Wednesday November 21, 2007

No screenshot-of-the-week this time; I'm taking the week off since the kids are out of school for whole the week. I'm having a lot of fun!

Meanwhile, Cindy Church has been busy creating more demo videos on netbeans.tv: First, there's the classical weblog tutorial, and then there's showing how to write and run unit tests in the IDE (where I'm incidentally also using the Dark Pastels color theme I've discussed previously on this blog). We recently met and recorded more material, so there are more screencasts in the pipeline. P.S.: Both screencasts are also available in higher definition as downloadable Quicktime files - see the "QuickTime format of this screencast" hyperlinks near the bottom.

Ok, back to vacation!

Friday April 20, 2007

It's been a busy month, and it's only going to get busier. Here are some public speaking events that are coming up - I hope you can make it to some of them:

• I will be speaking at the SD Forum Ruby Conference this weekend, at the San Jose tech museum, with JRuby developer Nick Sieger
• I have a technical session coming up at JavaOne, TS-9972, along with Martin Krauskopf who is developing the Ruby debugger for NetBeans. It's Thursday afternoon the week of JavaOne.
• I will also be speaking at NetBeans Day in a Ruby session along with JRuby developers Tom Enebo and Charlie Nutter
• The JavaPosse also has several appearances - there's our BOF Tuesday night at 10pm, we'll be the "lunch entertainment" at NetBeans Day, and we're also planning to do a live episode the following week at the Silicon Valley JUG.
• Finally, I was recently interviewed on the SDN channel regarding the NetBeans Ruby support. You can find the episode here (you can also subscribe to the SDN via iTunes, it's a video podcast). My segment is about 16 minutes into it, following sections on NetBeans 6 by Tim Boudreau and a Matisse demo by Roman Strobl.

P.S. Another demo tutorial for the NetBeans Ruby on Rails support was just published - it's here. Along with Roman's demo, these are now shipping as sample applications, so you can download the applications themselves and play with the bits.

Sunday July 23, 2006

It's unbelievably hot where I live! 111 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade - that's 44 degrees Celsius. My thermometer said 115 F, and I can believe that since I live in a part of town that is hotter than downtown where the official temperature is taken.

This of course is not conducive to working! Unfortunately, there is nothing good on TV - and I've seen all the movies in the movie theaters that according to critics are worth seeing. Not a large percentage might I add.

At least we get cool nights in California, so I can spend the morning hours web surfing a bit until it gets unbearable. Oliver Widder has posted a cartoon related to coding styles (a frequent topic on my blog). A number of people have expressed an interested in this, so it will probably be the topic of an upcoming Java Posse episode.

P.S. My favorite drink to consume in the heat is the Mojito. It's made with ice, mint, rum, lime, and sugar. Unlike the original recipe (google it), I actually blend all the ingredients in a blender such that you get pureed mint leaves in the drink. This gives it a stronger mint flavor - which is a good thing!

Tuesday July 11, 2006

The problem with password entry pads is this:

Gee, do you think my password has any 2's in it? How about 9's?

I've had my digital token card for nearly ten years now. Amazingly, I've never had to change the battery. Anyway, while having token cards is an important part of security, this Slashdot story shows that even these schemes are becoming targets for phishing scams.

Monday June 26, 2006

Today is my 10 year anniversary at Sun Microsystems. When I joined June 26th 1996 I started working on Sun WorkShop, Sun's C, C++ and Fortran IDE. It's been IDEs ever since, most recently Creator and now, Semplice.

Here's to another exciting 10!

Tuesday June 13, 2006

I actually have pretty good reasons for my low blogging rate recently, although they're personal so I won't get into it here. But on top of everything, I've been moving to a new place, and with six years worth of accumulated stuff packing and cleaning was quite an effort. Not to mention all the small annoying things I have to deal with, like no internet service for a week (my brother who is visiting is going crazy! Especially when the cable TV hookup is going to take another full week, during the all-important soccer world cup!). Just yesterday I found out that the garbage company is refusing to establish service for me because they claim the previous tenant has not paid his bill. I still don't understand how that's my problem. Garbage company, indeed!

Here are some quickies you might find interesting.

