Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I finally made it down to Volo to the car museum as a father & son day. My oldest was sick but the youngest was game to go. A friend is staying with me and brought his son along. We saw a great many fine restored cars, and wanted desparately to come up with the money to buy one or two of them

Maybe this is one:

And this is two:

Not that I’d pass this one by:

When I saw that the first gallery was the movie car gallery, I was afraid that the trip would peak early and then be downhill, but the great muscle cars and restored antiques were truly beautiful. I wanted to drive one so bad. That didn’t take any of the joy away from seeing the original Batmobile and the Ecto-1. Those are still a good time. This is a nice trip. I may end up taking all my visitors there

The museum is surrounded with antique malls, so those who don’t appreciate beautifully restored automobiles will still be able to go browsing and have a good time.

Among the other fine choices my family made for me (including scale model TBM Avenger, a book of panoramic photos of polar regions, aircraft movies, and old comedy movies, to name a few) I received a new media player.

This is the gp2x, which will be a fun hobby. If I were looking for a slick, trouble-free, tiny console with endless hard disk storage, I’d be looking in the wrong place. It’s pretty cool, but not quite “trouble free”. This device will be a bit of a hobby.

It made some interesting choices. The first was to be all open source. It’s a linux-based device for starters, and seems to stick to the common standards like USB ports and standard AA batteries. It even has a pretty familiar A/B/X/Y button layout with L1 and R1 buttons like on the game cube. I don’t play games, so it’s all the same to me, but the kids noticed some similarity. Also, its storage is entirely via the Secure Digital port. I happily have gotten two of them recently, each 1GB. I think I’ll watch for more/bigger ones. As is, thought, it’s enough for some video and audio.

It does some things really well. I find it to be a very good audio player and video player. It is also an ebook reader, though I’ve not tried that yet. The screen is large and bright, and I found it pretty comfortable for watching video. It’s really a pretty nice unit.

It handles OGG and MP3 very well, and has a variety of EQ presets. I can get whatever I want out of it musically, I think. I’ve a number of podcasts to catch up on, both talk radio and old-time radio comedies and . The one gig cards hold a lot of episodes. I’ve also been watching “Santa Clause Conquers the Martians” (a particularly bad Public Domain .avi file I have on hand) . This media player covers a lot of file formats, I’m not too worried about being able to get my media onto it.

There are only a couple of shortcomings. One is battery life. I sadly will only get about 10 hours of audio play (screen off, I assume) or else about 6 hours of video. If I use the USB cable to transfer files, I burn battery while transferring files. Luckily, I have a card reader/writer that is USB powered, so I can avoid some hassle. I will have to carry a few rechargables and a battery charger around with me, regardless. I don’t want to go burning through batteries all the time. But it will be sufficient for me to use on planes and trains, and I can use my laptop when I’m in a hotel room. There is also the option of an AC power supply. I can get around this problem.

Another issue is that it’s not as easy to install games on this thing as one might like. I’d like it to be like plugging in a game boy cartridge, but that’s now how it works. Installing requires some effort on my part, and games don’t install all the same. I hear that installing MAME on this device makes it more useful as a game platform. All of that doesn’t much matter, though, because I am not a game guy. I installed frozen bubble and it took me a while to learn the controls. I just don’t have the instinct for console games. Since I’m not so hot on gaming anyway, I may not mind this at all.

The main frustration I have is trying to get it to fast-forward a video file. I don’t want to watch the intro to Santa Conquers the Martians even one more time. I’ve had enough. I need to figure out how to use this thing better.

There is a longer and more detailed writeup at wikipedia’s GP2X page.

I found the fast-forward, it just didn’t work on the Plan Nine file. On other files it works just fine. You use the joystick by pressing left. A tap takes it a few seconds forward, but you can hold it to the left and get a progress bar at the top of the screen. When you think it’s far enough, release it, and the movie resumes from the forward point. It’s quite nice, when it works. I also installed a game or two, but games bore me pretty quickly. Now I need a 4GB SD card to plug in. I already got my rechargeable batteries, so that’s not the big worry anymore.

