then the desktop icon and menu icon and now the Borg assimilated the IDE Field Guide cover. Buy our book. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.



Apologies to those who do not know the Borg civilization. You can find more info here.

Creating Good Flash Demos, Part 2

Last time I wrote about software which you can use for screencasting. No matter how good the software is, without proper preparation your demos will look crappy. I have for you some tips you could consider before creating the demo.

If you want your demo to be successfull, choose a set of features people are really interested in. From my experience these are mostly features a lot of people are using and are somehow an issue. For example, GUI building in Java has always been a challenge. When I've published the demo of our new GUI builder which makes building GUIs easier, the interest was enormous. Another example are features your product was known to be not so good in but it's changing recently. People using your product will be very interested in such features.

Keep it simple. It's better to show fewer code so that people can understand it easily. Sometimes less can be more. In my experience the ideal length for a demo is 3-5 minutes. While this seems to be a very short time, longer demos are not good, because your viewers loose their attention and eventually become bored.

Make it dynamic. There has to be something happening all the time and unless you want to give the viewer time to absorb what he just learned, don't waste the time. Whenever there are some dead moments, this may mean loosing your viewer's attention and eventually interest in the demo at all. You don't want the viewer to switch to the other window.

If possible, use voice. There can be many reasons why not to use voice, starting by your level or English, that's it's more difficult or just because the software you are using doesn't allow it. If you want to make something really cool, speak to your users. They will be happy they don't have to read the text and can just sit and enjoy the demo. By absorbing the information both visually and acousticly it's much easier to learn anything and it's much more enjoyable. Speech makes your demos more human, you will create a connection with the person on the other side, while text is still impersonal. There are many reasons why to use speech so use it if you can. If there's any tip for creating good demos I would like to emphasize, it's this one.

Create a script. Before actually recording the demo, it's a good idea to jot down what you will demonstrate. Launching the IDE and clicking to show something doesn't work. If you are including speech, it's a good idea to write the speaking points down. Ideally if you have time, write the whole speech down. Then record the demo in two steps - at first the video part and then the audio part. Both audio and video can be cut, so it's relatively easy to synchronize them.

Decide which recording method to choose. Most softwares offer two possibilities - either to make screenshots of individual screens and combine them into a stream or to capture the demo as avi video (this video is embedded in flash afterwards). Depending what you are demoing, choose when to use either of these methods. The first one is more space efficient, but will not capture every moment. So if you are doing a lot of drag & drop or the screen is changing a lot, the second method is better. However count with the fact that avi video cannot be cut easily.

Post-process the demo. You'll use this tip after the demo is recorded, but it's good to count with it from the beginning. Most screencasting softwares offer you the possibility to cut dead scenes or to speed up or slow down anything. You can also add text labels and bubbles explaining what is going on.

That's all for today, next time I'll write about how to actually create the demo and provide tips how to keep the demo size small, what to do during recording and what not to do, etc.

Preparing for the Trip to US

It's getting close - I'm flying next Wednesday. I'm so excited, this is the first time I'll fly to US. Yesterday I bought the Lonely Planet guide for San Francisco, well, it was not cheap but I've browsed it and it is very good. So the guide will help me to speed up more than 15 hours on the airplane.

The culmination of the trip will be the NetBeans day on 26th. It feels great to have the opportunity to show NetBeans demos there, I'll be on the J2SE track. Also, it feels quite responsible, being on the same stage as James Gosling and people of this kind. This week we had a meeting about the preparations and it is going to be huge.

Next to my speech, I'll be there to blog. I'll take my camera and shoot like crazy to share the happenings. I'm there for 11 days and I will also visit Menlo Park and we want to visit some other places as well. I'm also wondering how the gay pride will look like, although I won't see much of it, it's on the same day as the NetBeans day. But it probably will not end with dusk so there'll be what to see.

This is the first time I'll also meet Jeff Jackson, who is the boss of my boss of my boss :-) That's the guy who's in charge for the whole Java and developer tools part of Sun. I've heard that there is some special huge office with 12 Creator developers on one place and it's interesting to see how they work together (I cannot imagine how this works, I need relative silence to be able to work efficiently). Also, I'm invited to see the Standford University, the university where Sun originates from.

