Hi everybody!

I finally released version 1.5.1 of Simidude. This is mainly a bug fix version that improves upon version 1.5.0:

• Bug Fix: I tried to improve the way Simidude finds its own IP address.
• Bug Fix: Some people experienced creashes on older versions of Ubuntu
• Bug Fix: Some people experienced crashes when a hard coded network address was not available in the current network.
• Feature: I updated the used UI libraries to their respective latest versions. This might bring some improvements especially on Mac and Linux platforms.

This version is recommended for all users.

As always if you have any feature requests please let me know- loud and clear.

Hi everybody,

this is a short notice to let you know I released version 1.5.0 of the Network Clipboard and Drag&Drop utility Simidude.

It took me a while to finish this version but I believe I did hunt down and kill some bugs and also introduced some features.

The release notes for this version can be found here.

You can download or buy Simidude here.

Have a great day,

Torsten.

During the last few days I got reports from two customers that said the virus scanner AVG reported Simidude as a trojan horse:

As reported by the install4j people these issues should be resolved by now. You might need to update your AVG virus database if you were hit by this:

http://forums.avg.com/ww-en/avg-free-forum?sec=thread&act=show&id=39669

Have a great day,

Torsten.

Balsamiq twittered it first and I’d like to repeat this great offer of Atlassian here:

Until Friday, April 24 you can get Jira And Confluence for a price of $5 each for five users. Don’t nail me down on the specific time though- Atlassian is to my knowledge an Australian company and I don’t know which time zone they use for there offer…

Jira is a Java-based Enterprise grade bug tracking system, and Confluence is an Enterprise wiki with every feature in it you could dream of but where afraid to ask.

So if you are a startup you may want to take advantage of this great offer: http://www.atlassian.com/starter/

When using your Mac in a busy environment it might be important to shield it against unauthorized access. If you leave your desk to head for that donut of yours or to dispose of the many coffee you drank you may not want to leave your machine unattended.

There are two simple settings that will prevend any unauthorized access to your Mac:

1- Require a password when your Mac starts up

When the Mac starts it usually shows your desktop right away. This is convinient but also very insecure- especially if you leave your box unattended. Do the following to make OS X behave more appropriate:

• Start your settings dialog and open “user settings”
• Click on “Login Settings” (you may need to unlock that screen by clicking on the lock in the left corner of that screen”
• Choose “Automatic Login deactivated”
• Lock the screen and close.

2- Lock your screen when you’re away

I found two possible ways to lock the screen of my Mac. There first one is to enable “quickly change user”. You can set this up on the same screen as “Automatic Login deactivated”. You can set it up to display a small user icon in the menu bar. When you click on it you get the option to change to the login window which effectively asks for your password before it would let you see your desktop again. Unfortunately this one also separates UMTS connections and possibly other things.

Another way is to go through your keychain manager:

• Open the keychain manager
• Choose settings and enable “Show status in menu bar”
• This will show you a little lock symbol in the menu bar. Clicking it gives you the option to lock your screen. You need to enter your password to get back to your desktop. I like this option better- it looks more appealing and doesn’t seem to separate any connections.

Do you know any other security tips? Let me and others know be commenting here!

Have a great day!

–

A few days ago my new software Simidude received its first review.

The german blogger tAXMAN Tom was running a post about network clipboards- actually the perfect situation Simidude is made for.

I wrote a comment to this post and invited Tom to give Simidude a try which he did.Shortly after that his blog conceived a new post about Simidude in rather enthusiastic words.

The bottom line of his post: “For me Simidude is exactly what I’ve been looking for” (translated from german).

If you are a blogger I would like to offer you a free license of Simidude. Just write me an email with a link to your blog- I will unconditionally send you a license back. If you do use Simidude please consider writing a review in your blog…

On a personal matter: Tomorrow night my family and I will start into one week of hysterically longed for holiday. I will read my emails but my response time might be longer than an hour. I though do try to read me email every day…

So you to have a great week!

A while back I bought myself a Vodafone UMTS flat rate together with one of thise nifty UMTS USB sticks. Mine is a Novatel Ovation MC950D.

For Windows, there isn’t much to bother. The stick comes with the Mobile Connect Lite software installed in the memory part. These kinds of USB devices act as a memory stick when not activated otherwise or as an UMTS modem. So the first time you connect the stick it will connect as a memory stick and show you a directory with the setup files for the Mobile Connect drivers. Install them and the next time (you might need to reboot) you connect the stick it will reconnect as an UMTS modem.

