software

I find this applicable to most (all?) of my endeavors, both art (screenwriting) and craft (software development):

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Unfortunately, I find myself all too often in the perfectionist camp, holding not dead clay but detailed sketches of ideas never pursued. I highly recommend reading more excerpts from Art & Fear. It sounds like good advice for life in general.

Today I read an amazing article in Wired about Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of software that uses spaced repetition to help you learn things permanently. Spaced repetition is where you learn something, then relearn it right at the point where you’re about to forget it. Each time you relearn it, you remember it for a longer period of time. The concept is simple, but requires a computer to determine the exact point at which you need to relearn something.

Wozniak created software called SuperMemo (SM) to implement the spaced repetition algorithm. In essence, it’s the ultimate flashcard program. It allows you to use images, HTML, and sounds, too. His latest feature is “incremental reading”, where you grab a bunch of documents from the web (or email, etc.) and throw them into SM. You prioritize the documents as you insert them; when you have time to read them, SM determines the order. As you read the document, you pull out info nuggets that you don’t want to forget, and these get added to the flashcard stack. Interesting, but it sounds like a bit of work.

Although it can be used to learn anything, the killer app is language learning. Indeed, in Wozniak’s native Poland, SuperMemo has been used extensively by students of English who wish to study abroad. There’s also rampant piracy and use in China and other countries. However, piracy is unnecessary, since Wozniak writes openly about the algorithms he uses, and open source alternatives have arisen.

One standout is Mnemosyne. It also offers support for HTML, images, and sound. One interesting feature is the 3-sided flashcard, which is particularly suited to language learning by including written form, pronunciation, and translation.

Another free program I saw recommended was OpenCards. It is based on OpenOffice Impress, a free PowerPoint alternative. As such, your flashcards can contain anything that can go into a PowerPoint slide, such as background images, animation, video, sound, etc. OpenCards runs on all major operating systems.

One issue I had with this super learning system is that, other than language, I couldn’t think of much that I wanted to keep in permanent memory. It did occur that in addition to foreign words, this is a great way to retain a large English vocabulary and keep it sharp. In On Writing, Stephen King recommends expanding your vocabulary by reading good authors and looking up words you don’t know¹. I already do this, but now I can retain them indefinitely. That’s pretty cool.

If I was in school, however, this would be a fantastic way to retain knowledge for tests. I did a lot of cramming, which they tell you not to do. Cramming helps you pass quizzes and tests that cover recent lessons, but when it comes to the comprehensive final, it fails². High school students who use this system diligently can demolish memorization-heavy AP tests. Not to mention the vocabulary-heavy SAT. Heck, this could make even high school language courses worthwhile! And all of this would lead to a clear advantage in college, where the same system should also work wonders. Later in life, you can brag about graduating magna cum laude - in French! - even though you studied something you never ended up using.

Update/Clarifications (4/23/08)

In case I didn’t sell this strong enough, the Wired article explains how cognitive psychologists and memory researchers are completely baffled as to why everyone isn’t using this technique. They equate it to using torches when light bulbs are available.

Although there is an obvious use for high school students, it occurred to me that placement in accelerated classes starts as early as 3rd grade. In my school system, you had to be placed there by 7th grade if you wanted to take the most advanced math classes in high school. So parents probably should start their kids as early as 2nd grade.

You don’t need to leave your computer on all the time - it will save your progress to disk However, it is important to use the software daily. Skipping several days can set you back quite a ways.

Another free program is Anki. While it’s a general purpose spaced rep. program, it has extra features for learning Japanese, English, and Russian. Students of Japanese can also try Reviewing the Kanji. It was also suggested in the Lifehacker forums that Pimsleur language CDs (which are available at your local library) could be converted to OpenCards decks for optimal aural learning.

1. As opposed to going out of your way to pillage the thesaurus, or using some other list of vocabulary words without a relevant context. [↩]
2. How bad it fails is related to how well you learned it the first time, the difficulty of the material, the strength of your short term memory, etc. Before you argue that cramming works, consider that you may be a genius, or, perhaps, you went to a shitty school. Just saying. [↩]

The Poetic Prophet, AKA Moserious, raps at ya about designing and coding your site. Yes, your web site. And yes. It is awesome.

