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.

Tuesday January 25, 2005

There's some exciting Solaris news today -- the first part of Solaris has been open sourced (with the rest on the way - and also, a record 1,600 Sun patents have been released.)

I'm a big Solaris fan - I used SunOS in college, and since then I've been at Sun for nine years where Solaris has been my primary development platform. The first five years at Sun I worked on the Solaris development tools, mostly the debugger, so I really got to get close to the metal. I therefore found Bryan Cantrill's blog entry on the just released Solaris DTrace code really interesting -- I love source code snippets with juicy comments!

Now that I work on Creator, the platform focus is different since we're trying to address other platforms like Windows, Linux and OSX. Most of my coworkers work on those platforms, so I'm the primary "Solaris advocate" in our group. I work at home three days a week (let's not count the number of nights...) and it's all on Solaris. On my two days going down to the Sun campus I work on OSX with my Apple laptop. I really like OSX since I can find a terminal, and treat it like Unix with a pretty GUI. But I sure miss Solaris facilities like the p-tools (pgrep, pkill, ptree, ...).

Thursday December 16, 2004

I just saw this on webstandards: You can install the CSS 2.1 spec on your ipod! Good for offline reading while stuck in line at DMV or elsewhere...

I recently argued why learning CSS is going to be worth your while when working with Creator and JavaServer Faces in general.

I was just about to install it when I realized I don't really need to; in implementing the designer I've actually memorized most of the spec! It's the first item in my Firefox bookmarks list.

Sunday November 21, 2004

I just got back from a really nice week in Prague. I got to see some demos of upcoming NetBeans features. Unbelievably cool. The form editor has a new design mode which is just going to, well, kick ass. No more gridbag, dude. The new mobile stuff is also fantastic. NetBeans is really getting fabulous.

What's the deal with airports and power sockets? I really wanted to connect my laptop while waiting for my next flight (and the battery was flat) yet I couldn't find a place to plug in anywhere in Frankfurt airport. I had the same experience last year at Heathrow. That time I finally found one in the middle of nowhere, but as soon as I had gotten comfortable security came by and told me to leave because there's some kind of "danger" with having people connect their own hardware to the airport power net. In Frankfurt I walked around for 45 minutes before locating a place to plug in -- at the airport McDonalds. So I was lovin' it...

Sunday November 07, 2004

The source code for J2SE 5.0 has been made available. Slashdot covered the event, and one of the posts showed that the community has already poured over the source code in an attempt to clean up its quality...

I immediately started a search command on the current Creator source to see if we have any juicy comments I can share with you.... But we don't. I tried successively less "offensive" words, and the only hits I got were for "stupid" and "lame"...

xxx/Utilities.java:     *  is really lame. The problem is that at the top level, I need
xxx/DnDSupport.java:   // insertTab is too stupid to notice that inserting a tab at the

This brought back some good (?) memories though. I used to work on Sun WorkShop, the C/C++ IDE for Solaris from Sun, and one of the really nice things about the IDE was that it integrated (not emulated) the XEmacs and vi editors. So we shipped XEmacs with the product. Well, XEmacs came with a bunch of supporting packages, such as Zippy -- which had a large database of insults copackaged with it, ready to be automatically attached as e-mail signatures etc. People actually complained about this, so we removed some of these, and we added a script to the emacs source tree integration process which scanned for a list of "offensive words" and yanked elisp packages containing them!

Friday October 15, 2004

I finally fixed my home wireless network. I work at home three days a week, and my home office is in the garage. The problem is the wireless router's signal only barely reaches into the house -- so when I try to sit on the couch with my laptop I can't actually be online. And thanks to Murphy's Law, if I'm not online I'll definitely run into some issue where I need online access - either to access a CVS repository to look at a file history, or perhaps googling some API.