That’s the way it works on Windows XP. On my Vista machine, it doesn’t automatically reconnect. I have to start the “LiteAuto.exe” application fom the stick manually. After that it works as expected.

Now for my travels I have bought this little beautiful MSI Wind Netbook. It comes preinstalled with Windows XP. Being me I created a dual boot setup with Windows XP in one partition and Ubuntu 8.10 in the other. BTW, this site describes some tweaks you should engage in in order to get your MSI Window running fully under Ubuntu. I for instance exchanged the installed WLan card or an ” Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG” in order to make use of WiFi.

Now I also wanted to use my UMTS modem when working with Ubuntu. The first (semi successful)  attempt I made was by following the description in this blog post.

It worked, but I found it dreadfull to call some command line script in order to reconnect the stick as a modem. So I set it up as an exercise but didn’t really use it much.

Now these last days a ran across a site caled Betavine, a Vodafone research and community site where they publish, among others, UMTS card drivers for Linux.

I downloaded the “Autoinstall for Ubuntu Fedore SuSE” file, installed it:

sudo .vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta3-ALL-i386-installer.run

and, after a reboot of my machine it just worked!

I inserted the Novatel stick and, after the stick had powered up, it would show a new entry in Ubuntu’s Network Manager (you access it from the little icon in the upper panel). When you click on the network Manager icon you see a new Network “Vodafone D2″ (or whatever network you are in), you can click on it and it will connect. Mighty cool.

Now I just need to get that stick working with my Mac…

–

I use Wordpress as my blogging system.

I’m very satisfied.

I need to keep it up to date.

Now it’s daunting to do the whole update ceremony by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there where an automated mechanism?

There is.

The german CT magazine published an article about using Subversion for automated updates. The idea is so simple I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it before!

Wordpress uses Subversion as it’s source control system. In Subversion you usually create a directory “branches” where a directory is created for each release branch. And then there’s a directory “tags” which contains a tag name (like “2.5.1″ which is the latest release as of this post) for every release.

Now what you can do is check out (svn co) the Wordpress code from the Subversion repository telling it you want to the, say, release tagged with “2.5.1″. Subversion will copy the code into a specified directory and will also keep the Subversion metadata (“.svn” directories) in place. Now whenever the fine folks at Wordpress release their version “2.5.2″ you “switch” the code over to that tag, Subversion automatically updates your local sources with the latest changes from the repository and you are done.

For all this stuff to work you need the Subversion client installed on your Wordpress host as well as ssh access to your account. To install Subversion on a Debian based system like Ubuntu you just say “apt-get install subversion” and it will be installed if not already present.

The Wordpress repository is located at http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress. If you want to checkout the “2.5.1″ release tag you would issues the following command:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1 blog

This would check out the release version “2.5.1″ into a directory “blog” which will be created by Subversion in the current directory. After that you need to adjust the file permissions so that your web server can access the files and directories. The following command is valid for Ubuntu (and probably other Debian-based systems as well):

chown -R www-data.www-data blog

Then, suppose Wordpress releases version “2.5.2″ you would issues the following commands from within your “blog” directory to update your local copy:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.2

That’s it.

The folks at Heise even released a GPL’ed script which encapsulates the Subversion commands. It even let’s you add specific language files to your Wordpress installation. I have attached the wptool to this post.

• wptool-10

As always I hope I could solve a few pain points in your life as a blogger…

Last year in October we went shopping for a construction company for our new home. Currently I have rented office space and I’d rather have living and working space together.

Since we life in a mountainous area houses are usually build here with brick and mortar. Now I don’t know how it is in your area but here there are probably more construction companies per village than… than… well, actually I don’t know. But there are many. You can choose your flavor from a vast variety. Do you want to build with sand stone, bricks, gas concrete- whatever you like there’s always a dozen companies that tell you that there solution is best.

Sounds familiar? The situation reminded me of the IT landscape. There are so many software shops and experts that try to sell you at their golden hammer.

The thing is it probably doesn’t matter if you use Java to build a system or Ruby or Python or PHP. Or you use Perl, that way you won’t need an obfuscator…

What is most important though is that the people who build your system or house know what they’re doing. It saves you a lot of trouble if you hire real experts. Not just marketing guys that know how to draw bubbles and present them to you as your nearly finished system ("We just need to generate the code…") but people who know of the technical details, who know how to communicate between teams so that the work flow does not get interrupted and, most of all, who you can trust.

