Fair Disclosure

We live with 3 pets. Two dogs and one cat. The dogs are black and tan. The cat is gray and white. The end result is that we have hair of every pretty much every possible color just about everywhere, all the time. If you too are a multi-pet owner you may know of the fur dust-devils that can take over your kitchen floor, the inevitable dirt by the door where the dogs come in or the “track proof” kitty litter that inevitably gets tracked. Over time, in order to properly clean up after the pets we’ve invested in a very good vacuum cleaner and a steam cleaner to go with it. Not to mention a weekly two hour visit from a professional cleaner. The Roomba has taken a lot of the work out of it, and that’s a good thing because if there’s one thing I hate it’s doing dishes by hand. Followed closely by vacuuming.

First Impressions

After fully charging the unit, we set it loose on the main traffic areas of our house – the living room and the kitchen. The first time we ran it the area was left pretty much ‘as is’ and the Roomba needed help a couple of times when it got caught up around chairs, table legs and an edge of a couch. The dirt trap was also stuffed to the max with pet hair after an hour. I blame the fact that the couch it DID fit under had probably gone way too long without us pulling it away from the wall. My Bad. At the end of an hour, the floor was very visibly and noticeably cleaner.

Week One

Let me let you in on a little secret. I’m a tech guy. In practical terms what does that boil down to? Wires. I’ve got em. Where I can, they’re routed, fixed and generally hidden, but in the shady recesses behind desks where Roombas might venture they can be found, exposed and vulnerable to the elements. Turns out it’s not that big a deal. As things the Roomba got stuck on revealed themselves, they slowly got evaluated, assessed, and in some cases removed. Getting caught under the edge of one couch? Solved by some $1.99 plastic furniture lifts. Stuck rotating around the legs of a wooden chair for 10 minutes? Chair ended up in the garage. The dirt trap was still pretty much full after every run, one per day in a different part of the house everyday, but at the end of a week the house was looking much better overall. And as a side benefit there was a whole lot less crap lying around on the floor.

Week Two

So by this time there’s a really big bonus to note about the Roomba over a conventional vacuum. Not only does it not require a lot of direct interaction to get your floors clean, but it also doesn’t make the pets go mental when you turn it on. One sure way to make the dogs and cat disperse in an immediate fashion is to turn on the vacuum cleaner. The noise drives them out of the room as far as they can get and it takes awhile for them to settle down when you finally shut it off.

The Roomba on the other hand doesn’t appear to phase them in the least. It’s (reasonably) quiet for starters. It also isn’t really all that “aggressive”. Our big dog, Aurora, a 13 year old Black Labrador/Dane cross, has a habit of falling asleep right in the middle of the room. The Roomba happily cleans right around her, so much so that she might turn her head to look at it, but rarely is it enough to make her actually stand up. Keep in mind this is when it runs directly into her. The pressure sensor on this piece of hardware is pretty impressive. Before I let it run into Aurora, I did test it out myself first of course – what do you people think I am, a monster? In this way the robot most definitely appears to obey the first law; when it runs into something it immediately stops and tries a different direction. And it stops on a dime. The cat thinks that we bought him a new toy. He chases and jumps on the Roomba like it was covered in catnip. LMAO.

After two weeks we figured out how to properly clean out the unit. Finally breaking down and RTFM helped to figure out how to clean the filter. The chassis is pretty much hollow so a lot of dirt and hair had accumulated there, something you can fix by pretty much shaking the whole thing over a garbage can, preferably outside. The carpet rollers also needed a little attention by this point, as pet hair and assorted other things(thread, plastic twist tie, etc) had been rooted out from the floors of our home and wrapped around the spindle. At this point our cleaning lady, a wonderful woman who has contributed much to keeping our house livable, not only noticed the difference but took the initiative to suggest tackling some of the less “essential” cleaning aspects and generally taking things up a notch: removing all the sink and shower knobs, cleaning in and around them; cleaning the oven(more than the once/yr average); removing all of the window screens, cleaning both them and the windows they’re covering. Did I mention she also takes the dogs out for us once a week? If you’re around #yyj and you want someone hard-working and dependable to give you a hand I can highly recommend this lady. Thank you Sandy!