Ironically, going to his site triggered a Quicktime update message that crashed Firefox. The message noted that the latest Quicktime fixes many serious bugs. Indeed. But even though I was in the middle of writing this very post, Firefox restored this edit page with all my text in tact. Oh Mozilla, is there anything you can’t do? (Other than not crash in the first place?)

Tip of the hat to Ray and Or.

The high def disc battle was supposed to go on for years. Sony, Disney, Fox, and Lionsgate backed Blu-ray. Paramount, Dreamworks, and Universal backed HD-DVD. And Warner Bros. backed both (it goes both ways), making it the deciding factor. If it backed Blu-ray, it could be over quickly, and if it backed HD-DVD the sides would be even and the war would rage for years with everyone buying two players or multi-players.

A week ago, Warner Bros. decided to back Blu-ray exclusively. The war is over. Condolences to the mourners.

Paramount actually had an escape clause in the event this happened, and Universal announced it will no longer be HD-DVD exclusive. There will be some cleanup, commitments fulfilled, but in the meantime, feel free to buy a Blu-ray player. Newline is also backing BR, as is the increasingly irrelevant Blockbuster.

It’s been an interesting ride. Including the BR player in the PS3 caused delays and cutbacks, and inflated the price. It was selling pretty poorly because of this and a fairly crappy game selection. But this past holiday season it sold 1.2M units¹.

This change in the film industry should fuel PS3 sales. From what I’ve read, it’s not the highest quality BR player out there. But unlike many standalone players for your home theater, it supports all of the special interactive features the discs have. This is mainly through Blu-ray Disc for Java (BD-J), which is a form of Java ME. Already a number of titles have been enhanced with BD-J, although it seems mostly limited to enhanced menus. Over time, this could lead to some pretty cool hacks and features, esp. with players that are Internet enabled.

Overall, I’m not terribly happy Sony won, but it is nice that a format has been chosen. Using Java for interactivity is another bonus.

1. Still way behind the Wii, which sold 3 times that. [↩]

More cool computer graphics technology coming our way. This brings great advances to the field of incriminating photo editing.

Thanks to Assassin for forwarding this. It’s a Microsoft technology that allows real time photo data mining. Remember that part in Bladerunner when Harrison Ford is watching a video like:

type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance

(Yeah, they did it Super Troopers, too.) Well this is kinda like that, only with tons of photos instead of video, and a better interface. It’s seriously badass.

For Christmas this year, I treated myself to a longtime object of my technolust: the Sandisk Sansa e280 flash memory MP3 player. Part of the e200 series, the e280 is the 8GB version. I paid $185 at Amazon (no blogger bribes here!). All e200 players have many features to thrash those precious iPod Nanos:

• Plays MP3, WMA, and secure WMA (see below)
• 1.8″ color LCD screen
• Image viewer
• Video player
• Voice recorder
• Data storage
• FM tuner, with record capability
• microSD expansion slot
• User replaceable, rechargeable Lithium Ion battery with 20 hours of play time (average)

That’s what everybody gets. The real kicker is if you have Windows XP [1] and a subscription service like Rhapsody-To-Go, Napster, or Yahoo! Music. This is a Plays For Sure player, so you can take subscription content with you. As long as I am a subscriber, I can transfer any track in my library, even though I didn’t buy it. Since I just got a great deal on Rhapsody-To-Go [2] I expect to subscribe indefinitely. That gives me any of Rhapsody’s 3 million+ tracks anywhere I want. It is the awesome.

That’s quite a feature list, in a very compact package. Here are the highs and lows.

