On the crossroads: a series of gaudy sports bikes. Machine after machine starting up and convoying out. Men and powerful machinery in the city late at night. Nearby the cafe staff sharing a cigarette at the end of the night shift.
MacBook Word Processing Part Two
Well now, hold the line, since writing my last post Writely finally opened for registrations again, NeoOffice posted Beta 2 and I also decided to give Mariner Write a go.
So then, first impressions? Well first of all NeoOffice Beta 2 is a big jump up. Performance is much better and the whole thing looks a lot slicker while retaining the great OpenOffice functionality I know and love. This is such an improvement that I am not sure I need to use something lighter like AbiWord.
Writely is something I have been waiting a long time to use as I only heard of it after the Google buyout when they closed registrations. So does it live up to such long held expectations? Well the short answer is yes in that I am not disappointed by it in the least at the moment. Naturally as a web-based word processor it has its strengths and limitations. I certainly like being able to snatch a moment at work to write something up and not have the hassle of working with a USB drive or anything similar. I haven’t tried the ODT export yet but if it works as advertised then the integration with OpenOffice is going to be a big win for me as it will allow me to mix the applications while keeping the data consistent.
So far Write just isn’t getting a look in although I did download the Mariner MacJournal software at the same time and that looks quite good.
MacBook Word Processing Part One
Since getting the MacBook I’ve been in need of a decent Mac word processer. I have NeoOffice and OpenOffice for the heavy duty stuff (and to be honest the ports are a bit heavyweight/ponderous too so you’re rarely tempted to crack them open for writing a little blog posting like this) but there is then a gap between them and TextEdit (which is what I am using now). The OpenSource alternative is AbiWord and I cannot deny that it is fast, usable and has some of the necessary functions for article writing (such as Word Count) however there is no denying that the WYSIWYG element of the processing window leaves a lot to be desired particularly in the area of font kerning. The best commercial alternative I’ve found so far is Mellel. That has the required features and a pleasing appearance as well as native performance.
However it also has its quirks such as a poor styling system, a strange desire to hyphenate words rather than do normal paragraph alignment. Hyphenating words automatically is only really of interest if you want to print the document from the application which is actually, in my view, the minority case. Most times my work is either transferred to the web or sent on to a publisher who wishes to import the raw text and styles for formatting according to their tastes. The major problem though that affects both Mellel and Abiword and really makes me hesitate to purchase a license to Mellel is lack of a “Zoom to screen size” option. The MacBook’s wide screen means you really need to able to seamlessly stretch the program to the width of the window and then have the text automatically resize to an appropriate size. There is nothing worse than looking at a long narrow column of tiny text that leaves two-thirds of your widescreen unused.
In the end the decision was made for me by Mellel, the evaluation license ran out and despite downloading a later version of the application I could not renew the evaluation. The end of the evaluation meant I was locked out of my documents, or rather I could not export the document to external formats (fair enough) and I could not cut and paste from the documents I had created during the evaluation period. This last restriction really bugged me, partly because it was shit (you could still take text from the buffers it was just more complicated to do) and secondly because if you are genuinely evaluate something and decide not to use it in the long run you should be able to transfer the content of your documents while not using any of the fancy features the application offers.
This kind of thing is the argument that is used against closed source and I for one would prefer to spend time and effort on Abiword despite its deficiencies because the effort will never be wasted and the software will never be taken away.
NetBeans 5.5 Beta 2 versus Eclipse 3.2 (Round One)
At last I’ve downloaded both IDEs and installed them on the MacBook and the work PC. The first thing I discover is that scrimping on the MacBook memory was a bad move as NetBeans likes a lot of it. Eclipse also likes a lot of memory but seems to do a bit better with what is available.
First test! Auto-completion: the productivity feature I use most everyday. The basic test is to have a declaration of the type Number n = new… and then hit auto-complete. What I am kind of hoping is that I get presented with a list of sub-classes of Number; Integer, Long and so on. Eclipse kindly goes for Number as the completion, which thinking about it is probably what I want to do 80% of the time. NetBeans on the other hand goes for a Burton on the MacBook, switching to the PC tells me why. The auto-completion code is trying to build a list of every possible class it knows about including XML and CORBA classes. Neither is perfect but Eclipse is closer here.