The trap is still pretty much always full.

Week Three

Stepping it up a notch, the Roomba is now being run 2 or 3 times a day, as much as possible covering the 3 primary areas of the house: the bedroom/bathroom areas, the dining room, and the living room and kitchen. All told it’s about 1800 square feet, broken down in order to roughly 600, 400 and 800 sq/ft chunks. The dirt trap now is starting to not be full. The Roomba is covering more territory every day, all of the electrical cords are tucked away where they can’t be harmed. The cat is now bored with the Roomba and merely takes one tiny step back when it threatens to run into him. The dogs continue to mostly ignore it. The house actually looks better than when we moved in. Despite the two month lifetime stated for the filter, I retired the first filter because it was, quite frankly, toast. Fortunately along with the “special” price 3 more filters were included in the box with the original purchase.

Week Four

Keeping up with things now is a lot easier. The Roomba runs once or twice a day, usually either right after we get home from work(in an area of the house we’re not in), and at night when we’re going to bed. The noise is pretty minimal so running it downstairs in the high-traffic areas at night while we’re sleeping works out really well. It’s also become kind of automatic to deal with. If we’re walking past the place where we charge the Roomba and the light is “green” we pretty much grab it and take it somewhere to do it’s job. If we’re walking past it in the hallway and the light is “red” then it’s time to empty it out and take it back to the charging station. That and remembering to pick up the limited number of things left hanging around on the floor that it can get caught on is pretty much it.

Is it worth it?

Well unless you’ve been paying really bad attention so far, you already know that I think it is.
So here’s the breakdown as I see it.

The Roomba cleans for between 7 and 14 hours per week. I can’t honestly say we ever averaged that much time pushing a vacuum before. The physical effort involved I would estimate at about 5 minutes or so per run, to clear up the floor, turn it loose and then come back and empty it later. So that’s about 30 to 60 minutes a week. And that is kinda the point of a robot isn’t it? Nothing like a division of labor that is 10% planning and 90% labor.

It cleans for approximately an hour every time, and takes a couple or three hours to charge back up to full. I haven’t been explicitly timing this, but it hasn’t varied a lot from this pattern.

It occasionally gets stuck. Personally I just think it’s kinda cool to watch it edge around the top of a staircase, and usually it’s sensible enough to pull back, but every once and awhile it just goes a teeny tiny bit too far and gets stuck slanted and bleating at the edge of the stair. Third Law in full effect here.

Similarly it seemingly hates the half inch foam mat we have under a painting easel, getting caught half-on/half-off the corners of it. With the more expensive Roomba models these are the kind of problems that seem to be usually solved by virtual “walls” which mark boundaries the Roomba should not cross. For us that bought the cheap version, some pretty simple measures close the gap. For the top of the stairs? We already have a gate(s) in place for the pets and it works equally well to keep the Roomba away from places it should not go. For the for mat? Sometimes a chair, sometimes a pair of shoes – whichever one happens to be closer at hand at the time. Weight really isn’t a big factor, but height is. If a surface is high enough and the Roomba bumps into it, it just back off. If it’s too low, the Roomba tries to climb it. Long story short is if there’s anywhere you don’t want your Roomba to go, you can gate it easily with just about anything that will stand in its way and is more than an inch high. As already stated this includes, but is not limited to, pet gates, furniture, people and pets themselves. This pretty much covers the Second Law.

If it gets stuck, well… so what? So far this thing has been so careful that it’s trained us to better behavior. Less things to get stuck on means less things on the floor means less clutter and more things in a closet or on a shelf. If it gets stuck on what’s left, it beeps to tell you so. Give it a kick and set it back on its merry way. The most you lose is <1hr of cleaning time, and you get the balance back with nothing more than moving it around and hitting the button again. Honestly with one simple color/status changing button you get all the information you need about the Roomba just by happening to walk by it. Simple UI FTW!