Trust goes a long way. Now how did we come to choose the architect and construction company for our house? And they haven’t been the cheapest of all the options we had!

Several reasons: First and probably most important they have an excellent reputation in our area. I spoke to a dozen of home owners and they all recommended that company. That started to build my trust and in the end I believe it was a big weight in their favor.

Second they where (and still are) very friendly and honest about the things they would or would not do. For instance they did not try to sell me every possible energy saving option you can possibly stuff into your house but only what they believed is the best mixture of options. I never had the feeling that they tried to sell me as much as possible but rather they tried to cater my needs.

Third they brought in their own ideas. I had a basic type of building in mind when I started to contact the companies. Some tried to sell me as much as they could, some just took the plans and calculated a price. What Gerlach Bau did was to bring in their own experience and creativity. They really helped us develop a house that would fit better than our initial plans. They told us the things they would do different and really made us consider options we didn’t know existed.

Another very important thing is the proximity to us. The short distance makes it pretty easy for us to just drop by at their office and talk about things that are not yet clear. Or for them to meet with us at the site. As Ian has written in his blog it is so important to have a fast and easy way to talk to the one in charge (the one who really can make decisions).

Now that the construction is going along I can say I’m very pleased. They started in mid March (There is a lot of daunting paperwork involved before you are allowed to build a house on your own ground.). Next week we’ll have the topping out ceremony (that’s basically when the beams of the roof are in place).

There is a fantastic coordination between the different teams at the construction site. All the material they needed was delivered right on time- nobody had to wait. They call in right on time when things need to be discussed in order to maintain a smooth work flow.

Now what can we learn from that?

First they life and thrive in a very crowded market. They are located in an area where many companies try to compete by price (of course if you choose a company that does this you have to life with the result.)

Their greatest bonus is their reputation. of course they need to maintain it with each new customer which in turn builds a better reputation. They respond to our needs and wishes which gives them a great customer service.

All in all a lot of attitudes that you as a successful software company would want to copy.

Stick to the things you know and build your expertise in your area of interest. Then when customers approach you you have the chance to exceed their expectations by using your honesty and knowledge. Compared with a great customer service you will build a reputation for you and your company that soon will attract new customers.

That is my observation with the recent events that are going on here. What do you think?

I realize I haven’t written anything about myself for a while. I apologize.

Times where (and still are) very turbulent for me during those days. By the end of December I laid off my last employee which basically means I’m working alone now.

I finally realized that I was trying to keep something alive that wouldn’t survive naturally. The problem was that I was trying to establish a market for us in more than one different domains of expertise at the same time. See, I am a software developer. That’s what I do and what I love. I do this for over a decade now. I’m inclined to say that I know a fair amount about this software segment (java in particular) I’m working in.

On the other hand my employee was hired to develop our website which he did well. He is also quiet good with computer hardware and graphics design. So I was hoping to enter into these markets (web design and hardware) as well. Hmm.

Now, it’s not only hard to play in a market you know nothing about, it’s actually quiet impossible. There are different rules in web design, different customer types, different approaches to customers. I knew nothing about.

But anyway I was trying hard to preserve that place of work for him- until I finally realized that it’s draining all my energy! My plan was to safe money from my consulting work with customers so that I could later spent time developing my own products. But instead I spent money and- much worse- a lot of time trying to establish a market where I don’t belong to.

I would like to give you dear reader, this advice: don’t employ someone just because it’s a friend and you want to help! If that person would detour you from your business vision don’t go that way! It won’t help him much and it will burden your relationship.

It’s hard to believe how many mistakes one can make But I’m very thankful that they just cost time and money and not the future.

We (my family and I) are now recovering from the spent energy and experienced frustration and will focus AGYNAMIX into a proper direction. That means, we won’t go after more than one vision and thus tearing the company apart.

I already have some ideas of software products that would prove useful in my day to day work. I just have to decide which idea to pursue

And that’s actually another advice I’d like to offer: develop a product for a domain where you have a deep knowledge about!

My first product was a monitoring software for water supply companies. I went into this because a befriended electronics company needed a software to complete their portfolio. I didn’t know anything about this domain and made a lot of false assumptions during the course of development.

