Mark Roseman's Blog

The True Holiday Hangover.

Was paying some bills via online banking and mistakenly took a look at our upcoming Visa bill; let's just say between the usual stuff, Christmas shopping, and the upcoming flight to Edmonton plus the upcoming cruise... ouch.

Otherwise, this time of year is good.. we don't do too much of the big Christmas events, and work demands are a lot quieter. It's been a good opportunity to balance a bit more of the next version development work with the usual long overdue code cleanup. It's a chance to look at things with slightly fresher eyes, recognize where new abstractions would simplify things, etc. Also a chance to look at a few other technologies which may be of some benefit not too far down the road.

Had migrated my bug database to Trac a couple of weeks back (after earlier moving my source code into Subversion from CVS), and that's working out well in terms of better organizing things. Still a few more infrastructure-type improvements in the queue, but the major ones I've been planning on are now done and over with.

Happy holidays.

Best wishes to everyone for a merry Christmas (or whatever). We're going to be sticking close to home the next couple of weeks, then off for a quick trip to Edmonton Jan 5-7, and then we decided to go off on a short cruise somewhere warm Jan 13-18.

Digging out of a hole.

Heh, Tk people should check out this thread on comp.lang.ruby to get a good feel for how people out there like Tk as a toolkit for UI work in this day and age. And "just use Tile" is not exactly a good answer.

The real answer is a "show me how it actually helps me right now, don't tell me". That would involve a lot of legwork: finishing the rough edges in Tile, an up-to-date and robust Ruby binding, full documentation, some fantastic production applications as examples, and community support to answer questions, help people along, and so on.

That's a lot of effort. And that's the problem when a community has deteriorated, been marginalized and cannot attract the young blood — the effort just isn't there (and yes, I'm part of the problem). Don't get me wrong, the current efforts are great news for the installed base, but the level of effort to get beyond that would be tremendous.

Challenge for geek businesses.

Add a new category to your bug tracker called "company". Use it to record "bugs" in your company's operations and processes, making sure to accurately record proper severity and/or priority. Are you brave enough to try this? (I'm not yet...)

Tangible Computing.

Check out these two USB add-ons: here (via BoingBoing) and here (via The Register).

Adobe Acrobat and Real-Time Conferencing.

If you're at all interested in real-time collaboration stuff, check out this article about how Adobe has integrated their already excellent Breeze technology into the practically ubiquitous Acrobat. While I admit I haven't been keeping up with this stuff, reading through the discussion about the feature list and interface, I have to say I'm very impressed — to say nothing of what a fantastic move it is to integrate it right into Acrobat.

DabbleDB.

Had a good play around with DabbleDB, which I'd looked at a bit a little while ago. The basic idea is that it's a "web 2.0" tool that lets you easily create and evolve simple database-oriented applications; so each application can have one or more tables (called categories), and each table has fields of different types, you can define ways to display lists, sort them, filter, etc. For example, I put together a simple lightweight "bug tracking" application.

The emphasis is on making this easy to do, and also on sharing with others. It's not a replacement for "real" databases, nor is it intended to be. The target is the many people in small-medium businesses who regularly try to use Excel as a database (ok, guilty.. all my license info gets stored in Excel). It's a sizeable niche.

This is done by the guys who are behind the Seaside web framework for Smalltalk (they're based in Vancouver - yay Canada!). Interaction is very AJAX-y, and relatively smooth, though there are still some rough edges in it. More impressive though than I thought it would be.

Interesting to consider a ProjectForum-like treatment of the idea, where you could do a version of this that could be easily installed inside an organization, with people accessing that internal server via browsers. I'm not up on what other tools might be out there that do this sort of thing, but might be another nice little niche...

Screen sharing.

While there are a lot of screen sharing services out there these days, LiveLook (in beta) aims to be very simple (single click) to start and easy to join, and works cross platform - Windows, Mac and Linux. At least in the current incarnation its definitely not a speed demon, but the basics work as you'd expect. It's a signed Java applet running this, so "no software install" like most tools require.