So many things to see...

Expressing Oneself and Other Random Thoughts

Today I went for a coffee with my old Dutch friend. It turn out to be a very pleasant evening. Sometimes our discussions go a bit wild and we start to discuss metaphysical things, like "Who am I?", "What the hell am I doing here?", "Is there any 'I' anyway?", "Is it all just an illusion?" and stuff. Mostly we don't find any answers to such questions, but at least we have a good feeling about having very spiritual conversations.

Among other things we've opened the idea of expressing ourselves. We all humans have this need to do something to show who we are (well, most do) - painters paint, developers write code, poets write poems, etc. For some reason we need to share this with other people. Which brings me to my popular topic - blogging. Why am I blogging? Why so many other people are doing it? Is it because we do not have enough friends? Or is it because something terrible happened in our youth and we are still not able to recover?

Well, thinking more about blogging, it's just another way of expressing yourself. But what's driving it? It seems to be a strong need for conversation. I have many friends and don't suffer from being asocial, but still I want to write to other people all these ideas. Thanks to the internet I get the opportunity to share my ideas and experiences with thousands of people. So it seems to me that the whole thing about blogging comes from our need to talk and the internet just gives us a very unique possibility to reach people independently on distance.

It is always exciting to read comments to my blog and answer them. Another interesting thing is to see the reactions in other blogs, it's also a way how the discussion goes. One guy writes a message and another guy responds. By that you can create even chain reactions. Actually this way the Internet is creating an image of reality and individuals write their updates on the reality. The system reacts on lies. If you write something terribly wrong, it is very soon corrected by the others. That's why companies have to be honest on the internet, if they claim about themselves they have the best product people will definitely react very soon by saying their product sucks.

So, by blogging and other discussions on the Internet we are creating a huge knowledge base. Anybody can search it using powerful search engines like google. It's not very well organized, actually it's completely disorganized and may be out of date. But still, if you are interested in almost any topic, you'll probably find the answer. As I sometimes say, if it's not on Google, it doesn't exists.

My concern is: what will this thing called the internet develop into? In Holland, 70% of teenagers have their personal page and are using the internet as a huge part of their social life. Instead of going to a disco or pub, they chat on the Internet. Although the interface is still very unmature (you can't touch it, smell it and taste it), it replaces many of their normal human interactions. So many people on the net, so many discussions going on - so incredible huge amounts of information shared.

If you take a scientific look at our brains, they're just billions of neurons interconnected in a huge network. Now how does that differ from the Internet? My sci-fi question is: what does it take for the system to become alive? Will humans be needed to operate it or once we develop tools which will enable automatic organisation of information inside the system create a real artificial intelligence? Or is there something else necessary, some kind of energy which is unique to live beings and thus no technology can't create anything living? What is behind this world? Why are we here? Is there any meaning of life?

That's it for my Friday midnight's stream of conciousness. I'll try to come back to earth with next posts :-)

Creating Good Flash Demos, Part 1

Ok, I'm getting tired of answering questions like "how did you create the flash demo I saw on the web". I'll try to summarize my experiences with creating flash demos (aka screencasting) in this series of articles. I hope you find it useful and I'm looking forward to any additional insights you may have.

Let me start by the most important thing - software. I did my little research and found out there are two really good softwares which are useful to capture features: Wink and Macromedia Captivate.

Next to these, there is also Camtasia Studio, but I didn't like this software that much as the first two. There is plenty of other small screencasting softwares but mostly from what I've read they just didn't serve the purpose of creating flash demos of features very well.

The Solaris guys are preparing an interesting completely opensource screencasting solution. Unfortunately it doesn't seem enough user-friendly as the first two mentioned softwares at the moment (you can cut there easily, shrink swf size, add bubbles with text, etc.) but I'm looking forward to see the progress they'll make in the future. There also exist other softwares to convert VNC streams to Flash, but these suffer from similar issues like the Solaris toolchain.

You may also find a software called Robodemo, but that's just an old version of Captivate. That's basicly it about the choices, if you have any other interesting tip, please let me know.