It’s best you can develop a software that you need to work with on a daily basis. This actually means you will discover their bugs and quirks. You will end up with a very polished product because, as a proud software developer you hate to work with crappy software

I sincerely hope that writing down those things will prevent others from some of their mistakes. Although I realize that some mistakes just have to be made in order to realize it really is wrong

See you!

I just read an interesting article about software scheduling strategies over at “Joel on Software“.

I found it rather interesting- so without further ado, here’s the link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Spam is a bad thing.

Spam is ugly, dumb- I don’t want it. Probably as much as you do.

A while ago I listened to one of the TWIT networks “Security Now” podcasts entitled “Are you human?“. In this episode Steve Gibson explains the Captcha mechanism (which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart“[Wikipedia]) and the newly created (at Carnedie Mellon University) reCaptcha mechanism.

Both are ways to solve the (actually pretty hard) problem to tell humans and machines apart (Are you a Who?) which is also known as the “Turing Test”. Now pattern recognition is getting better and better and computers are gaining rapidly in speed which makes this a harder problem with each passing year. There are now enough algorithms to fool the Captcha mechanisms used at big sites.

reCaptcha to the rescue.

There are several projects going on currently that try to digitize paper books so that they can be archived in digital form, read online, etc. It’s so much nicer to have a digital text- you can search it, reformat it. Well, you can’t decorate your house- maybe you can use the digital book pages to decorate your ranch in “Second Life™”?

Anyway, they use the best OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software available and are still not able to scan all texts for whatever reason. Now that means that those OCR algorithms out there are not able to digitize parts of those books correctly. reCaptcha then takes those words, obfuscates them even more and presents them to the user. Humans, of course, usually recognize the words and can tell the computer the meaning.

reCaptcha always presents you two words: one which is known to the system and one that isn’t. The unknown word is presented in multiple combinations with different known words to different users. When a certain amount of users have read the word the same way the words is declared to be known. It is then added to the dictionary of known words.

Using this algorithm you actually help digitizing those huge amounts of paper books!

So the moral? LEAVE MORE COMMENTS!

I’d be interested in your opinion upon this thing. Especially, would this mechanism discourage you to leave a comment?

Today I got a mail from Fogcreek with a download think to their latest beta of FogBugz.

We have it running  on a Windows 2003 server with a mysql 5 database. The upgrade from a recent version 5 was super easy I have to say. Just clicked through the installer and upgraded the database through the website. Everything ran smooth and without trouble.

The biggest most impressive change that has just leaped out of the browser and banged at my head was the wiki integration. With a WYSIWYG editor that actually works!

It was very easy to create tables and edit them or create links to other content. Speaking of links, one can of course link to a FogBugz case from a wiki page. When done the linked to case will reflect the wiki pages that contain links to this case.

Way cool! I love it so far.

Now, people love to write about success. Me too. But I guess it is more valuable to write about failure. Or mistakes one makes. The process of making mistakes, recognizing them and learning not to repeat them is probably one of the most important in a person’s life. And so it is for a company. A while ago I enjoyed reading Eric Sink’s article “Make more mistakes“. It speaks about the importance of making mistakes and learning from them. Now while I think everyone makes them, only few people decide to write about their failures. It just doesn’t feel as good as telling the world about your million dollar success…

Since I have no million dollar success to report about I decided to share some of the mistakes I made. In the hope to help you avoid the same traps.

It all began when I started my company back in 2005. I started solo in April and relatively quickly decided to employ people. It’s surely not wrong to employ someone- if there is a reason for. It all has to do with insecurity and lack of entrepreneural knowledge. And because I think I’m not too special in that aspect I suspect that there are others out there with the same problems which I faced.

First, there is vision. If you start a company, may it be solo or with people, you need to have a vision. You need to know where you wanna go to, what your goals are, your ethics, your philosophy. Of course that vision will change and adapt over time. But if you start without you’ll end up running circles and getting nowhere. It is very important that you as the leader of the company carry that vision in your heart. My vision was to have a company. I’m a software professional, a geek. I want to write great software. I want to do it the way I see fit. But my vision was not very deep rooted. I kind of took a short cut. I thought “Well, I’ll employ great people and provide a place for them to be creative. I just add their abilities and their visions to mine. So we end up with a great, unique powerful vision.” It won’t work!

If you as the leader can not provide the guidlines of your company you’ll end up having a bunch of talented people that still don’t fit in. Because you have not defined where you want them to fit in. If you as the leader do not have the vision how do you know who’s good for your job and who’s not.