Highs

• Screen is sharp, photos and videos look good.
• Sound quality is quite good, both for WMA (160K) and FM stereo
• Using Rhapsody’s jukebox software, transferring music is quite easy. You either drag and drop files, or synchronize with your Rhapsody Library. If you needed to, you could pick and choose from your Library instead of copying the whole thing. Personally, mine is a giant “best of” collection, so it’s very convenient for me to connect it to my PC have it automatically sync up. Right now I’ve got around 600 tracks that I’ve chosen over the last year, and it takes up about 2.7GB.
• The design is very nice. It’s shiny! And black. It’s not quite as compact or beautiful as the iPod, but… duh. As far as I can tell, Apple has kidnapped the best designers on the planet (minus Agent Hulagun), so nobody else can have such elegant-looking products. It’s the modern day equivalent of Ivan the Terrible poking out the eyes of Postnik Yakovlev after he built St. Basil’s Cathedral.
• New batteries are only $20 from Sandisk, compared to $60 for iPods.

Lows

• Like just about every other MP3 player I’ve read reviews on, the earbuds kinda suck. Sound quality is decent, they’re just these big round discs that don’t feel like they were designed to go in your ears. They’re too big for your ear canal (I think they’re more bellybutton sized), and I haven’t figure out a way to place them so they don’t feel like they’re about to fall out. I’m looking for a replacement, and have my eye on the Sennheiser PMX60 headphones. I’m pretty sure the larger drivers will drain the batteries faster, but at least they’ll be comfortable without messing up my incredible hair.
• The voice recorder seems to record a high-pitched whine along with your voice. It’s annoying, so don’t expect to make any podcasts from it. And you have to speak into the mic, so I don’t think you can use it to record lectures. Of course, the mic hole is about 2mm in diameter, so it’s a wonder it works at all. At least you can pause and continue the recording.
• When using the thumbwheel, your thumb rests on the left side of the wheel, which is not optimal. You scroll down, you’re turning counterclockwise, and the screen scrolls up. This is really an artifact of using a very compact device, and I don’t see a solution - that’s just where your thumb naturally rests. To make this more ergonomic you’d need to make it bigger, which nobody wants. I’m sure most compact MP3 players have this issue.
• When connecting to my PC for transfer, the Rhapsody software needs to scan the device for tracks. This takes several minutes, and I only have about 600 tracks (”only” meaning it’s only 1/3 full). In “mass storage” mode, you can’t transfer subscription content, only drag and drop files. So it doesn’t scan your tracks when you connect, but when you disconnect it essentially reboots and does this “Refresh Database” thing that also takes a couple minutes. You can’t win.
• The only way to recharge the battery is by hooking the device up to a USB port via the included cable. Not an issue - unless you want to travel with it. Luckily, there are many 3rd party Sansa accessories that solve this, and they’re even blessed by Sandisk. This includes USB charging ports for your car’s cigarette lighter, as well as wall chargers.
• The LCD stays on when the device is connected to a PC. Since you connect to charge the battery, it seems dumb to be draining it by lighting up the screen.
• Photos and videos can’t be placed on the microSD card.

I’m nitpicking a bit with the lows, but I’d rather be thorough in case one of them is a deal-breaker for you. Overall, I think the highs far outweigh them, and I’m quite happy with my purchase!

[1] And presumably Vista, but don’t hold me to that. I think it just needs Windows Media Player 10 or better.

[2] I’m afraid it’s gone now, but during the holidays they offered the to-go service for $8 month. I’d been paying $10/month for the Unlimited service, which doesn’t allow you to transfer to MP3 players, and the upgrade price was $15/month! I created another account, hoping to merge the two, but the best customer support could do was cancel the old one. I downloaded the entire library from my original account and then imported it from the new one, so I was able to save just about everything. After spending a year carefully selecting 600 tracks (out of several thousand), you don’t want to have to find them again!

I was just poking around and came across this Christmas themed skin for Firefox.

Tinseltown 1.1 (Firefox Theme)

There’s some nice animated Christmas icons for when pages load and some cool translucent graphics throughout the tabs and text fields. The candy cane scroll bar is a nice touch. Well, at least I can enjoy this for the next week and then it’s back to default.

I saw this clip of a program called ASSIST (MIT) which is used as a design aid for mechanical applications.
Probably old-news to some Crack Team members, but the clip just started showing up and I though I’d share.

http://thatvideosite.voxcdn.com/core/3406/mit_digital_drawing_board.wmv

I’m told that Microsoft has a “Physics Illustrator” that works the same way.
Anyone have any experience with this kind of software?

