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Today

Pop-up papercasting

I think papercasting is amusing. A lot of my work at Sun is critical in nature, meaning I feel much of my added value comes during the review phase of various documents (whether that document is text or code). A week ago, I spent a morning working on paper while my car was being serviced; as a typical engineering interval, I thought my working notes might be of interest to someone.

Reading them over, I realized that the notes rely too much on my context, which papercasting wouldn't fix. Hence, a little browser scripting and pop-up papercasting becomes a way to fill in the background on what some of the tasks mean.

Move your cursor into each target to see additional information about that term.

JavaCity is a nice coffee shop near my car dealership in Santa Clara. They have a large awning that wraps their corner of the building, so one can working pleasantly outside (with a large café au lait).

Lamy makes the Safari pen, which I've been using for a few years now. But, like the car, my fountain pens suffered some neglect while we were constructing smf(5).

One of the aspects of interface stability within and on top of Solaris is that private interfaces can be used by other projects and products by following a specific process. This process is based around the construction of a document called an interface contract and is managed by the various architecture review committees (ARCs).

smf(5) detects changes to manifests using a hash of various filesystem metadata; it turns out that this hash is more strict than it needs to be, which makes repository portability prohibitively expensive. The hash can be simplified, while compatibility for old hash values is preserved.

Jonathan has been working over the past couple of years on improving cstyle, which checks a C source file for compliance with Sun's C style. It's implemented in Perl, and has some medium-complexity regular expressions, so I'm going over it carefully.

When I'm taking in one of the cars for service, I usually have time for lunch at Pizza Chicago, which has very good deep dish pizza.

[ T: papercast ]

(2005-05-11 00:36:30.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/sch/entry/pop_up_papercasting

Comments:

Neato-- but a minor usability problem is that on my laptop's 1024x768 screen, it wasn't obvious that the rollover items were being filled out below the "page" itself-- I simply couldn't fit enough on the screen. Perhaps you could use a div with absolute positioning and some CSS instead, to pop up the explanation nearer to the highlight?

Posted by Dan Price on May 11, 2005 at 03:37 AM PDT #

@Dan: I didn't want to popup over other targets, although I could reconsider. I think the next step would be to reduce and crop the image. (Actually, I think all of my photos are too big for 1024 × 768 or 800 × 600 systems.) — Stephen

Posted by Stephen on May 11, 2005 at 12:45 PM PDT #

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