So after I started solo someone wanted me to create a website for them. I was pretty busy developing Net-Herald, our monitoring application. But I knew some friend of mine who is very creative and has done websites before. Since he was looking for a job at that time I offered him a place in my company and thought “Well, maybe we can position ourself within this market. He is also a PC hardware expert, so maybe we can sell hardware to our clients, too.” So I employed him in August 2005.

In November 2005 we needed to develop a brochure for Net-Herald (did I say it, that’s our monitoring application). There was another friend moving up to our area who studied media design. So I thought “Maybe we can position ourself in that market, too. He is very creative. There surely are many great synergy effects. He can write the documentation for Net-Herald (our …), he can concept the texts on our website, etc.”

Now we created a few websites since then. And he did a great job designing that brochure. And we had some synergy effects.

But (that’s a huge, underlined, blinking red BUT)- these are no reasons for employing people! What were the reasons I did it in the first place:

• They where friends and I wanted to have them a job. And I thought it might be great to have friends around.
• I didn’t have a vision my own! I was just looking for opportunities. We thought: We are very good at our job. We can do a lot of things.

Now, it’s a special thing to have friends work for you. Beware! If the friendship came before the employment relationship then it can simply be that your friends expect you to handle them nicely. Never work late. Never work on Saturday’s. And you- you don’t want to kill the friendship. So you end up taking part of there work on your shoulder.

Concerning the second point: Of course, you can do a lot of things. But a lot of them are not in the center of your heart and they will be done mediocre. There is only a small subset of things that I can do really good. For instance we tried to sell Linux small business servers- with Open Exchange, Hylafax and all that kind of stuff. Why? because I had someone who can assemble the hardware and I needed work for him. Or we tried to sell VoIP contracts for the same reason.

Here is a big thing I learned: Do not employ someone and then seek work for him. Rather employ someone for the work you have that you can’t get done on your own. If you are not an expert in a field than it’s no fun to go in there because there are a lot of people who are better. Stay in your field of expertise, grow there, learn more. Find people who will work for you in your field of expertise!

Again, I made those mistakes because I had no clear vision! And actually, we are still about to define it! It is a process to find your identity. It takes time to grow into being a business. But if I had stayed on my own I would have been faster in finding the center of my venture. I want o develop software. I don’t mind changing the language or the domain I develop software for. But it’s about software. I’ve done a lot of database backed applications in Java- so that defines my current field of expertise. I’m willing to learn more and to move to different fields- but it will always be about software. And that’s large enough I’m looking for product opportunities within this field. Because this is what I know best and where I have the most expertise. I won’t try and do something alien to me. It’s not fun and the result won’t be great.

Another thing that kept me alive over the years was that I didn’t threw away that contacts I had with my former employer. So after a while I got a contract from him as a freelancer. That consulting business brought the money to feed me and my 2 employees. But that’s not the purpose of having employees. They are supposed to make mony for you, aren’t they? They are supposed to work on your field of expertise and help you grow a company.

So after more then a year I laid off one of my employees which relieved me a great deal from having to care for three. The other one is doing a great job in supporting our Net-Herald and other customers and maintaining our and our client’s websites.

Moral: I find the most important lesson here is the importance of a vision. A vision that is unique to you, not just borrowed from someone else. A vision that will sustain you in rough times. I vision that actually defines your identity and the work you want to do. There is no short cut in finding a vision. It takes time. But it’s worth it.

Dear reader, I’d love to receive feedback from you. Write about your experiences…

In the hope of being of value to those brave entrepreneurs out there.

I made some painful observations in friends companies that I don’t want to keep from you.

When I started AGYNAMIX in spring 2005 I was thinking to start the (ad)venture together with a friend. We had talked about the idea of founding a company and developing our own software the way we think is best.

When I talked about this to a close friend of mine he stressed the point that it is so important to know who is leading the company. Over the course of time you will have an argument about what is the right way and what is not- now, who decides in the end? If no one can make a decision because both own the company with an equal share you are stuck- you cannot make a move. Or you will try to find a foul compromise that will eventually ruin the company and your friendship.

Since I was the one who was having the vision and I was the one who quit his job I also wanted the right to make the final decision- which my friend (who stayed in his job) could’n agree with. So we agreed to disagree and I founded the company myself. Back then I didn’t see the impoartance of this so much but the more time passes the more I see companies struggling because they don’t have a lined up leadership.