Very cool. I just loaded it yesterday and did a couple test runs with Agent Hulagun - kudos to him for his part in the vital mission. Overall, it was pretty simple. You have to click download a few too many times, but eventually you get there. When running the installer, remember to click the [ Options… ] button and make sure everything’s kosher.

I had a slight issue due to a non-standard microphone configuration. I have an Audigy 2 ZS card with an I/O plate for the front of your case. It has a 1/4″ mic input with preamp, into which I have plugged in a Shure SM58 mic (pretty much the most famous ball mic ever). This shows up in audio/sound programs like Audacity as “Line-in 2/Mic 2″, but most programs just show the sound card or “windows default” (or something like “system”) as an option. This requires you to use the control panel to select that mic as the system default. Problem is, programmers who think they’re oh so clever will change the system default to “Microphone”, and this is very frustrating when troubleshooting!!! I had to uncheck an option in Skype that says something like, “Let Skype mess up my options that I’ve taken a while to get right”. I am paraphrasing to accentuate truthfulness. When that was done, though, it worked.

And it works really well. Granted, I’m using a $100 mic and $60 headphones, but it’s pretty clear on both sides. And of course, totally free. There is a slight chance that Yahoo! Messenger with Voice will also work with my setup, but it doesn’t have a “don’t screw things up checkbox”, and it definitely screws things up when you use the voice setup wizard. I’ll have to find another test subject to troubleshoot that.

I recommend either a headset or mic/headphones combo. Using a speaker will turn it into - surprise! - a speakerphone. And those are annoying for both parties. However, you probably want to be able to unplug the headset/headphones easily; I know my computer will mute speakers when headphones are plugged in. You can uncheck that option, but then you’re driving both at the same time, which seems like kind of a waste.

I originally wanted this set up to communicate with East Coasters without burning up all my cell phone minutes. If I call them 9pm their time, it’s still 6pm (primetime) for me. Of course, this also works for locals with only cell phone access.

So feel free to add me using my Crack Team email address. If you don’t know it and can’t figure it out, email me and I’ll clue you in.

I asked subscribers to the Orange County Java User’s Group (OCJUG) mailing list what books had the greatest impact on them as a developer. Below are their answers, in the order submitted (so the first two are mine). Images are linked to the book’s Amazon.com entry.

Thanks to all who contributed.
Read the rest of this entry »

A recent comp sci grad (BSCS), who was having trouble finding work due to lack of experience, decided to register for a masters degree (MSCS). He asked what I thought about it, especially in light of the dot com bust, and the recent push into offshoring. My response is generally positive.

The fact is, after the dot com bust there was a paradigm shift in recruiting. Previously, companies were just looking for smart, capable people with a solid grasp of the fundamentals. They knew that as technologies changed, so did your job description. When the bust happened, there was an embarassment of riches (i.e., available employees) for recruiters. They started asking for exactly what the position required at that time, usually the exact experience of the person vacating the job. And because of the times, they got it (this famously led some to ask for developers who worked on a technology before it existed). Although things are heating up again, the recruitment practices haven’t changed. I’m looking around now and am running into similar issues, because my experience has been equal parts s/w dev. and project management. Odds are I’ll have to specialize in one or the other before moving on.

There is hope, though. In the ’90s there was an aeropace bust; massive layoffs across the industry. Agent Assassin was an aeronautical engineering major (aero for short). When my school hosted a career fair, with over 100 companies, every one wanted a comp sci major. Only 4 wanted aeros. This led to a collegiate exodus of aeros; many chose a more general major like mechanical or civil engineering (or comp sci!). Now, aerospace companies are having a hard time filling positions with good engineers. The schools weren’t producing them, but the engineers were still retiring, resulting in a seller’s market. The competition is driving up salaries, and my employer is proactively raising salaries for certain employees in order to stay competitive.

Our industry’s bust came around 2000, and I’ve read many articles about comp sci departments not being able to find students. In time, even with the offshoring, we will have a shortage of good software engineers.

