More Sony eReader Pix

By popular demand, I'm posting a few more pictures of my Sony eReader, to convey a better impression of the resolution modes I described in my previous post.

The first shows the smallest eBook resolution:



The second shows the largest eBook size (Mr Magoo Mode):



The third shows a Pragmatic Press PDF (Best of Ruby Quiz), in the best viewing mode (rotated to landscape, zoomed in to text width):



I hope that satisfies everyone's curiosity! If you want to feel and touch one, I saw them on sale at my local Borders in Atlanta last weekend.

Sony eReader

Those who know me know that I'm a gadget nut, and I've gotten a few gadgets lately that fall into the category of essential for my on-the-road lifestyle and of interest to software developers and other geeks as well. One of them is the Sony eReader. This is the first real application of digital ink, which has been The Next Big thing for several years While it looks like a monochrome LCD display (with no back-lighting), digital ink acts more like real ink in that it doesn't consume power while it's being displayed. Most LCDs need a constant (very low level) charge to keep their dark bits aligned. With digital ink, you just zap them once and they stay in place until you zap them again. The obvious use of them in a digital book reader makes perfect sense: it consumes no power while you are actually reading the page, just when you turn the pages.

The Sony eReader was announced at the beginning of 2006, and was originally going to be available in the Spring of last year. Fast forward to November, when they actually shipped (I got mine late November, and I was on the list of "ship it too me right off the assembly line". Here's a picture:



The Good
Reading eBooks on it is an awesome experience, pretty much all I hoped for. The screen is highly readable as long as you have light (it does not have a back light). Essentially, if you have enough light to read a regular book, you can read this one. Even in low light it isn't bad because you have 3 zoom levels for eBooks: small, medium, and large (Mr. Magoo could read the large without his glasses). The page flips are slow because of the digital ink, but it's not really noticeable. I quickly forgot that I was reading something on a new fangled device and just enjoyed it, and have subsequently read more than a dozen books on it. The battery life is stunning: I used it for an entire week in Singapore, reading a couple of hours a day, without recharging it once (and that included 2 marathon reading binges on the 26 hour flights there and back). The eBooks (and even PDFs) take up very little room. It comes with about 100 Mb of storage; I immediately put a 2 Gb Memory Stick in it. I guesstimate that I can probably get 1000 books on this puppy.

The Bad
One of the great appeals for me was the ability to put PDFs on it. I carry (or would like to carry) a fairly sizable collection of reference books with me, in addition to whatever I'm reading at the moment, and lots of books (especially technical ones) exist on PDF. Alas, the reading experience with PDFs leaves something to be desired. Unlike eBooks, the eReader can't reflow PDFs, meaning that you can basically see them in 1 of 2 sizes: regular (the entire page) or zoomed (just the text on the page, eliminating the margins). The text of most PDFs is still too small for portrait mode even in the zoomed state, so I generally flip it to landscape. One of the annoying bugs bites you here: when you flip pages on PDFs in landscape mode, it re-sets itself to regular mode but still thinks it's in zoomed. That means to be able to read the page, you have to flip it back to regular (for real), then flip it back to landscape. That means that every time you flip pages, it's a 3-press operation. Which wouldn't be so bad except for the glacially slow refresh rate for the digital ink (which is hardly noticeable for a single page flip). Once they get this bug fixed, PDF's will be reasonable on this device, but painful for now.

The Ugly
The selection of eBooks is pretty small right now, but growing fast. As you would expect, there are a fair number of science fiction titles, including Neal Stephenson's whole catalog (which I have dully downloaded and and synced onto my eReader). The worst part of that whole experience, though, is the Connect software that comes with it and manages both syncing with the device and shopping at their on-line bookstore. Strike 1: Windows only, so I have to crank up Parallels to access it. Strike 2: Think iTunes written by a high school student who's just learned VB. It's awful and clunky. The should have picked a reasonable starting place (like Eclipse RCP) rather than reinvent a buggy version of an application that needs a file system view, a HTML-centric content pane (or pain, in this case), and standard menu stuff. Strike 3: buggy, crashing at the drop of a hat. One of the few options on the menus is "Update", which I access frequently to try to get a better version. While it works mostly, it also locks up on a regular basis. At least the syncing part pretty much works and is fast. It really shows, though, how much you take something like iTunes + iPod for granted until you see an amateurish version.