Changing to Number n = new Int… closes the gap a lot. Both go with an alphabetical search rather than looking at the context but again NetBean falls foul of checking too many possibilities and not favouring the java package over anything else. It is also noticeably slower than Eclipse on the PC (I accepted the speed on the MacBook but on a low-end development machine I would have expected comparable performance).
So, my first impression is that Eclipse is faster to produce code in. However I need to be able to leverage that, what I probably want to do is write a body of code in Eclipse and then switch it between Eclipse and NetBeans according to what is stronger in the area of development, testing and deployment I want to do later. NetBeans does seem to import Eclipse projects; Eclipse (so far) does not seem to know what to do about NetBean projects. This is a real shame, I suspect there is a plugin that does it but I haven’t found it yet.
Todo Lists Todone
While having a look around at some functionality to help define my proposed Swing Todo List application I discovered Tada Lists from 37 Signals.
What a totally awesome app! Almost immediately my desire to get coding on my application died a death as I was no longer “scratching my itch”. In fact there is still some point to doing a lightweight ToDo list application I can take around with me on a pen drive but I have to say for most of my day to day stuff I have switched to using Tada. After all almost any work situation is going to find you connected to the web for other reasons.
A Scanner Darkly
Awesome! A Scanner Darkly is my favourite novel about drug culture and my favourite Philip K. Dick novel. To me it is the only novel that is really tells the truth about drug users rather than romanticising or condemning them. It is also quite a flawed novel which makes it ripe for adaptation and Richard Linklater has done an excellent job of making what is currently the definitive Dick adaptation for the big screen.
The film retains Dick’s ear for junkie patter with conversations and incidents that had me doubled up with laughter with the idiocy and veracity of it all. It also has the paranoia and psychosis of drug culture, capturing perfectly the false camaraderie of those united only by their drug of choice. Ultimately any drug user becomes alienated from the rest of the world (something the film explicitly mentions in the opening scene) and that strange mix of bonding and estrangement is perfectly captured. There is one perfect scene where Bob and Donna are sitting on a sofa, each holding a cushion. When Bob asks to touch Donna instead she freaks out (though it a slightly less coherent way than presented in the book).
The protagonist’s central dilemmia of having to spy on himself is Kafkaesque and a kind of endlessly relevant theme but the film also incorporates a dialog about the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. It is less condemnatory about rehab than the book and while remaining a very bleak kind of film it has a softer, more positive ending than Dick’s almost nihilistic conclusion to the novel.
The rotoscoping is great and really helps present an altered view of reality without being too gimmicky. Something like the scramble suit would just have looked a bit crap in a fully live action film I suspect (one of the dilemmas of V for Vendetta, of course, which struggled to complete with the highly stylized novel).
Performance-wise Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr. and Rory Cocherane all give excellent performances (although Downey Jr. is head and shoulders above the rest and refuses to simply turn in a stereotype). Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder probably divide people more but I have a soft spot for both and think they do well here. Keanu does get the pathos of Arctor’s position and his tragic end. I was moved by his monologues anyway…
It’s not you it’s me…
In addition to getting Java Certified today I also had the weird experience of turning down a job offer. This is something I have never done before and more unusually still it was a bloody good job offer too.
As a first born child I tend to cling to convention, conservatism and safe choices. Despite this my supposedly safe career choices often turn out to be much more fraught with risk than I had realised. So I decided to do something risky for once, turn down the safe job that I could easily have done and try for something more risky, something that I might fail at. There are other reasons of course and most of them shouldn’t really go on a public blog. Still the main point is that it was a thoroughly good offer but it wasn’t really right for me. I think that passing the exam today definitely helped me think that I can afford to take a risk and enjoy what comes out of it.
Certified!
I decided to buy a certification exam voucher at Christmas and for the last three months I have been doing a lot of studying for the exam. This morning there was a lot of trepidation as I made the trip to the assessment centre, not least because I paid for the test out of my own pocket and didn’t want to throw more money at retaking it.