I’m convinced now that eclipse is designed for use by polytentacular aliens who might be capable of pressing their bizarro key chords. This thing gets more bizarre the longer I use it. I am struggling to remember how to do the simplest things. I’m stuck with the mouse and menues for now, and hating it.

I’m also convinced that my friend David is a polytentacular alien. Somehow he zips between mouse and keyboard without looking. I noticed that he’s good at finding all the various shiftmode keys (Alt, Option, Splat, Control, Shift) with the right hand. That’s really weird to me, but I’ll try it.

The other thing I notice is that there are tiny, tiny little groups of pixels that have grave meaning. I’m talking about the package view. Little tiny icons represent files. These little tiny icons are hard enough to decypher, but at least they normally look like little disk “drums” from flowchart days. But the itty bitty corners of the tiny icons get their own icons. For some reason a white asterisk on a black background of a itty bitty bit of screen real estate about the size of George’s left eye pupil on a dollar bill means that there’s been a change in the file. Or that there’s an error. Or something. I think the question mark on a blue background means it’s not in version control. It’s tiny, tiny, and much iconography is as arbitrary as the key chords required to reach anything useful.

This is clearly another “expert friendly” system, because it’s pure heck for novices. Eclipse has all the features, and if you can press 80% of the keyboard in one blazing strafing run with unbelievable accuracy you can use it.

I’ll get over it. I’ll become an omnitentacular alien if necessary, but it’s sure not becoming a natural tool. It does not disappear into the background, and it’s hard to watch an expert use it because they move quickly. It’s another bit of strangeness on top of all the other strangeness that is this new project. But we live. Time and familiarity, time and familiarity. Eventually even I will be able to do work.

Here is a beautiful little number from Crafter Guitars. It is another dual-voice, and I wonder how it stacks up to the Taylor T5. In looks, I think it may have the Taylor beat. I have a little fantasy where I round out my collection with a multivoice like this one (or the Godin, or the Taylor). This baby has the baggs acoustic pickup and the Armstrong lipstick pickup and a fader for blending them . I’ve only seen the pictures, I’ve not played one. In my fantasies, the Armstrong is fat and thick.

For now, I’ll just dream. Maybe someday I’ll get one of these. Or else maybe the Line6 variax. Or the Taylor. …

Well, almost first. This is the longest extended time I’ve been using it. I’m blessing and cursing it as I go. There are things that are probably reasonable features, but to which I have unreasonable habits to break or difficult habits to gather. Really, this is much about my fit with eclipse as it is about quality.

Anyway, here are my impressions:

• Great highlighting. No complaints there at all.
• After a few days, I’m very aware I’m using it. It hasn’t started to disappear into the background or become “part of me”. I don’t know how long that will take.
• Chords. I’m a vi user so I’m not used to chording at all. I really don’t like ctrl-alt-shift-key-key sequences. I guess you have to have chords in a modeless editor, but they should be logical. Ctrl should mean one thing, shift should mean another. Where are the chord conventions explained? Where’s the help for that? Shift-Alt is often used for refactorings, but also for many other things…. why? Where’s the reason in this? What would help is some kind of a status bar add-in that worked like the gvim wildmenu option. If I could press ctrl-alt-shift and see a list of next keystrokes, that would be awesome. It would teach me. As is, I’m kinda stuck with memorizing as best I can. Worse yet, there are too complex for one-hand chords. Just for fun try typing shift-alt-X and shift-alt-R with your left hand. Try doing it without looking. Every time I have to take my eyes off of the work I’m doing to look at the keyboard is time off-task, and I feel it. I suppose I have to learn to do all the shift/ctr/alt/whatever with both hands so that I can do shift-alt with the right while pressing R with the left. This will take a while just to develop the physical skills. I have never used my right-hand CTRL or ALT keys before.
• Pretty good multi-language support. Very pleased. May end up trying eclipse on python
• Good platform for plugins. I’m rather impressed, esp with subclipse
• I hate tree views, but at least this one recognizes empty directories are just bogus java namespace tricks, and collapses com.objectmentor to a single tree level. Bless them.
• When you copy code from one file to another, the relevant imports are copied too. That’s a bit of genius. Nice touch.
• Ctrl-1, while being a stupid and meaningless key combo, is an incredibly smart feature. I didn’t realize until I paired with someone who knew the environment better that this feature was context-sensitive. Now I have more reasons to use the keystroke.
• The default template has unnecessary vertical space between field decls. I hate unnecessary vertical space between field declarations. I could completely do without this bit of stupidity. Now I have to learn how to change the template.
• Too much menu navigation. Some things I can only reach by using pulldown menues, which cascade, and I’m not so accurate and fast that I don’t accidently close the menu by navigating off the menu popup, or off the parent item while moving. Cascading mouse menues are a particularly ugly mechanism.
• Too much reliance on mouse. I don’t have a mouse. I don’t actually carry one with me, and I don’t like using my touchpad. The problem is that I have to take my eyes off the the code I’m editing in order to find the mouse, then to find the cursor, and then to re-home my fingers. This is often enough for me to lose fervor. If you aren’t a mouse-lover, you will not like eclipse. I cannot even get TO the svn plugin features without clicking in a tree view (package explorer) and chasing cascading menues. Thankfully, there are menu keys so that I can do: bring up package view, find mouse cursor, drag to top of package view, rightclick, press E to get ‘team’ menu, press U to get ‘update’. That’s the only way I know to access the “svn up” command. I’m now going to keep a command line open. It’s too much collateral effort to save 6 keystrokes. Oh, but guess what? My command line SVN doesn’t work with the eclipse project… what in the world…?
• Danged hard to find/print any keyboard shortcuts. I should be able to do all my work without reaching for a mouse, darnit. In eclipse, I have to switch to my touch pad far too often. It’s annoying and it slows me down.
• Excellent integration of JUnit. Kudos!
• The darned tree views take up too much horizontal space, esp the package explorer. I like to have multiple files open on the screen at one time (tiled editing panes) and that requires more horizontal space for them. Sadly, the package explorer is next to useless unless it’s as wide as the darned package names, leaving 3/5 of the screen for doing actual work. Boo.
• The package explorer and JUnit bit become tabs of the same window by default. Boo. Thankfully the designers were smart enough to allow me to drag/dock them, so now my JUnit is on the opposite side of the screen where the stupid outline view (which I NEVER use) used to be. This nets out even. The annoyance of having it in the wrong place is made up for by the ability to move it. If it weren’t for the whole darned thing being mouse-driven, I could eliminate the package explorer entirely.
• Using the “Add arguments to match” feature (ctrl-1 on a method call) doesn’t seem to take the default names of the parameters on the actual function prototype. Instead of saying for address “Address(street,street2,city,state,zip)” it shows “Address(fname,fname,fname,fname,fname)” — I don’t get how this works, but when I’m filling in the parameters, I would like to know what they mean. Where does that come from? I don’t have ‘fname’ as a variable, nor is it mentioned in the prototype. Where does that crud come from? A change here would be most welcome.
• How the heck can I switch between tabs? This is annoying. Surely something so simple wouldn’t require me to locate the mouse cursor, and drag to the tab, and then click. Real programmers know how to use a keyboard.
• There is a subclipse problem where I cannot use my command-line SVN to work in the directory. It claims that
  

  This client is tool old to work with working copy ‘.’

  this was most upsetting to me. I had assumed that the subclipse plugin was using my local svn command-line stuff. Now I have to be in eclipse to do anything with my code base. This is not making me happy at the moment. I have a lot of work that I’m not quite getting done now, because it doesn’t seem that the revert is reverting enough.