For the truly interested out there, I tracked this month or Roomba in a Google spreadsheet. Blame my OCD if you want. And for those of you who might be reading this who aren’t total geeks, the Three Laws of Robotics are classic Asimov science fiction.

Date	Duration	Areas	#TimesEmptied	Notes
1/30/2010	~45m	Den + kitchen	1	Totally full
1/31/2010	~30m	Master bedroom + dressing room	1	Totally full
2/1/2010	60m+	Den + kitchen + storage	3	had trouble getting into storeroom past easel; stuck under couch in places; sticks in corner of couch by glass doors consistently; realized I wasn't emptying trap properly after 2nd time; trap was full even after emptying properly the last time
2/2/2010	60m+	3 bedrooms upstairs	3	trap was half to 3/4 full each time
2/3/2010	<60m	front room	2	trap was full first time(40m), almost empty the 2nd; light turned yellow after 20m, orange after 40m; tray got caught on persian rug and fell off; first time died under 1h
2/4/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	2
2/5/2010	~60m	3 bedrooms + bathroom	1
2/6/2010	~45m	living room	1	pretty full, not totally
2/7/2010	~60 m	living room	1	full
2/7/2010	~60 m	2 bdrms & bath	1
2/8/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & bath	1
2/8/2010	~60m	Den + kitchen + storage	2
2/9/2010	~60m	front room	1
2/10/2010	unattended	front room	1	got caught under couch, weren't home to correct it
2/10/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	3
2/11/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/11/2010	~60m	whole downstairs	3	chassis was filled with crud, need to be more thorough when emptying; trap fell off
2/12/2010	~60m	front room	2	caught under couch
2/12/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/13/2010	~60m	front room	1	trap was only about a third full!
2/14/2010	~60m	front room	1
2/14/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/14/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	1	run when going to bed, minimal noise
2/15/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/16/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1	full, but not compact full
2/16/2010	25 min	den, back room	1	1/2 full
2/17/2010	~60 min	den	1	1/2 full
2/17/2010	~60m	3 bdrms & both baths	1	1/2 full, finished completely underneath a bed :(
2/18/2010	~60m	front room	1	1/2 full
2/19/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1	Got stuck once early on, 1/2 full
2/20/2010	~60m	whole downstairs	2	Full both times
2/20/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/21/2010	~60m	3 bdrms & both baths	1	full. Got stuck hanging on lip of stairs.
2/21/2010	60m+	den+kitchen+storeroom	3	full each time
2/21/2010	~60m	whole downstairs		run when going to bed, minimal noise
2/22/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/23/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/24/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	1
2/24/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	1	fun for the guests!
2/25/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	1
2/26/2010	~60m	front room	1
2/27/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths	1
2/28/2010	~60m	whole downstairs	1
2/28/2010	~60m	2 bdrms & both baths & closet	1
3/1/2010	~60m	front room	1	real problems with the couch and persian carpet; got stuck on both more than once
3/1/2010	~60m	den+kitchen+storeroom	1

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Gource

Gource is a software version control visualization program with support for Git, Mercurial, and with a tiny bit of extra effort, CVS and Subversion. It’s available as a macport install, as is the ffmpeg program used to stitch together a series of screenshots into the final video.  All of these visualizations were created with Git or Git-svn. When the Gource program is running it brings up an interactive window so you can interact with it to a degree, affecting the camera, zoom, etc.  The default resolution is 1024×768 but I tried to bump it up to 1920×1080. I’m assuming that stretched the limits of the rendering, as there’s quite a bit of pixellation in the final product; either that or the ffmpeg params need to be tweaked. The three visualizations on this page were all created using this one-liner command line invocation (broken down here over several lines for readability).

gource -1920x1080 --highlight-all-users --bloom-intensity .3 -a 1 -s .01
     --hide-dirnames --hide-filenames --stop-at-end --output-ppm-stream -
     | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i -
     -vcodec libx264 -vpre default  gource.mp4