I used three main methods of preparation: Sun’s own web-based practice exams, Sybex’s study guide and the excellent Examulator by Marcus Green. All three had their own virtues, Examulator was actually closer to the final exam format while the Sun practice exams had really good questions but were very pricey with only three mock exams all of which had to be taken in six months.
The Sybex book was spot on with its information; everything you need to know is in there and the example questions at the end of each chapter are good. However you need to check the errata and some sections are much better written than others. A particularly poor section is the explanation of Enums, it was only in the last week (via Examulator) that I discovered an Enum can be used anywhere a class is (I knew Enums where equivalent to classes but hadn’t made the connection) and therefore you could have inner and method Enums. All very odd and disturbingly last minute.
I knew when I started the exam that it would contain question formats and a UI that would be unfamiliar and that worried me. Also despite the geek stories of how easy the exam is and how so and so got 90% the first time they tried it after just three weeks revision I was fully expecting to fail the first time. After all this is meant to be some kind of global Java gold standard. I decided before I went in that I would make full use of the Mark and Review functionality and go for a first pass that would weed out the easy points. That technique definitely worked for me and settled me into the format and gave me some confidence to tackle the harder questions.
As for the questions you are not allowed to say too much (and it is not in your interest frankly to lower the bar for everyone else) but as someone who works with 1.4 day to day I found the 1.5 specific stuff (like Scanners, formatted printing and Templating/Generics code) harder because the reinforcement for the theoretical stuff just wasn’t there. Some of the drag and drop logic puzzles were very tricky and in the end for a few I had to just start playing around and eliminating some of the options to avoid analysis paralysis. I was also impressed how much stuff had been drilled into me about method overriding, variable scoping and Concurrent programming. I’m not sure how much of the certification course will come in handy in my regular work but I do now feel I have the confidence to go and do the consultant thing of looking at a bad piece of code, figure out what it is doing and how.
Why? Well obviously because I passed the test, I practically ran to the reception desk where the result was printed out and the minute someone said “congratulations” I just sagged with relief. Becoming Certified was a major goal I set myself this year and I have spent a lot of time, effort and money realising it. It feels fantastic to have achieved it more or less on time.
Of course what feels even better is that for the next few months my Sundays will not have to be centred around two hours of practice exams and when I take a book to bed it isn’t going to be the certification guide or Java in a Nutshell. From now on I can rely on the IDE to tell me what the API content is between version 1.4 and 5.0, hurrah!
I feel like I am getting my life and my free time back and that makes this achievement all the sweeter. After university I swore never to take an exam again and ten years isn’t a bad run to have stuck to a resolution. However the truth is that with globalisation competition for work in IT is still incredibly fierce despite the paucity of skilled labour in the UK. Certification is one of those things that shows you are willing to go that little bit further than the next candidate. Right now though the self-achievement is enough, the adulation can wait…
Vlogging versus Podcasting
A number of people have been trying to turn me on to the brave new world of vlogging recently. I have personal favourites in the form of Brookers and Ask A Ninja but the truth is that vlogging just isn’t ready yet.
Most of these shows (including cult favourite zefrank) make pretty much no use of the visual element of the format and would in fact be much better served out as a tiny audio download. Even Ask A Ninja with it’s endless vogueing and gurning is pretty much all about verbal puns and non-sequiters. For me the surest check is to simply close your eyes. If you’re still laughing or enjoying the show then it could be a podcast. I haven’t found anything yet that makes the visual element of the show indispensible in the way that, say, Brooker’s dance routines are to her skits.
I might be being reactionary or I might be hating Quicktime’s streaming capabilities but right now there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to vlogs except to prove that the technology is (almost) there to make them possible.
Continuing NetBeans 5.5 Adventures
Okay, I have to admit I am really starting to like NetBeans 5.5. Projects transfer between Mac and PC fine. You can put the projects onto a USB drive and work on them with no real issues or noticeable slowdown for the dinky projects I have. I also downloaded the Eclipse project importer and hell, it just worked.
As I’ve said before Eclipse 3.2 is still in Beta but I suspect that while it will remain a great Windows IDE NetBeans is probably going to be a vital accompaniment from now on.
Echo One 