I don’t like it all that much yet, but some parts are excellent.

I don’t usually post anything specifically for one friend, but this is different:

I just found the article on iTunes over at Downhill Battle. Ouch. I guess it never hurts to get some more details on the system. I like the idea of displaying the artists’ cuts of each song. That’s a system that might work. I’m sure sometimes you may not care what the artist gets, as long as you get your music, but I think that it might even start a “we’re nicer than brand X” war. That kind of arms race would be good news for all of us.

An alternative is the proposal by DownhillBattle to collapse the major label entirely so that something new can take its place. I don’t think I’m militant and “civil disobedient” enough for that kind of thing. The idea to burn it all down so we can start over is pretty radical.

According to an article at DefectiveByDesign.org the majors may be listening to us finally, and playing with the idea of selling music that isn’t crippled. If all goes well, they’ll be offering music that people want, and the experiment will show that it works. Maybe that’s what Sony was doing with Jessica Simpson and Jesse McCartney stuff — songs nobody wants. Oh, that might have been a bit of inflammatory commentary.

What could happen in a half-hearted attempt is that they could offer some back-catalog non-hits from one-hit wonders, and then blame us for not buying copies. But no, this is Norah Jones and Reliant K.

The article at ArsTechnica mentions eMusic, whose lack of DRM has been a strong selling point.

This time was less painful than the last few attempts. I am working with a team of coworkers on a system that we’ll use as a programming example in training next year. It’s a pretty big effort in a short time, and its mandated to be in Java without common open source libraries (ouch). We will be doing a web app together, and that promises to be fun. We have a mix of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (in inverse order of preference/ubiquity). Expect there to be a lot of excitement and challenges even in a Java world. Less so if we were doing Python or Ruby I’d expect.

I am using XUbuntu Eft (recently did upgrade from Dapper — was painless!) and was able to install sun-java-1.5.0 via apt-get..I think I had some leftover configuration from the last time I got it to run, so my paths weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. I also found a configuration tool called update-java-alternatives to choose which java implementation my system points at by default.

I also was able to install eclipse fairly easily. With a room full of friendly coworkers, I learned about the eclipse plugin management features and was able to add the necessary bits-n-pieces without too much trouble.

Of course, setting up subversion was not so hard, but integration between eclipse and subversion is awful and necessary. The renaming refactoring causes files to be renamed and java has conventions like classname==filename. That makes me wish for an “image” system like smalltalk, though I’m not very good with smalltalk/squeak yet. We tried a plugin called subversive first, and it almost worked sometimes, but we had a lot of trouble getting it to behave in the heat of updates and merges. We then switched to subclipse which seems to behave much better. By the time we got to that point, some of us had already abandoned eclipse for intelliJ which has better svn integration.

Sadly, one coworker’s machine would not take subclipse and would not work with subversive, so he’s not able to use eclipse at all so far. This is despite multiple restarts with complete deletes of the software and configuration. Whatever is wrong, it persists in being wrong. Otherwise, the rest of us have been able to do some coding on our machines.

Of course we’re pairing, and the variety of laptops and their keyboards and OSs would be expected to be trouble, but really not so much so. We’re getting along pretty well.

Listening to legally purchased music on legally purchased devices is dangerous and wrong, according to our friends at the most backward-thinking industry on earth. Even though organizations all over the world are dead-set against DRM and in favor of greater fair use rights, the industry which could most benefit from free distribution is pushing to get it stopped Right Now.

I supposed when they realized that DRM does not work, and cannot work, they decided to push for laws against trying.

The thing they’re probably going to do is make themselves totally irrelevant to the market they were formed to serve. I hope so. Serves them right.

The recent article from computing.co.uk notes that Bill Gates is no longer a big fan of DRM. Heck, he may never have been. I have been saying for a while that he seems to be getting nicer and more agreeable by the month.