The Bottom Line
The above notwithstanding, I love this little thing, especially for eBooks. If they would get the PDF bug mentioned above fixed, it would be Good Enough for PDFs too. Of course, what I would really like is the ability to reflow PDFs, but thats much tougher. If anyone reading this knows of a PDF to eBook converter, please let me know...I've searched in vain. The Sony eReader has some pain points (like the PDF bug) for a version 1.0 product, but it still a great addition to my collection of gadgets.

Why I Hate Christmas Music

Most of my family thinks I'm a curmudgeon because I hate Christmas music. Generally, I don't bother to go into the full details of why I hate it because it is long and drawn out, and chances are slim that they would understand anyway. But here's why.

Music has a special place in my life. Like a lot people in the software industry, I have an intense relationship with music. Ever since I discovered music in a big way when I was in the 7th grade, it has been a constant companion. Literally. I always have some music playing in my head, always in the background. There is no way for me not to have music playing in my head. I wake up with music, spend my whole day with it, and go to sleep at night with it. And therein lies the problem.

I hate catchy tunes because the stick in my head and won't go away. What most people like about pop music is the very thing that makes me dislike it: the hook. The problem is that those little snippets of music get stuck in my head and persist. Hours later, I find the same track playing over and over, an increasingly irritating background noise. After a while, I have almost a sore spot in my conscience, a groove worn deep by the same little track playing over and over. The catchier the tune, the harder it is to exorcise. It's like a cut on the roof of your mouth: constant low level irritation.

This explains several things about my music taste. It explains why I have 1000+ CDs and counting: I must have variety. It also explains why I like so much music that most people find disturbing and discordant. I crave complex music all the time. My wife, Candy, complains that I don't like any "happy" music because I have such a taste for the unusual: the anti-catchy tune.

And that also explains why I don't like Christmas music. By definition, all Christmas music features catchy tunes, designed for humming and singing along. When I was a kid, I enjoyed it as much as the next person. But is has a cumlative effect. Every year, the grooves in my head worn deep from the past get worn deeper. I find myself in a constant bad mood around Christmas because the music is inescapable. This last year, they were playing it on the airplane as they taxied, at exactly the time you are forbidden to use some other music player to drown it out. My head was filled with those tunes for hours afterwards, boring their way through my gray matter. I defensively wore my iPod in every store that I went during the holiday season

Christmas music isn't the only thing that affects me. At the client where I am currently stationed, some fool has his cell phone play "When the Saints Come Marching In" as his ring tone. For the first few weeks I was here, I would wonder why, at the end of the day, my head was full of that irritating tune, playing over and over, drilling its way through my head. It's like inadvertanly stepping in something sticky, and now every step pulls irritatingly on your shoe. I figured that it must be a cell phone somewhere, so I started listening for it. Sure enough, someone in the vast cube farm over my right shoulder gets about 10 calls a day, polluting the air around me with that insidious song. I wondered why coming to work here put me in such a bad mood: now I know. Because I know it's there now, I try to fight it off everytime it rings with some other music that is soothing (to me at least) that I can summon from my mental reserves. It's not cool here to were my iPod or I would, all day, every day. And the worst part is, I can't really complain because I can't find this person (the office is large enough so that I can't home in on the signal before they answer it) and they would think I'm crazy. Just like my family thinks I'm a scrooge.

Technology Snake Oil Part 11: Customizable Rube Goldberg Machines

I've found myself more and more talking to people about SOA because of my background with distributed computing. Over and over, in these discussions with CIO's, CTO's, and CCYAO's, they keep talking (without realizing it) about Customizable Rube Goldberg machines.

Rube Goldberg is a cartoonist whose name made it all the way to the dictionary:

Rube Golderg - n. A comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation.


Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author who lived from 1883 - 1970. He is well remembered for his cartoons (thus the dictionary entry), some of which everyone has seen (maybe without realizing it). Here is Rube Goldberg's "Simplified Pencil Sharpener":



Many SOA architectures look just like this diagram, with similar unintentionally ironic names. As I wrote before in Entropic Software, software tends towards complexity. It seems doubly so that enterprise architecture tends towards (frequently needless) complexity. Every SOA pursuit I've ever seen could stand some significant simplification. Of course, most consultants won't say that; they view monstrously complex software as job security. That is perhaps one of the differences from mercenary consultants who are only in it for the buck (complexity == $$$ + long periods of time == job security). If, on the other hand, you have someone who is trying to implement what you need, the tendency should be towards simpler architecture and systems. This isn't a slam against big consulting firms (I know some guys who work for the biggest who really care about what they do, and they would agree with my assertion).

The Snake Oil here comes from C(x?)O's who believe that Rube Goldberg-like complexity is inevitable, and this myth is perpetrated by mercenary consultants. Like Rube's "How to Tee a Golf Ball without Bending Over":



The key to successful distributed computing lies with extreme simplification. The most scalable distributed architecture in the universe (as far as we know) is based on a very simple protocol: HTTP. The key to successful SOA endeavors is two-fold: simplicity and testing.

You can read more about Rube Goldberg and see a whole gallery of his work at www.rube-goldberg.com.

Writing Assignments

I haven't been blogging a lot lately because I've so tied up with other writing stuff. I have a huge number of writing projects ongoing. Ironically enough, I've been writing more than ever, just on longer-term stuff than blogging (and, for various reasons, my primary blog writing time, which is sitting in airports, has been down lately). Here are the projects:

• I'm editing the No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology, Volume 2: The 2007 Edition as we speak. Just like last year, this one is filled with contributions from No Fluff, Just Stuff authors (14 of them this year) ranging from Web Services, language stuff, testing, agility, persistence, and a whole bunch more. We've also retained the very popular The Authors Speak chapter, where the authors talk about books, favorite tools, and (new this year) favorite travel horror stories. We've also added a couple of collaborative chapters, one on Eclipse Tips and Tricks and another on IntelliJ Tips and Tricks, with contributions by authors who use those environments. This one is bigger than last year's, weighing in at over 350 pages. It'll be out in March of 2007.
  


• 
  The Productive Programmer, for Pragmatic Press, is the book David Bock and I have been working on for about a year. We keep coming up with good ideas and our writing time keeps getting OBE (Overtaken By Events). But, he and I are really starting to crank out some pages because we really want it out in the first half of 2007. Look for it to pop up on the Pragmatic Press website soon as a beta book.
  


• 
  I'm also involved in a project with 3 other authors (Zak Tamsen, Jeremy Stell Smith, and Joe O'Brien) on writing DSLs in Ruby. Frequent readers of my blog know that this is a big topic for me, and my co-authors have come up with some awesome examples. This book is also for Pragmatic Press, and we've been cranking away at the pages recently, after spending several months discussing and generating examples. This book will blow some people's minds!
  


• 
  I'm also contributing to another anthology which shall go unnamed at the moment. Thankfully, that was just a couple of articles (one solo, one collaboration) that is done and off my plate for now. I wrote about Polyglot Programming, greatly expanding on the ideas presented in my blog entry of the same name.
  

Think I've got enough writing pending? Whew! Hopefully, if it doesn't kill me, I'll have 2 books and 2 anthologies out in 2007.

Finding the balance between short-term, idea fountain type writing in blogs and longer term, more cohesive writing for books is an increasing challenge for those of us who write a lot. Some of my colleagues (like Jay Fields) have essentially written a book, one blog entry at a time. If he published his blog between covers, he'd have one of the influential DSL books on the market. I've been trying to talk him into doing just that. It just goes to show how something as staid as technical publishing is not immune to seismic shifts because of the very topics that appear in their books.

ClearType

My friend and college Karan scolded me the other day when I told him about ClearType, which every user of Windows should use on their laptops. He was scolding me because I hadn't blogged about it, and he and I see each other rarely these days (as I'm no longer in Chicago). So, this is for you, Karan. I'll try to be better in the future when I find stuff like this.

ClearType is one of the great innovations produced by Microsoft R&D. Microsoft has a massive R&D effort world wide. Last year, I attended the Microsoft Tech Summit, and some of the coolest stuff we saw came from the head of R&D's presentation. ClearType is a utility that you download from Microsoft's site (here). It does sophisticated font smoothing, making fonts look much better on LCD displays. I'm not nearly so sensitive to fonts as some of my more aesthetically inclined colleagues (hey, David F., I talkin' about you), who can tell you in minute detail about kerning, anti-aliasing, and a bunch of other arcana. So, it's a big deal that I can tell that ClearType makes a noticeable difference. It makes the fonts look less jagged, and in the latest versions, it allows you to adjust the effect to get the best possible display.