I see companies where both partners have an equal share and they just cannot agree about the strategy of their firm. Maybe their both views are valid, but because they cannot agree they move very slowly- and that’s the worst thing of all. You spend so much time and energy arguing about what to do and how and when that you have no strength left for your customers!

So as an advice to fellows thinking about starting up- Decide who will make the final decision. Now I think it is good not to start  alone. If you have someone who will encourage you when time get rough and they will), but then there will also be times when you argue about the company’s future. Then you need to be able to move forward even if you do not agree.

Now go back to work

We had some intern work done lately.

Two of the results are a simple Tax Calculator and a port of TiddlyWiki to the Windows Vista™ Sidebar.

The Tax Calculator is useful if you have to recalculate between a gross and a net value of some amount of money. In the Calculator you just enter the amount and then push one of two buttons depending if you want to convert from gross to net or the other way round. You can grab a copy here.

The SideWiki is a port of the popular TiddlyWiki. As TiddlyWiki SideWiki runs within the IE engine that drives the Vista Sidebar. It does not need any server. You can use it to store your personal information in a wiki styled tool.

Also, if you follow the Getting Thing Done (GTD) (developed by David Allen) methodology, this tool is for you!

SideWiki is still kind of a beta since it lacks documentation and might still have a few rough edges. But give it a try and us the feedback.

Enjoy,

Torsten.

Hi everybody,

right now (well actually, a few minutes ago) I released a new version of the Docbook Publishing Tool Dopus.

I’m sorry for the quietness around but I was very busy with projects at my customers places, own projects and, of course, the very cool EclipseCon.

Anyway, without boring you to dust, here are the new features of this release:

• Some people reguested Docbook Slides support. Well, here it is. Dopus does not yet support SVG or htmlhelp for Docbook Slides (you are welcome to help me figure out why). But it does support: PDF, HTML, XHTML and the table and frame versions of HTML and XHTML.
  To create a Slides document, just type:generator.bat fluffyslides create slides

  After that, you can use these targets to generate output:

  • pdf
  • html
  • tablehtml
  • framehtml
  • xhtml
  • tablexhtml
  • framexhtml
• Dopus is now packaged on a Mac. Ant on Unix systems supports the setting of the executable flag for files. So now when you unpack the Dopus archive you don’t have to change the file mode of generator.sh anymore- it works out of the box.

You can download Dopus as usual in our download area. Enjoy!

Well, today was the last day of this conference.

It was a very exciting event. Since it was my first EclipseCon I can’t compare it to the previous ones. But there was some kind of special spirit there- people, yet from different backgrounds and following different goals still had some common ground- Eclipse.

The day started with a gorgeous keynote by Dr. Herbert Thomson. He talked about software security. Well actually, he didn’t just talk, rather passionately convincing the audience about the matter. He was speaking about fuzzy testing- injecting random bytes of characters into an application. And within a few minutes he showed (live) how the Macromedia FlashPlayer 6 could be compromised by finding possible stack overflows through fuzzy testing. Pretty amazing…

There was another talk about security in Eclipse applications . Neil Bartlett pointed to a project called Eclipse-JAAS which he started to address security in RCP client server applications.

After lunch two ladies from the Eclipse team intruduced the Eclipse test framework (org.eclipse.test) which they use to automatically unit test and performance test the Eclipse SDK.

Finally, Mike Milinkovich and a row of project leads held a panel at the theater to talk about the future of Eclipse and answer questions. According to the board there where 1353 attendees which drank 665 gallons of coffee.

What I especially liked, apart from the talks, is the idea of table topics. Every lunch table had a sign on declaring the topic of the table. This was something like “BIRT”, “Eclipse on Linux”, “Building a business upon Eclipse”, “SWT”, you name it. This idea basically makes it very easy to come in touch with the people at the table. You already have a topic. So what happened when I sat down at the table was that people asked me (supposed I joined the BIRT club): “Hey, welcome. Are you using BIRT? Tell us about your experience.” Pretty cool. Whenever you need some kind of ice breaker think about it. Now, the idea is pretty simple and straight forward. Yet I cannot remember that I ever came across a place in whatever context who used this idea…

Today I sat at the “Eclipse as a business model” table where I met two very friendly japanese guys from NEC® who introduced there open source application JALCEDO to me. JALCEDO is supposed to make development of client server Eclipse RCP applications easier. According to my table peers one can describe JALCEDO als “Ruby on Rails” for the Eclipse Java world. I’ll check it out…

The conference was very well organized. There was an army of waiters just serving whatever was needed. The talks where militarily timed and always started on time and ended on time. It was rather amazing to see all the bits flow together like puzzle pieces.