I think that for many, getting an MSCS is the right thing to do. For a while now, engineers have found the MS to be a professional standard, while scientists required a PhD. But advanced degrees were often a curse for software developers, with employers valuing real world experience above all. I think that’s going to change over the next decade. Offshoring is driving US companies to be innovators, keeping the more advanced/important work here. So getting a masters will help you compete globally.

Right now, it can be hard to find an entry level job. This because if you have a good, well rounded CS education, you are a tech generalist. And they’re unemployable until they get 20+ years of experience, at which point they’re really experts in everything! So an MSCS is a great opportunity if you manage it well. But that requires knowing the real reason you’re there, a point which escapes many grad students.

When my manager got his MSCS at USC, he noted he could have chosen classes for the entire degree without learning anything new. This is because for many schools, once you graduate with a BS, you are a “grad student”. You are not allowed to get a second BS, you must get a graduate degree. Since this could very well be your first experience with CS, they allow you to get a general education covering the fundamentals. If you have a BSCS already, obviously that would be a waste of time and money. Instead, you want to specialize in something you are passionate about. By specialize, I’m talking about things like:

Networking
Databases
OOAD/Design Patterns (perhaps even this is too general)
Embedded Software
AI
Human Computer Interaction

You know the drill - the major topics under the CS umbrella. That expertise will be your key to employment. As much as possible, your graduate education should mimic real world experience from a well managed career. And that experience will probably be focused.

This means that if you have a choice between creating a thesis, and taking extra classes, always go for the thesis! At the very least, you can tell people you are a published author. More importantly, you will have a concrete project to show to employers. Even better, doing a thesis (that you chose yourself, instead of taking the first thing your prof. suggested) is an awesome way to create the ultimate class, learning what you’re most interested in. I think that passion is critical for success. It’s cliche, but enthusiasm is contagious, and employers love it. It will come across in interviews when you start talking excitedly about your work. And they’ll want that enthusiasm - and expertise - on their team.

I am evaluating music sequencers to use with my new E-MU Xboard 49. It came with Ableton Live Lite 4 and Proteus X LE, and my sound card (Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum) came with Cubasis VST (Cubase lite) and FL Studio 4 Creative Edition. Not one full version in the bunch. I can respect that, but the way some versions were created is very frustrating.
     Kudos to Steinberg and Proteus. From my limited usage, they seem to be true, self-contained lite editions of other products. Ableton and FL, however, did a half-assed hack job. First off, Ableton hasn’t created a Lite version of Live 5, which shipped last fall. So it’s basically Live 4 with Operator (optional software synth) running in demo mode, with an option to hide the features not in the Lite version. If you could fully hide them, that’d be great, but I keep getting messages that read, “You are trying to access a hidden feature, you need to switch to demo mode”. Hidden feature? It’s right on the menu, jackass! Sometimes I get them from trying to drag and drop things. I should never see those messages, it should just not allow the operation, or show that you can do it. Also, you can’t save or export in demo mode, making it pretty worthless to me. Couldn’t they just remove the export functions, so you could save work but not render it to an audio (MP3, WAV, etc) file? Then every time you came up with a cool song or loop, you’d have more incentive to upgrade. It has built in tutorials and a hefty manual, but neither were pared down to match the Lite version. The manual has links that read, “See the feature chart to find out if your version even has this feature.” Of course, the feature chart hasn’t been created yet. I spent a lot less time with FL Studio, because I was getting those same “This version can’t do that” messages. My patience was used up with Live.
     This is a shame, because Live seems like a cool product. And after all that bitching and moaning, I can’t find a better product for the money. Owning the Lite version allows me to upgrade to Live 5 for $200. I’ve also looked at Reason 3 ($200 academic price), Sonar 5 Producer ($420 street) and Cubase SX3 ($400 academic price). Reason is the only one that comes close price-wise, but it can’t do audio recording, which I need for recording my dulcet tones. I may pick up Reason later, as it’s considered an excellent companion to Live, which is lacking in the instrument department. I’ll let you know how it goes in an upcoming article.