Groovy

From the initial commit on August 28, 2003, Groovy has come a long way. I tried the Gource provided python script to translate an svn log file into the required format the first time, but cloning the repository with git-svn seemed to produce better results. It’s interesting to see that the overall structure of the Groovy project doesn’t look like is has changed very much over the years. I recognized a lot of the names you see on the screen. Be sure to watch the 1080p version if you’re having trouble reading the text and see if you can’t find some recognizable committers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grails

Starting on Sunday March 14, 2004 here’s how it all unfolded, at least from the perspective of the public Git repository. Grails looks like it grew a little more spontaneously than Groovy; there are more frequent restructurings and some transitions that seem to cover a whole lot of ground in very little time. In particular watch out for the burst of activity in the summer of 2009.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Griffon

September 17, 2008 marks the first commit for Griffon and this short but sweet video explodes right from the start. Benefiting greatly from the Grails model this project shows a lot of progress in a very short time indeed. Most, if not all, of the names you see here you probably caught in the previous two videos as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s the Point?

Watching these gives me (and maybe you) some appreciation for how much effort over time it takes to bring a new language/framework/technology to maturity and all of the individual contributions that go into it. Gource provides a lot more detail into the actual structure if you want to dig in. For purposes of keeping these images fairly uncluttered I removed file and directory names and just focused on the committers and the general structure. I think I gained a git of insight into how a codebase can evolve, and properly appreciate that organizing the increasing complexity of an ever-growing system over time is not a simple job. Plus they look cool. Enjoy!

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This plugin integrates the IDE with one or more components of the Atlassian application suite. Multiple instances of Jira, Fisheye, Bamboo and Crucible can all be configured and used to streamline the development workflow.

Jira

This is perhaps the most essential piece of the puzzle, and inevitably the part a developer is going to interact with the most – the issue tracker. From within the IDE Jira master view you can load filters(basically stored searches for issues), do ad hoc searches and start work on a particular issue. If you drill down to a particular issue you can comment on it, assign it to yourself or another user, log work against it and generally manage it in most of the ways you can from the Jira web interface. Granted it’s not quite as pretty as the web interface, but the essential information and interaction is all there, and if you’re missing something an action is provided to open any issue in a web browser.

What really works for me is how the interaction supports my general workflow so closely:

Granted, I’m not the best at remembering to pause the timer, but being confronted with the time when I commit forces me to honestly evaluate how much time it took to complete the task when it’s clearest in my mind. And incidentally, while we’re here, the option to automatically organize imports in the commit dialog, a built in IDE function, has saved my butt from maven dependency-analyze any number of times.

It’s also convenient that you can see all comments and attachments for issues – viewing a screenshot describing a UI issue is pretty much essential after all, don’t you think?

Bamboo

So once your code is committed, a build is kicked off on Bamboo. Hopefully all goes well, but if any build you’re listening to fails the IDE will give you a message to that effect. You also have access to changes, tests and any associated build logs. And whether or not your build does fail, stacktraces from the log are immediately available and clickable in the IDE. In addition, you can manually trigger builds and label or comment them.

Fisheye

Integration with Fisheye is bi-directional between the IDE and the Fisheye webview. Context menus are available on right clicks in the IDE that open a file in Fisheye. And in the Fisheye web app clicking an IntelliJ icon will open a file in the IDE. It should be noted that this feature only appears to be available with Fisheye 2. I know because I’ve been missing it in Jira Studio, which still uses the 1.6 version of Fisheye.

Crucible

This is the one integration I’ve used the least so far, primarily because I don’t have Crucible installed locally for testing and again it seems a lot of the power of the integration is only available with version 2. The documentation certainly seems to suggest more rich functionality than I’ve found available anyhow. Fisheye and Crucible are actually bundled together for installation, so the Jira Studio version appears also restricted to the 1.6 version – for the time being at least. Mostly the Crucible integration is convenient because it provides messaging when reviews are assigned or commented.

Documentation

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even look for these until writing this blog post. Configuring and using the plugin is very straightforward, provided you’re familiar with using these Atlassian tools at least. Nevertheless, I did discover a few additional bonuses and as usual the docs are both complete and up to date.