• There is a "Developing Rich Web Applications Visually using JavaTM technology" class in San Francisco on June 20,21,22. This is being taught by the authors of the Creator Field Guide - Paul and Gail Anderson. There are just a few more seats left in this class. More information about this class can be found here.
• There's a webcast on Ajax with Java, DWR and NetBeans tomorrow (6/14) with Dave Johnson, CTO at eBusiness Applications. More information here.
• Oliver Widder did a small cartoon on the Java Posse hat mystery...

Tuesday April 18, 2006

You may be familiar with the Universal Law of Gravitation. And in schools and other auditorium settings, you may have observed the "Second Law Of Gravitation":

Students will gravitate towards the back of the class room. The seats in front fill up last.

Perhaps students are afraid to be picked out by the teacher to answer questions. Or perhaps they are afraid to be seen as eager to learn.

However, at some point in college I discovered that actually picking those undesirable seats up in front was a good idea. I've stuck by it ever since. In presentations at work I always beeline to the seats up in the front. Why? I discovered that lectures actually seemed more interesting that way. Perhaps there were fewer distractions between me and the instructor. Perhaps being up close let me see and hear everything clearly, and perhaps occasional eye contact with the instructor kept me from pulling out alternative reading material (e.g. computer books) if I got bored.

It turns out that if you sit in the center front, you will actually retain more of the material. Research shows that if people are placed randomly and then presented with information, people in the front, and people in the center, can recall a lot more of the presented information than listeners to the sides and back. And we're not talking 10% more. We're talking twice as much.

This has been called the "Attention Zone" by some, and the "Action Zone" by others. (Information retention is just one aspect we can measure; verbal interaction is another.) This has been studied in depth because it has implications for class room design and student seating assignments.

Taking a seat in the front is a simple tip you can use to start enjoying lectures more. And you'll probably learn more. It's not exactly one of my coding tips, but potentially much more useful.

Friday December 30, 2005

I've been on vacation this week - and I took last week off too. One of the things I did was to take my kids to a movie called Polar Express. We saw it last year - but this year it has been re-released in IMAX theaters in full 3D.

Lots of games claim to be in 3D - but what you're really seeing is a projection of 3D onto a 2D surface like your monitor. Cues like perspective and occlusion lets your brain figure out (through educated guessing) the spatial relationships. However, we can do better than that. If you look around, you can actually perceive depth around you. If you look with just one eye, the depth perception disappears (and you're back to the two dimensional view again where you guess things based on size, appearance, occlusion, etc.).

The trick to presenting a real 3D view, is to project two different images to the viewer - one for the left eye, and one for the right eye. Objects far away appear in the same place in the two pictures, but objects closer will appear in different places. A finger held right in front of your face obviously looks different from the left eye than from the right eye, even though the distant background stays roughly the same.

A number of things have been tried. One way is with color glasses - usually one red lens, and one blue lens (anaglyph stereo). The whole trick here is that the 3D image can be presented as a mixture of red and blue. Since these colors are complementary, the overlaid red and blue images blended together will be split apart again by the red and blue eyeglass lenses. (The red lens will see only the blue colored image, and vice versa). The problem with this approach is that you can only do "grayscale" images - the red and blue lenses obviously warp any attempts to do full color images. Here's an example of such an image. I created this with a raytracer I wrote ten years ago, back when I was really into graphics and real 3D in particular. It's a simple model of some screenshots from the product I was working on at the time (Sun's Workshop debugger) along with a 3D model of the signature green "Run" debugging arrow:

Another approach is to use 3D shutter glasses. Here you're using a special headset which very rapidly opens and closes the left and right eye lenses in succession. This is synchronized with a computer, which shows the left image followed by the right image. This allows full color 3D, since you're using time rather than color to do the image separation. I've never tried this technology so I don't know how well it works but I believe it's been used in games.

Another approach is the original, historical approach to viewing 3D images - "free" viewing. Here you simply show the two images, right next to each other. With a little training, it's easy to view this image and visually fuse the two together in your head (by changing your eye focus to be behind the screen) and suddenly see a 3D picture in the middle. Try it.