I'll compare now my top two choices - Wink and Captivate, I've been using both for quite a while:

Wink - advantages

• It's free even for commercial use
• Works both on Windows and Linux
• Produces quite small swf files
• You can add text bubbles and post-process the demo in other ways
• Easy to use

Wink - disadvantages

• It cannot incorporate sound (in current version, should be fixed in next major release)
• Not as powerfull in demo post-processing as Captivate
• Flash files produced by wink cannot be processed by flash editors, there are too many objects
• Can't handle well bigger demos

Captivate - advantages

• Best screen capturing tool I've found so far :-)
• Very good sound integration
• Very good tools for demo post-processing
• Integrated well with Macromedia Flash editor
• Supports two modes - recording of screens and recording of videos
• Very small swf file sizes

Captivate - disadvantage

• It costs 389 Euros - yes, I do have a valid license (answer for managers from Sun ;-)
• It's a bit more complex to use than Wink
• Works for Windows only

Which one to use? The choice is quite easy. If you do not want to pay and don't want to use speech, Wink is a good choice. However if you can afford to buy the license, Captivate is my number one. Your platform can also make a decision for you as well. Generally Wink is good for small demos, but if you want to make something bigger and really really good, Wink won't scale.

That's all for today, next time I will write how to actually create the demos. I'll also give some tips how to get best results when showing software features - to make people watching your flash demos excited. See ya.

New NetBeans Icon - Borgs Are Coming

NetBeans has a new desktop icon:



I can't help myself but I like the older one more. Maybe it's a matter of getting used to it. Concerning icons and stuff, everyone's suddenly a UI expert... It really looks like the Star Trek Borg cube.

First Q-Build of NetBeans.next

... was surprisingly not promoted. This was a long day today, I've submitted 10 bugs. And in meanwhile, I'm preparing the demos for the NetBeans day. I've just counted it and in the first demo we'll show 15 less known but useful features of NetBeans 4.1 editor, well, maybe known by the NB enthusiasts but hidden for the average Joe developers. Maybe we'll surprise the enthusiasts, too.

Quick Tip #7 - Macros in Editor

As promised, today's tip is about macros. What are they? These are actions which are recorded according to what you do in the editor. Depending how good you are, you can create even such action such as surround with try-catch, comment a piece of code, etc.

You can record the macros by pressing the red button in editor toolbar, perform the actions and then end recording by pressing the grey square next to the button. Then you name the macro and assign a shorcut to it. To execute the macro, you just need to press the shortcut you've assigned.

Michel Graciano from Brazil has prepared some great macros and you can download them here. Similarly to abbreviations the content of the zip should be placed into the directory ~/.netbeans/4.1/config/Editors/text/x-java. Make sure to backup all XML files this may replace. The abbreviations in abbreviations.xml are necessary to execute the macros (they contain few more than last time), the keybindings.xml file sets the shortcuts. Macros.xml file contains macros recorded by Michel.

Here are the available macros:

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl-J I	Surround with if()
Ctrl-J T	Surround with try-catch
Ctrl-J L	Add debug code
Ctrl-N P	Create property
Ctrl-J {	Add a block
Ctrl-J H	Comment code
Ctrl-N F	Define identifier by previous class
Ctrl-N S	Delete two words
Ctrl-J C	Trim
Alt-U Q	Toggle case of identifier
Ctrl-J [	Format code
Ctrl-J D	Debug variable
Ctrl-J F	Add editor fold

Most of these macros require to have selected a piece of code in the clipboard. You may not use all of these, but they're a good source of inspiration for creating your own macros. Actually this way you can add simple features to your IDE. How cool is that? :-)

The First Open in Open Solaris is in Czech!

Wow, I wonder if this is intentional but the first Open is "otevreny" which means open in Czech:


I really wonder if this has any connection with NetBeans whose core developers are in Czech republic. Or just a coincidence?

I'm Downloading Full Sources of OpenSolaris

So it finally happened - the sources are there. I'm going to take a look at them. How exciting!

Update: So I did some search for interesting words. Nasty me. I like line 7691 of /usr/src/uts/common/dtrace/dtrace.c.