Overall

Really the point of using this plugin is to significantly reduce context switching; as much as possible your work is concentrated in one interface, and for the vast majority of cases you only need one piece of software running to get the job done. Where context switching is inevitable, this software tries to make it as “one-click” as possible. The end result is to put the power of your Atlassian products front and center in the IDE, where us developer types spend most of our working lives. Now, if only Jira Studio gets updated to the latest available software versions, because I’m dying to try out side-by-side diffs for Crucible reviews in IntelliJ!

Anyhow, if you use Atlassian tools the Connector is well worth checking out. And you Eclipse users aren’t left in the dark either. I can’t vouch for it’s quality, but there is an equivalent plugin for Eclipse available as well.

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1. Atlassian: Here Be Dragons
2. Griffon support in latest Intellij EAP
3. Thanks for the shirt Atlassian!

The Atlassian Toolbox

Jira is the cornerstone of the stack and, with the addition of the ‘Agile’ GreenHopper plugin, is an ideal tool for tying together issue tracking and project planning in one easy to work with bundle. Crucible and Fisheye provide peer review and repository browsing. The Confluence wiki provides a great framework for organizing and sharing knowledge. Bamboo is an extremely versatile continuous integration platform. Crowd provides SSO and identity management. And they all can link together nicely to provide consolidated views spanning the entire stack.

Here Be Dragons

Late in 2009 Atlassian started a new marketing campaign geared towards smaller deployments: $60 to purchase 10 user licenses for the entire software stack, including 30 day trial licenses with support. Previously some of the applications were available for personal use(2 or 3 Users only) at no cost, and indeed I have a Confluence install I’ve been using for the last year, but this deal makes the entire stack available at what is really a very reasonable price. And they even include a fun, if slightly corny, tutorial which guides you through installing and configuring all of the applications to link them together. So here’s my experience ‘Slaying the Dragon’.

The very first thing I discovered was that my years old Intel iMac with 1GB of memory just wasn’t going to cut it. The recommendation is for 2GB of memory and “No other applications running — just the operating system, JAVA, PostgreSQL and the Atlassian applications” so I of course took that as an opportunity to ask Santa for a memory upgrade.

Ten days later, with 4GB of brand new RAM installed I got much further than the SLOW grind that was Crowd + Jira + Confluence + iTunes fighting with each other over 1 gig of memory(shudder). Aside from a couple of minor hiccups, everything installed without hassle and the instructions were nothing short of spectacular. I did have to make some tweaks to the postgres database configuration upping the number of allowed connections; apparently this setup is more than a little connection hungry, tsk tsk. Crowd is the one application I’m least familiar with, and integrating with it seemed to be the most actual ‘work’ but hey – if manually copying around and modifying a couple of configuration files is the biggest hassle involved in providing SSO for 5 enterprise apps, I think I can live with it.  I am probably going to have to bite the bullet and invest in a more practical server machine, but I’m pretty sure the 2010 budget can find room for at least one new computer.

Been There, Done That, Where’s my T-shirt?

I’ve already started to plan out milestones for the new year’s projects in Jira, so I guess I’m already committed to paying the $60 when my trial period expires. Especially when Atlassian is donating all proceeds to Room to Read. I get enterprise-ready software for cheap AND all the money goes to a good cause. Win-win in my books – and a great job by Atlassian(on both the software and the charitable good.) Did I mention they’re sending out free t-shirts to anyone who completes the challenge?

In the gallery below is a screen shot for the single Jira Dashboard view you end up with at the end of the exercise. It ties together activity from each of the applications into one homogeneous view, and each widget is color coded to represent where the data is being drawn from. If you’re looking for an affordable solution to help streamline your work at home or in a small development team, check it out!

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I’d pretty much shelved them until I was reading over the list of new features and saw the new support for bluetooth stereo. Sure enough I dug the headset out of a box, charged it up and took the dogs for a walk – with beautiful wireless stereo sound piped out of my iPhone. The connection was very solid and the sound was at least comparable to the earbuds that come with the iPhone.