In the Polar Express IMAX version, however, they were using another technique which relies upon light polarization. The trick here is to use two movie projectors, projecting through perpendicular polarizing filters. Viewers then also view through glasses with perpendicular polarization lenses. The net result is that you get to view beautiful (full color, no time lapse) stereo images. I assume it was fairly easy for the creators of the Polar Express to create a 3D version - they already had the full 3D models; they "simply" had to render all the scenes over again - twice, one from each eye location. Hope they had good rendering hardware.

I had heard a lot about the polarization technique - but this was the first time I actually saw it. It looked fantastic - and of course the "screen resolution" in IMAX films is fabulous. But there is one remaining problem. I discovered that I tend to lean my head to one side or the other during a long (two hour) movie - and as soon as you do, you start seeing visual artifacts. Your head had better be completely aligned with the polarization axes! (And the images also were rendered assuming a horizontal pair of eyes).

All in all it was definitely the movie experience of the year - yes, there have been movies I enjoyed more, but the combination of cool technology and seeing a movie that the kids loved so much and really put them in the mood for Santa was ..... priceless.

(P.S. That's a good thing since the tickets were nearly twice what I'm used to - $15 for adults and $10 for kids!)

Thursday September 22, 2005

The morning commute. The San Francisco bay area has lots of radio stations to help you through it - provided of course you enjoy listening to commercials or "flipping stations". And despite the large number of software people in the area, the morning show topics are invariably the safe staple of morning shows anywhere: celebrity trash, traffic, and endless banter. Oh, and if there's ever a good segment, you can be sure it's right when you're about to lose reception as you're heading into a tunnel or the train is going underground.

One of my coworkers today asked me what the deal was with "podcasting". It is not named podcasting because people walk around recording their diaries on their iPods. Podcasts are basically radio programs. iTunes and your iPods have special support for podcasts, and treat them quite differently from regular music files. In particular, in any given program, it remembers where you left off. Therefore, if you come back to play the same program later (having played other music other podcasts in the meantime), it continues right where you left off. Podcasts are organized separately from other music, and is listed chronologically automatically. And today I discovered that if you hit pause, and later resume, it will back up a couple of seconds in the soundfile such that you don't miss a single word.

So, podcasting is really the ability to broadcast radio programs to pods - playing devices. This has some advantages. For example, since they don't rely on the airwaves for distribution, they don't have the same restrictions that radioprograms do, where the range is so limited they have to focus on topics of broad population interest. Instead, you can have highly specialized podcasts with listeners spread throughout the world. I've found it a great way to replace my constant radio frustration. Reception is perfect since you're not relying on an antenna. The topics are interesting since I picked them myself. And in addition to the special interest topics, I can get good radio programs like NPR's Nova and Jim Lehrer's Newshour.

Monday September 12, 2005

Check out these ads eventually rejected by "top business publications". clientjava.com claims it was Wall Street Journal - I have no inside information.

(There are more ads at the marketing site)

Friday September 09, 2005

PBS is making available online NerdTV: a series of hour-long programs where Cringely interviews various technology luminaries. The format is a lot like the Charlie Rose show. I just "watched" the first program this morning while sifting through my e-mail. It's with Andy Hertzfeld, of Apple++ fame. Episode #3 will be with Bill Joy; I'm especially looking forward to that one.

So I'm definitely bookmarking the URL.

Saturday July 30, 2005

I get screenshots every now and then in the mail, and frequently in bad formats, so perhaps the following is not known to all:

• Do NOT send BMP files! They are uncompressed. A simple screenshot, which should be a something like a 50k gif, will be a 5 megabyte attachment - 100 times larger than necessary! Unfortunately, BMP is what you get by default when you grab screenshots with Ctrl-Printscreen in Windows and paste it from the clipboard. TIFF, common on the Mac, suffers from a similar bloated file size problem since it too typically is not compressed.
• Do NOT use JPEG for screenshots! Unless all compression is turned off (which it never seems to be), JPEG is a spectacularly bad format for uniform color surfaces like those you get from application screenshots. JPEG is great for photos - much better than GIF or PNG. But for screenshots it introduces all kinds of ugly visual artifacts.

...and finally, a related issue: If you're going to show a scaled down version of a picture in a web page (e.g. a thumbnail), don't just use the width and height attributes on the image tag! Not only does that require the full image to be downloaded anyway, but worse yet, most browsers do a horrible job scaling pictures. Prescale the picture in an image editor instead.