It was a pleasure to be there!

Now that the 3rd day at EclipseCon is over, lets reflect a little bit over it. It was the first time I tried the “Continental Breakfast” at the EclipseCon. Well, the sessions and talks where better. Seems this kind of breakfast is not my taste. Never mind.

From 9:00 to 10:00 Robert M. Lefkowitz was holding a keynote talk about the anomalies of Open Source software. Very entertaining.

After that was my second try to get into an Equinox session, which failed miserably because either the room was too small or the people where too many. Or both. So since I didn’t really get my hand on another talk I found some time to stray around, visit the exhibiters booth and just relax.

Next was “Charting with BIRT“. After Jason kindled my interest in the BIRT reporting framework and awakened the hope that I actually can use it and improve my own software with it, I wanted to hear more about it and so, I went there. The session showed the charting capabilities of BIRT. They showed the different types of available charts, which include line, bar, gantt, pie, bubble diagrams in 2d or 3d. Really impressive and with a very flexible Report Editor that actually keeps you from editing source files. It though might be too complex for end users to use it and build their own reports.

After lunch I finally cought an Equinox talk which I actually used to recover from my post lunch coma. It was not the presenters fault, though…

Another interesting thing was the RadRails speech. RadRails is a Ruby on Rails IDE. RadRails build upon the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) and Eclipse (either as a bunch of plugins or as an standalone RCP application) to provide Rails developers with an IDE that is supposed to make Rails development even easier. Heck where should this lead to? I mean, writing a Rails application is already sooooo easy and cool

Kyle Shanks, one of the RadRails developers mentioned, they had 100.000 users by now which seems pretty imressive to me.

After that there was a panel on the Data Tools Platform which I used to freshly install Ruby, Rails and mySQL on my MacBook Pro. RadRails comes next…

At the end of the day I had another interesting talk about the dynamics of BIRT. The presenterscame up with a lot of examples to show how easy it is to script your report or to even script the parameter dialog that is presented to the user. In the end they showed a dynamic report which held a table of addresses. When clicking on of the addresses that position was loaded into Google Maps and presented on top of the table within the dialog. Bad thing is you can only do this as long as you did not print the dialog…

All in all it was again a very exciting day.

Tomorrow will be the last day (of EclipseCon) and I’m mighty looking forward to getting home to my family!

Now, the second day of EclipseCon 2007 is over. Much lessons heard and much foot eat. Was really a great day that ended in enlightened mind and hurting feet.

In the morning I wanted to attend the Equinox session but the room was so crowded that I couldn’t even get some space standing. Seems like a  lot of folks is interested in using Eclipse technology on the server side. Never mind.

So I went to a BIRT talk next door which probably a good idea. Jason introduced new features of the Reporting Framework in a very refreshing and easily understandable way. I looked into BIRT in early 2005, back then I decided not to use it for our Net-Herald RCP application. But with the new features that where introduced during the course of the last year or so it makes a very competitive option to JFreeReport which I use now. Especially the Report Designer is very powerful. Using the BIRT approach we now have a chance to give our users the chance to create or change reports themselfs (with some training). It will sure take some time until BIRT makes it into Net-Herald since it’s no #1 priority but it’s an item on my list of future items.

After that there was a Mylar session. For those you don’t know: Mylar adds task focused programming toEclipse. It fades out things you’re not interested at the moment and help you concentrate on the tasks at hand. It integrates with CVS, SVN, Bugzilla, Jira or Trac (others to come) to help link your code to bugs in the database.

After lunch we had a talk about the Eclipse Data Binding Framework. I wrote about this yesterday. The Framework bascially helps you to wire your model against the user interface or any other part of your application. It then synchronizes the wired parts whenever data in the other part changes. It also supports validators to be hooked up in the middle. One could probably compare it with for instances the JGoodies binding framework although it is said to be more flexible (and harder to learn).

The exhibitor’s reception where the delicious part of the day. Indian and mexican food, green stuff, a chocolate fountain and a lot of coffee, bear and wine. Yammi.