A quick test indicates that the microphone works great for phone calls as well, making these a great alternative to the earbuds. The lack of wires is a big bonus since the majority of the time when I’m listening to music from the iPhone it’s when I’m out with the dogs – and they do love to jump up and “accidentally” rip the earbuds off my head.

I thought I was doing pretty great with cut and paste and spotlight in the new feature set, and I get this added bonus for the same price as the rest: free . Thanks Apple! I can even almost forgive you the $10 charge to update the iTouch OS(tsk tsk).

If you’re interested in a good headset for the iPhone, here’s a nice article with some alternatives. I’m also EXTREMELY glad to see that I seem to have gotten a good deal on the headset, since they’re still listed online at $49.95US and I paid less than half of that, including shipping and handling. Thanks tigerdirect.ca!

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I’ve been a long time fan of GMail, and I have tried a bunch of the other ‘major players’ in the email game over the years: Netscape, Yahoo, .Mac, Hotmail and every silly @provider.com webmail account that they give you with your inet subscription. Those last have all been universally hideous pits where nothing but spam goes to die, BTW. GMail in general kicks them all. Put it together with Firefox and some of the excellent available extensions and you see where web apps can really shine. Enough touchy feely stuff, what I needed to know this week was how Google Apps could replace some of the key features I depended on from Exchange, and here’s what I came up with.

Feature Comparison

OK, so I didn’t make a huge secret out of it with the blog title where I stand on this faceoff, but having managed to achieve in a few hours what it took me days and lots of Googling(irony intended) to do with Entourage is pretty compelling. I was able to transfer content, establish essentially the same organizational structure, and replace each and every Entourage/Exchange feature I care about with less than two hours of fiddling. Google Labs, Firefox extensions and just the general “hugeness” of the Google community promise me far better access to updates and enhancements than I could ever hope to get (at least for free) from the Microsoft alternative.

I will not say for one minute that Entourage and Exchange did not work for me. They did what they were meant to do, and in a lot of cases(especially on the iPhone) they did it very well. But even in just a pure browser environment, where a lot of the UI “bling” still doesn’t keep pace with a competing desktop application, the general functionality and usability of Google Apps just plain outshines Entourage – and a lot of other email clients as well. Exchange server VS Google for mail – well the one is only as good as the machine you host it on, and is subject to any availability problems that machine might have. Google is pretty much good everywhere, anytime.

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For a little background, this is the same company that first released Mathematica almost 21 years ago. They’ve had a very long time to refine and expand their repertoire as well. Mathematica, with its somewhat weird and wonderful syntax, is in general a powerful language and platform for computation and visualization. Or so the PR materials claim. They also boast that it is “The world’s most productive programming language.” We’ll just wait and see, now won’t we – and potentially have a Groovy showdown to answer that question.

So what are the Mathematica guys doing now?

They’re Giving It Away!

Yup. Free, as in beer. The comprehensive knowledge-base and set of algorithms developed in Mathematica are backing the Wolfram|Alpha site(WA from here on in cause it’s too much to type, tyvm), providing some great visualizations and, at least so far, some pretty good interpretations for natural language queries.  While hit and miss for some things that WA doesn’t know about(yet), what it does know it shows off pretty well. Locations resolve to census and geographical data, and what good mashup would be complete without Google Maps integration.  It can give you a comprehensive weather report, for now or for a decade in the past.  The part that caught my attention was the easy access to genomic data. I was delighted today to find that they have a fairly comprehensive library of “Life Sciences” data, algorithms and examples available. If you enter a genome sequence such as AAGCTAGCTAGC you get chromosomal matches. Information on proteins, SNPs and other biological tidbits is also readily available.

There are a couple of catches here, of course.  No robots allowed, although how they will enforce this I do not know. If you use the content somewhere else, give appropriate credit – citing sources is hardly painful for good info. No reverse-engineering, etc to try and steal their product or algorithms. And no commerical use allowed, which stands to reason coming from a company whose flagship product appears to start with a $295 home edition pricetag. That last one leads me around to the topic of this post.