Well, if you’re one of “us”, and not one of “them.”

You’ll probably get different charge out of some of the side-links. It’s a bit upsetting in some cases.

I had a long talk with some people today on the meaning of Quality.

Of course, as a software developer I consider it to be excellence in coding, that something we’ve written (or had written for us) is correct, expressive, well-structured, reliable, and performant. No wonder we argued so long about it. That’s a lot of ideas for one word.

Now, we had a more classically TQM trained fellow in the room, and he gave us quality as “fitness to purpose”, which is really a definition that I would attribute to excellence in requirements management. That is also quality. This is a definition that works equally well for table oranges (beautiful, regular, colorful, but flavor not so important) and juice oranges (sweet, tangy, tasty, juicy, but appearance doesn’t matter).

Of course, another definition is that it anticipates and provides for user’s needs and desires. That is a “quality product”. The iPod is a quality product in this regard, as is most of the software you happen to like (most likely). Really great games consider the user in this way.

Sure it’s all quality. We have an ideal product if the requirements are selected well, the analysts who conceived the product were sufficiently sharp and imaginative, and the software that rolls out of the development team is correct, expressive, well-structured, reliable, and performant, and if the entire project is available at an acceptable cost (or for free).

All I really learned is that we have to be careful how we express ourselves. My TQM colleague suggested that maybe the thing we need is to begin each project with a discussion of quality so that we can come to a common understanding of the qualities we want our product to have. That sounds pretty wise, to use communication and collaboration.

Okay, I guess I’m just dense. Whenever the politicians and newspeople start talking about the decline in some academically-taught lifeskill (math, english, physics, chemistry, home economics, etc) they start talking about fixing the problem with more standardized testing. Increase the testing?

Okay, lets say I am a student in high school (pretend I’m much younger) and I can’t do math, and you test me six times per year. Judging by my scores, I apparently can’t pass one math test per two months.

If you think that my math test ability is cyclical, you might increase the sampling rate, hoping to catch the peaks as well as the valleys. Of course, it’s not cyclical and you find that I’m unable to do math 12 times a year or 52 times a year, just like I’m unable to do it six times a year.

Alternatively, maybe there is a suspicion that my math skills are not the issue, but my test-taking skill. Maybe the call for more testing is intended to hone my test-taking skills through increased practice. That’s possible. With this theoretical underpinning, I could see that we could increase my skills this way. If that is the case, then this is a good answer. However, I doubt that this is the problem.

Finally, if I take the same test over and over, and the teacher tells me that I should have chosen answer “d” for question #44 each time, I may memorize that answer. Eventually, I may pass the test through rote memorization, without actually learning to do math.

If I’m not getting any smarter by failing two standardized tests per week, and it sure seems that all the testing and grading is going to seriously cut into the time that might be spent improving my skill. My secret suspicion is that my inability to pass the test is likely to be because I lack the math skills, not the test-taking skills, nor because my math biorhythm is low on test day. Maybe there is instead some reasonable rhythm of teach/practice/test that each student needs. Maybe some more attention from teachers and tutors (meaning smaller classes or remedial training) would help. Maybe I need to be taught in a different way (less standardized, more personalized).

Whatever the need, I fear that increasing the amount of testing and the amount of standardization at the expense of more and more varied training is a mistake. I admit that I’m not an education expert, and I’ve not read the studies. Hopefully someone can point me to the double-blind study that shows that testing is more effective than teaching, and I can drink the kool-aid, but right now it seems pretty darned silly to me.

Courtesy YouTube, I am just groovin’ on Larry & his friends tonight, following MPTV’s viewing of the Clapton Guitar Festival.

1. Just an Excuse
2. Josie
3. Room 335 with Lee Ritenour from “Larry and Lee”
4. BP Blues HEY! That’s not his 335!!!

There’s more on YouTube, but if you don’t know Larry C, then this will do a pretty good job of getting you acquainted with the master. There is much, much more available than these songs. Larry’s been a hard-working man.