Saturday May 21, 2005

Check out the image on the T-shirt on the right (I snagged it from Lukas' blog). The T-shirt is for their NetBeans 4.1 release party. Look closely at the logo - they've constructed "4.1" using little NetBeans cubes. But look closer - the "4" is an impossible geometric construction!

I've been reading an interesting book lately: Masters of Deception by Al Seckel. Well reading is the wrong term - it's really an art compilation with page upon page of reproductions of famous "deceptive" art by artists like Escher and many I had never heard of. I was amazed by the breadth of creativity in this area.

One really interesting image he included is a painting by Sandro Del-Prete. This image has the property that the interpretation of the contents really depends upon your experience (which is probably true for most pictures, but more so here). I've reproduced only a small fragment of it - click on the small image on the left to see the real image. Nearly all kids who see the picture see dolphins. Most adults see, well, something else... From the book:

This image was displayed in an illusion exhibit gallery at the Museum of Science in Boston. When asked if there was any controversy about displaying this image, the curators replied that once a group of nuns had objected, but had quickly silenced when told that one's perception is based upon past experience.

Monday March 28, 2005

My daughter was pretty disappointed this morning. She lost her front tooth, and put it in a glass by her bed last night. And this morning, the tooth fairy had apparently not stopped by - or perhaps she did, but after taking a look at the tooth decided she didn't want to trade.

The last couple of weeks have been really busy. On the home front, all three of my kids have been sick, which with all the implied sleepless nights has really taken its toll on me. But we've had fun too - on Sunday my youngest son took an unintentional swim in the Vaillancourt Fountain in San Francisco. Luckily there was a clothing store nearby so he didn't have to take the train home in soaking wet cloathes!

The main reason I've been busy however is work. Those of you using Creator today will be very happy to see the fruits of our labor in the next version.

This is my favorite part of the development process. Yes, you have more freedom in earlier stages too take all kinds of input and plan to do everyhing. Yes. Yes. Yes. And a pony too? Sure, no problem.

However, my favorite part is later in the cycle. All the major systems are getting done, they're getting integrated, they're working, and it's really exciting to see hard work paying off. And especially to actually start playing with what will be the end product.

My favorite quote from the Creator team is "It's all uphill from here!". I only vaguely remember the context, but I know it was Joe who said it, so perhaps he can blog about it. Anyway, the beauty of the quote was that it was said eloquently and in context such that it meant exactly the opposite of what it sounds like. But I think it's that inflection point in development I like best - acceleration. Or maybe even the Big Bang metaphor. We've had a couple of big bangs lately, with different people integrating big changes simultaneously, and seeing it all work together is inspiring.

I'm working from my garage office, but I have a baby monitor so I can hear the kids in the house. And they sound asleep. I'd better go play the Tooth Fairy. I told my daughter this morning the fairy is probably busy and can't stop by every house every night. But I'd better take care of it tonight. After all, if she's not writing software, how busy could she be?

Monday February 28, 2005

James Gosling's latest blog entry points to John Gilmore's fight for privacy, and in particular, airport rules. The requirement for all travellers to present IDs to fly helps security how exactly?

This story really struck a chord with me. A couple of months ago, I was going on a business trip from San Francisco airport. I had a million errands to get done before I left - so I brought my bills, envelopes and stamps to the airport. After checking in, I sat at the gate and filled out the payment slips. Then I figured I'd look for a mailbox. Surprise surprise - there are NO mailboxes ANYWHERE inside San Francisco airport. The only one is outside, on the curb! I thought this was unbelieavable - I have often mailed postcards to friends and family from airports while waiting for my flight. But when I talked to the security guards who were pointing me outside, they were telling me that this was for "security reasons".

That didn't make a lot of sense to me. I've brought the letters IN, THROUGH security. If there's a bomb, or anthrax or whatever in my letters, I've already got them with me, ready to take on board. How would having a mailbox for me to drop them in make for a security threat? What if I drop my letter in one of the thrashcans, or airport flower pots, instead?

Presented with this argument, the security guard just smiled and said knowingly "I wish I could tell you, sir, but this is classified and we don't want to give terrorists any ideas". So... I obviously don't have a mind made for terrorism because I can't figure it out.