How much to subscribe?

They’re not being at all coy about their intent to monetize WA. I couldn’t find a pricetag anywhere, but you can bet that their subscription link has been clicked a few times today. With promises for API’s, the potential for companies to purchase/rent their own private WA servers, and delivering the content through a browser powered by a single text input – these are some pretty compelling selling points, at least IMO. It’ll be interesting to see where the bottom line is for this potentially powerful service. In the meantime, they’ve done a fantastic job of getting the world at large to load test their software for free. And if they ever put out a free developer version, you’ll be seeing a future post. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for some indication of how much it’s going to cost. If the price matches the hype, it won’t be cheap, unfortunatley.

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In particular, when I bought a new Macbook Pro not so long ago, the sync allowed me to turn on the laptop, plug in an ethernet cable and enter my MobileMe identity – and that was it. When the sync was done, I immediately had access to my wireless network at home (KeyChain passwords sync’d seamlessly) – no trying to find, copy down and manually transfer my encryption key! That in particular is handy since I have over a dozen wireless network configurations stored.

Another nice to have, since my employer uses an Outlook system for email, was the Entourage sync. Or at least it would be if the damn thing didn’t keep duplicating all of my calendar entries and contacts! When I noticed it the first time I said to myself : “not perfect, but I can live with it for the convenience it provides”. By the time I started getting calendar events showing up on my iPhone for the fourth time, I said enough was enough and went Googling.

Starting with this article on the Entourage support page, I ended up reading this over on MacWorld, which brought me to the iCal Dupe Deleter. That took care of the iCal problem in under 20 minutes with less than 10 button clicks. Not bad – tnx to the creator of that software John Maisey, it worked fast, correctly and exactly as advertised.

I haven’t yet done the same for the iPhone, but it looks like iTunes supports a sync option to just replace the info on the phone and start anew, so I anticipate no problems.

Seeing as how it appears that neither Microsoft or Apple have anything planned to address this obvious problem in the software interaction(strange that those two don’t see eye to eye), it’s fantastic that the community out there in intarweb land is so great at sharing ways to address it. So let Mac and Windows fight over my stuff, I still win. Nyah nyah!

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Upgrading the previous install caused the app to crash every time after a second or two. A quick reinstall fixed the problem, and really it is a small price to pay for free software.

There also appears to be an issue or two with a disappearing save button. And the first time I entered this post, it apparently got lost in translation becuase although the new post showed up in WordPress, the title was the only thing populated.  Oh, well – the button problem is already in bug tracking and if I REALLY wanted, I could just fix it myself since it’s open source and available for download. Aaaah, if only I had the time to learn how to be an iPhone developer right now – maybe next month.

In the meantime I’m just going to say a bit thank you to the developers of the application and use it as much as possible. Don’t worry guys – I promise to file bug reports

In other news, I’m looking forward to the new Griffon In Action book coming out – but that’s another blog post.

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I saw a lot of familiar software, things like the CLC Workbench and BioJava and a multitude of single purpose apps to facilitate research and analaysis for proteomics, genomics and other disciplines.  The majority of the applications have been built and accumulated over the course of years, mostly on linux and all either open source or just plain free.  They’re pretty rough around the edges – not a lot of flashy GUI’s here, mostly command line interfaces and simple single window apps. Reminds me of why there’s a need for software like I write – to provide a workbench for managing the multitude of different activities scientists do on a day to day basis, and to help organize the giga-bytes of experimental data that gets created along the way.

This particular distro was pretty impressive, had everything installed that I would expect(and a bunch of things that I had no clue about – no biology PhD here I’m afraid). And fresh – all of the installed software was up to date, which I have yet to see on a downloaded VM image.

A big thank you to NEBC for putting out this well thought out – and visually beautiful – distribution, and to VMWare for making virtualization such a piece of cake.

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Whoops, spoke too soon – looks like they’re testing the new version, complete with landscape mode, as we speak. I look forward to seeing it on the app store soon.

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