So I finally went out and bought a wireless network Range Extender. You just place it near the edge of your current reception area, and it talks to your existing router, duplicates the id etc. and effectively extends the range of the network from the new location. Sounds easy in theory -- but it took three calls to tech support, one lasting nearly an hour as we kept resetting the router and range extenders. There were lots of snags - positioning of the devices during configuration, upgrading firmware - and then the biggest problem: some problem with the device they apparently know about (but didn't realize while helping me) where the "valid link" light doesn't turn on when it in fact -is- working...

Oh well, I'm happily blogging this from my couch!! And I'm noticing several Sun bloggers are posting many good political blog entries... Alec Muffett, Tim Bray, Geoff Arnold and others.

Tuesday September 21, 2004

I had a really interesting experience in the hotel this week: I got in the Elevator and there were no buttons anywhere to select my destination floor! Turns out I just followed people into the elevator; I shouldn't have done that.

The floor selector is OUTSIDE the elevator, on every floor. When you get to the elevator entrance, press the floor you want to go to. It then tells you which of the three elevator doors to use. You get in, and the elevator will go to the desired floors.

My first reaction was that this was a really bad user design; I have been trained to enter an elevator and look for the console to make sure my floor's button is selected - so this was discomforting.

But on the second trip a little while later I realized that this is a superior design! Provided of course people can get used to it - which may take a while.

Why is it superior? Because it allows the elevator controller to schedule the three elevators more optimally. That's because as soon as you arrive to the console on your floor, you tell it EXACTLY where you want to go, not just up or down. This extra information lets the elevator scheduler make better decisions since it doesn't have to wait until you get into the elevator to find out exactly where you want to go.

For example, let's say three different people arrive at the elevator on the eight floor. If they all press the down button in a regular elevator, one elevator will be dispatched to the eight floor. However, in this new system, if the three people are going to different floors and press say 1, 3 and 5, then all three elevators will be dispatched to the eight floor. And so on. I've used the elevator for a couple of days now and have totally gotten used to it and I definitely prefer it.

Monday September 20, 2004

I'm spending this week in Paris and Toulouse in France attending various meetings with customers and potential customers for Creator. We'll be doing various demos and listening to suggestions and requirements for upcoming releases.

I was hoping to work on the plane from San Francisco, but couldn't; I've finally discovered a disadvantage to my nice 17 inch Apple laptop: I can't open the screen on a plane when the guy in front of me reclines the seat as far back as it will go... And thanks to Murphy's Law of course the person in front of me went to sleep a half hour after the flight started and woke up a half hour before we landed... I saw other people with small laptops happily work through the night.... Grrrr.... On the other hand, I was able to read a book on JavaScript so I did get something useful out of those hours.

And I also did get to do some coding yesterday. After spending all morning in the beautiful Versailles, I needed to rest my legs so I did some coding in the hotel room. Rather than fix bugs I worked on a new feature. I wish I could tell you all about it, but... it's top secret!

Tuesday August 17, 2004

Seriously. Who uses the caps-lock key?

Other than people composing Nigerian Scam (419) e-mails - you know the type, "DEAR SIR... CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL... typo typo typo."

I got used to Sun keyboards that put the control key in the location where capslock keys are found on PC keyboards. When I used Linux and Solaris x86 I was able to use xmodmap to remap the caps lock key to act as a control key - but of course anytime I try to use somebody else's computer, such as at an internet cafe when travelling, or worse yet, when doing a demo on fixed hardware somewhere - I keep hitting caps lock and getting myself into trouble. I don't use Windows often enough to justify searching for a program

On my mac powerbook I've found a program to remap the capslock key as well - but it doesn't always work. After suspend and at occasional random times, the key has memories of its previous life and decides to switch case rather than put Emacs into the right mood for the next keystroke.

So here's my question -- why do we give such a prominent position to a key that's probably not used? Or am I missing some big class of business users that say work in spreadsheets with the capslock mode turned on? Since people use the control key a lot (to do ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste for example), can't we put the control key up there on all keyboards? It's certainly a more comfortable position than where it currently sits.