If you are using Windows (still), and especially if you are using a laptop, you should download ClearType and give it a try.

Ruby, Meet the Enterprise

A lot of people (myself included) are convinced that Ruby is going to be the next major language (regardless of the platform it runs upon: native, JRuby, or the CLR). And, consequently, Ruby will have a major impact on enterprise development. In fact, I think that SOAR (SOA + Ruby) will be hugely popular in the coming years. As I've stated before, Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalk crowd. It has a similar feel to developers but isn't hamstrung (like Smalltalk was) by proprietariness and expensive tools. Where Smalltalk failed, Ruby will succeed. Ruby is perfected positioned to become a major player in the SOA space: loose typing == flexibility, which is what SOA is all about.

Interestingly enough, if you look at the guys who were really into Java in 1995 and 1996, they are almost all heavily involved (and mostly billable now) in the Ruby world. Of course, this isn't an accurate barometer, but there is no good way to tell what is the Next Big Thing. Looking at people who've identified it before is as good a way as any.

Anticipating Ruby's move into the Enterprise world, next year features erubycon, the first Enterprise Ruby Conference. This is highly important to the Ruby community who wants to promote Ruby in the enterprise. Having a conference dedicated to this topic helps validate both Ruby's readiness for the enterprise and vice versa. I predict that, like RubyConf, this conference will be small this year, and in 5 years it'll be massive.

Dynamacism

The Pragmatic Programmer contains the outstanding piece of advice that you should learn a new language every year. It not only gives you more tools to apply to problems, but it encourages you to think in different idioms. Every language has its own set of patterns and styles (the original Kernighan and Ritchie book on C, known affectionately as the "K&R" book) was as much about how C should look as what it did. People still talk about the "K&R style"; they defined the idioms of C along with the language. Learning new idioms and styles makes you a better developer, thus the efficacy of the Prags advice.

Here's a recent example that I perpetrated. After a stint in .NET and Ruby on Rails, I'm back on a Java project for a while (and coding again in my beloved IntelliJ, even if it is on Windows). I ran across some code that caused my refactoring alarm to go off. Here's a snippet:

  
public void record(String toBeRecorded) {
    MessageWriter messageWriter = null;
    try {
        messageWriter = new MessageWriter(_destination);
        messageWriter.write(toBeRecorded);
    } catch (RuntimeException rx) {
        throw rx;
    } finally {
        if (messageWriter != null)
            messageWriter.close();
    }
}
public void record(List<String> listToBeRecorded) {
    MessageWriter messageWriter = null;
    try {
        messageWriter = new MessageWriter(_destination);
        for (String s : listToBeRecorded)
            messageWriter.write(s);
    } catch (RuntimeException rx) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Cannot write list of messages");
    } finally {
        if (messageWriter != null)
            messageWriter.close();
    }
}

This is an overloaded method that does basically the same stuff before and after the important stuff (writing a single message or a list). Because I've been in languages with closures for a while, I refactored it thusly:

public void record(final String toBeRecorded) {
    recordMessage(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            _messageWriter.write(toBeRecorded);
        }   
    });                                                   
}
public void record(final List<String> listToBeRecorded) {
    recordMessage(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            for (String s : listToBeRecorded)
                _messageWriter.write(s);
        }
    });
}
private void recordMessage(Runnable recordingStrategy) {
    try {
        _messageWriter = new MessageWriter(_destination);
        recordingStrategy.run();
    } catch (RuntimeException rx) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Cannot write list of messages");
    } finally {
        if (_messageWriter != null)
            _messageWriter.close();
    }
}

This is basically just the Command Design Pattern. But before I was using closures on a daily basis, I never would have thought to implement it this way. I would have created some additional classes in their own files, created a formal implementation of the Command pattern, and a lot of other excessive ritual. Of course, if this got much more complex, it might need that ritual but, in this case, I was able to consoliate all that open and close code in a single place (which made things DRYer as well).