On a lark, I subscribed to the Rhapsody Unlimited music subscription service, lured in the by their 14-day free trial ($10/month after that). I had fun with Pandora, but wanted to try something that gave me more control over what I listened to. In this case, complete control. Rhapsody has over 1.3M songs, and gives you the power to listen to any of them in any order. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but you’ll still run across missing albums, and occasionally missing artists. At least they have a button that reveals all of an artist’s missing albums.

Listening on the go

One of the benefits of the Unlimited service is Rhapsody To Go, which allows you to download tracks to a compatible portable device (the ones that say Subscription). There are 3 catches in that statement: 1) you are a current Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, 2) your MP3 player is Janus/PlaysForSure compatible (iPods aren’t), and 3) you’re using Windows XP. And 4 catches if you include the fact that not all Rhapsody tracks are Subscription tracks, but in my experience almost all are. The quality of purchased and downloaded tracks is 128K, in WMA, AAC, or MP3.

Since I don’t see myself dropping the service anytime soon, I’m highly motivated to get a Subscription compatible player. Because I’d like an expandable player, I’m leaning towards the Sandisk e200 with a microSD slot, removable recharbable battery, FM tuner, and voice recorder, due out in March (happy birthday to me). [Attention Sandisk: when your marketing dept. launches a product at CES, without so much as a press release on your website, it’s time to fire them.]

Listening at home

You can listen two ways, through their web interface or their dedicated client. I usually use the client/jukebox software for its interface and convenience features. If you add a track to your library, it can download it so you can listen to it even when the site is down (which happens occasionally). Assuming you’re a current subscriber, of course, and are using Windows XP (I’m guessing it’s a DRM issue). You can purchase tracks for $.89 and albums for $7.99.

I don’t know how much music I listened to before, but I find with Rhapsody I listen to about 3 albums a night. It allows me to more thoroughly explore artists and genres. I find I’ll listen to classic rock musicians from past to present, until they start sucking (which happens pretty consistently as they approach the 1980s), and indie musicians from present to past, for pretty much the same reasons. I’m generalizing, but there’s definitely a pattern there, and it’s cool to see how the artists evolve (or devolve).

They also have several pre-programmed radio stations to help you explore new stuff, and allow you to create a station based on your tastes, like Pandora. I haven’t tried the custom station feature, and would be impressed if it was as good as Pandora, but I’ve been too busy albums to check.

I recently tried to reinstall my copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000, and it immediately informed me that without a printer, it would not install. Claims it needs printer settings to know how to set up the document. Now, anyone who’s written a screenplay knows it has a rigid format, so requiring a printer seems stupid. Especially since I don’t have access to one right now.

Enter PrimoPDF. It acts as printer driver, which fakes out programs into thinking there’s a regular printer. It can also be useful to print to PDF for sharing documents, or sending them somewhere else to be printed. Of course, Movie Magic Screenwriter has a built-in PDF creator, making it even less necessary!

Well, at last I’m free to unleash my creative genius. It shall be a daring tale of love, where an ingenue played by Emma Watson falls in love with a much older, but quite obese, American screenwriter…

When I installed Windows XP, I noticed it could treat .zip files as directories. This is nifty at first, but slows things down, especially if you have a directory filled with .zip files (like, I don’t know, your Downloads directory???). It has to decompress them all internally, throttling your CPU and blocking UI events (like switching directories to stop the slowdown). In contrast, if you try to actually decompress a zip file using the built-in wizard, it takes f o r e v e r. I have a hunch they’re making it a low-priority background process, so you can do other things while it’s decompressing. Problem is, 99% of the time, I just want to work with the files it’s decompressing! I didn’t see an option to speed it up, although I haven’t looked very hard, because it should be easy enough to find. Conclusion: Microsoft is stupid.
     I found a nifty utility called 7-zip that has made my life much easier. It decompresses things right away, using a context menu. Just right click on the file in Windows Explorer, and choose Extract Here (or Extract Files…). It works right away, no waiting, and handles a multitude of file types (originally 7 different kinds, hence the name). This includes .rar files and mulit-part files (where the files have sequential suffixes, .1, .2, …, .n), using the same, easy interface. It’s completely free, open source software. You don’t even have to deal with WinZip’s nagware.