I already own:

1. Larry and Lee with Lee Ritenour
2. No Substitutions (Live) with Steve Lukather
3. Fire Wire
4. Sapphire Blue
5. Live at the Greek (Stanley Clarke & friends)
6. Collection

I lost and desperately miss Christmas At My House, which was so beautiful it brought a tear to my eye. Such masterful and emotional playing. What a guy.

I keep looking at these media players, looking for something that plays AVI and MPEG video (I’m a fan of Public Domain B movies) and also MP3 and OGG audio. Of all of them, I think that I am currently enamored of the Cowon A2. It has allegedly very good battery life for a movie player, and handles most of my favorite file formats. It also has pretty plenteous storage.

It supports WMA,WMV and that doesn’t attract me at all, though Sam says it’s because I don’t know what the WM formats really are. I accept that criticism, because I really don’t. All I know is that I resent having a microsoft-specific player format, as I resent having proprietary Apple formats. I’d like to see more PD and open formats in the world, and I will be happy enough to have royalty-free, DRM-free stuff if possible.

It does support recording via the analog hole, which is a good thing. I want to copy my dvds to the device for later watching on the road. Fair use is a wonderful thing. It also does FM radio, but I don’t normally care.

I need a car stereo with a mini-jack so I can listen to my stuff in the car. Headphones are illegal and also unsafe, so I would liketo NOT do that while driving.

If I didn’t want movies, the X5 would be great.

From Roughly Drafted’s article on iPhones we have this jewel:

In fact, Apple’s still unannounced iPhone has rocketed the company’s market valuation to an all time high, meaning that Apple has made more from silence than Microsoft has earned in actual sales of its new player.

Denver was very nice this week. It was cold, but not the same way that Chicago is cold. In Colorado, at 45 degrees F, I was pretty comfy even without a jacket. I was seriously out of breath at the top of each staircase, but it was pretty comfortable (especially in the sun).

Returning to Chicago was tough. It was c-o-l-d. I waited for my ride outside of the airport without a hat, and my entire face ached and then went numb, my ears were frozen, and it was so cold and windy that my teeth started aching under my cheeks. No more going out without a hat! I did a little shoveling (because someone who was supposed to do it decided to put it off for about 7 days) and cleared the driveway. The snow had melted and been refrozen and had been driven over. This stuff is so much easier if you get it as it falls, or just after, but being away meant that it was up to someone else. It was tough to break it, but it’s much better now.

That is one of the toughest things about being gone: you have to delegate, and you need your children to actaully do the work you give them. Otherwise, the work gets tougher and tougher.

Ah, well, now we’re all at home (and many others are here as well). We have a house full of family, some we haven’t seen for several years, and we’re all cozy and warm and happy together. It’s a good day. Colorado had lower humidity, less wind, higher temperatures, and a view of the mountains. I could happily return, but having a warm house and a view of family is sustaining in a welcome way.

I recently heard about an XP project that had been started, was producing results, and was very successful. What’s sad about that? I heard that someone at C level (CIO, CEO, etc) heard about it and stopped it because he didn’t like the idea of having a different methodology. It wasn’t because of any problems with the project, just a problem with the idea of doing it that way.

(No, I’m not going to say where it allegedly happened or who told me).

On one hand, it’s sad because something that worked well was halted. The team was happy and productive, enjoying this new way. They were producing, and then they were made to stop.

On the other hand, it is sad because that guy really did have the right to choose what his company would do. I don’t tell those guys how to spend their money. The project was started under-the-covers, and kept a secret for a while, so this guy at the top had no idea that people were doing things he didn’t agree with.

So the saddest part is that I don’t know how to feel about this. I suppose that the XP team was being underhanded to some extent, but also that there was closed-mindedness about something that worked. I suppose it’s is what it is, and it’s hard to determine if either side was more right.

Maybe the sad part is that I can’t pick a side to root for.