There is a lot of talk these days about rich web client interfaces with AJAX, and I’ll admit I find it exciting. However, there is an alternative
called OpenLaszlo. It has the same goal as
AJAX (desktop feel and response time in a web application), but uses Flash
instead of JavaScript/DHTML. While most web developers know JavaScript
already, the advantage here is that you only have one target platform:
the Flash plugin. The word from the trenches is that it’s very
difficult to overestimate the amount of time you need to test AJAX apps,
especially cross-browser. And I hate testing. Another advantage for bigger web
shops is that the backend/middle tier guys rarely do the front end
stuff, as they’re tied up with business logic and data access issues,
which is quite a handful already. For these apps, they have to master
XML and/or web services, too. At the same time, your front end guys are
often professional graphic designers who know Flash about as well as
they know JavaScript, if not better. So OpenLaszlo can help leverage
your existing skill mix.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp AJAX is not without support, though. There is a JavaScript
library called Rico (developed by
Sabre Airline Solutions) to help developers get up and running. It was a
Sabre lead who made the comment about the difficult testing, so it looks
like they’ve open sourced their framework to get the community to help.
I don’t know if you want to open source a competitive edge, but the rest
of us are the better for it. I’ve also heard good things about DWR, but it’s a Java library.
My current goal is still to concentrate on the middle tier,
getting up to speed on Spring and Hibernate. I figure once I’m
comfortable with those technologies, my choice for a rich client will be
obvious (or simply won’t matter).

Over the past couple months, I decided to migrate this server from Red Hat 9 to Solaris 10. What follows is the logic and history behind that decision, which is still in progress. This is the first in a series of articles about moving from Linux to Solaris x86.
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A couple years ago I switched from NT to Win2k, because spyware bundled with BearShare hosed my system. For the record, Win2k doesn’t protect against spyware, but I’m loathe to upgrade a working system. For the other record, I paid $10 for LimeWire and it was well worth it.

Since then, I’ve found a couple good programs to fight this. The first was Ad Aware. It’s good, but didn’t detect a recent problem. I found out that Pest Patrol often finds spyware that other programs miss. They offer a free scan of your system, and offer detailed instructions on how to rid the menace. While the instructions are clear, they often have many steps, and you’ll probably buy the thing to make your life easier.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy for me. After many attempted removals (all requiring reboots), I was getting nowhere. The asshats who write spyware have it start up immediately, and the asshats who wrote Windows lock all running programs so they can’t be deleted (this is one of the reasons why it requires so many reboots). If you run into this problem, you have to find the offending file and remove read and execute permissions (through Properties->Security). Leave the write permission on, because you need it to delete it.

I told Pest Patrol of this problem, but never got a response. Granted, I can have a bit of a snarky attitude when frustrated, but if I followed Lincoln’s 24 hour rule for poison pen letters, I’d never send any.

I finally have the opportunity to work on a J2EE project. There are, approximately, a bajillion different technologies that make up core J2EE plus open source APIs, frameworks, engines, etc. Since I probably won’t be here forever (because “here” won’t be here forever), I thought I’d ask WWMD: What Would Monster.com (have me) Do? Here is a listing of J2EE technologies and the number of tech job listings, nationwide, that ask for them.
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Are you somewhat technically inclined? Do you use Outlook (2000 or newer) or run a Linux mail server? Good. Do you complain about spam? If so, after reading this article, you’ll have to shut your pie-hole about the spam problem, because it’ll be your fault if you still see it.
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This panel was on the pros and cons of using High Definition video for independent films. What follows is a summary of the points raised by the panel, and why I’m choosing DV - not HD - for my short.

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Wired has an excellent, very thorough article on the outsourcing of computer jobs to India. It’s required reading for all current and future techies. And accountants. And financial analysts. And every professional who could work from home. The bottom line? It’s time to become a higher evolutionary.
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After much struggling with the misnamed eZpublish, I’ve decided to switch to Movable Type. Maybe now I’ll get some writing done.
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