I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. But more than that, I’d like to remind us all that, for that wish to be fulfilled, we need to support and care for our friends and family; we are living in interesting times, and our love for each other is our best defense.
Those of you who see me regularly know that I have been putting on weight lately. I’m currently over 250 pounds and, even for me, that much weight is a problem — the obvious indicator being that it is now difficult for me to get “crunched” enough to put on my snowboard boots. Ugh!
As such, I’ve decided to join the ranks of the New Year’s resolution makers:
I will lose 50 pounds this year.
Now, in general, I’m pretty good at sticking to a resolution (particularly, one that I’ve told the world about 🙂 ), but losing that much weight will be a challenge, so I am asking for your support. Please feel free to remind me if you see me acting in a way that would run counter to the goal. I won’t let it happen deliberately, but it’s certainly possible that I just might not notice.
There’s a pattern I fall for, about once a day, while browsing the web on the iPhone. It goes something like this:
follow a link to a new page
as the page starts filling in, read the first screenful
do the “scroll up” gesture to make more content visible
watch as the iPhone randomly does one of three things:
ignores the gesture completely.
waits about a second and then scrolls a few pixels
starts loading the page pointed at by the link you happened to be over when you started the scroll up gesture
Ok, so it’s not like I don’t understand what’s going on here: The poor thing is busy painting the page, and it just can’t deal with the added processor requirements of recognizing all of the events that make up the gesture. It either misses them all, or gets just a few of them, which leaves it either scrolling “a bit” or treating the gesture as a click on the link.
The thing is, it really doesn’t matter to me whether this is processor limited, or a bug in the OS (i.e. events get lost), or it’s just a bad design (i.e. input handled in the same thread that does the drawing), but the end result is that because I can’t trust what the phone will do in response to my touch, I have to wait until the page fully “settles” before I start scrolling. On pages that have lots of content and go off to ad services to fill in side bars, etc., this means I wait for a long time.
I mean, c’mon Apple; do I really have to tell you about the need for responsiveness?
Anyway, as frustrating as this is, the only real reason I started ranting about it is because it got me thinking about Eclipse, the UI thread, and the multi-core CPU trend. We’re pushing more and more work into multiple threads, drastically increasing the contention at the glass. The Jobs framework and UIJobs are interesting, but don’t address issues like recognizing when multiple jobs are attempting to paint conflicting (or even exactly the same) information in the UI… Anyway, there are aspects of the e4 “modeled UI” that are related to this, but it’s not clear that we’ve thought enough about it yet. Hm…
I hate the idea of strategic voting. I’ve always been a strong believer in voting for the party/candidate that most strongly reflects your world view. This year, however, I’m strongly tempted to vote Liberal (even though I think they’re idiots), simply because I believe the prospect of having a Conservative majority in government *now*, at the point when the world is about to go through a significant upheaval would be tragic.
The thing is, when I look at the state of the world — ecologically, socially, and economically — and how I feel that we will have to respond to it, it’s clear that the party that best reflects my views is the Greens. I also believe that many, many others in Canada feel the same way.
The NDP are also close, if they could just figure out that sometimes “Environment first” is going to have to trump “People first”, so that our kids get to have a world worth living in too.
As most everyone knows, I’m not a fan of traveling, so I like to find some other way to commemorate my vacation — usually by doing something significant around the house. This year, we chose to move Dennis’ bedroom to the basement. He’s almost 16 now, and it seemed like he needed more privacy than being in a room that shared a wall (and a cold air return vent) with his parents’ bedroom.
Now another thing most everyone knows is that our house tends to be filled with stuff. This means that as a precursor to any significant work on the house, we need to purge the stuff to make room. We started by giving away the last of Dennis’ Star Wars toys and Lego to friends with younger boys. Then we got rid of our excess pocket books… Hm… that comment doesn’t really do the situation justice. Here’s a picture to give you a better idea:
What you’re looking at are 36 “2 cubes”, almost all of which are full of books that we are going to donate to charity, along with a couple of bicycles and a several bags of clothing and material.
With a bit more room to think, we settled on the following plan:
Deb would take over Dennis’ old bedroom as both a study and sewing room.
I would move the stuff from my room in the basement to Deb’s old study (i.e. the front bedroom).
Dennis would move down to my old computer room in the basement. [Added feature: the futon couch that was in Deb’s old study would move to Dennis’ game room.]
In a frenzy of simultaneous shifting of stuff, we attempted to converge on this plan, but ran into a couple of snags:
I had one of those plastic sheets on the floor in my computer room — you know the ones that make it easier to roll around on a wheely chair. Unfortunately, sandwiching a carpet between a layer of plastic and a cement floor turns out to be a bad idea; when we lifted the plastic sheet, we discovered that the carpet underneath had gone moldy. This threw a major monkey wrench into the planning, since we couldn’t move any of Dennis’ stuff into the room until we could get the carpet replaced, which of course meant that Dennis ended up with his bedroom strewn all over the house while we worked.
When we originally put the desk in Deb’s study we actually built the desk in the room. So, when it came time to move it, we discovered (of course) that we couldn’t get it out of the room without dismantling it into several pieces. At that point we made the snap decision to just leave Deb in her old study, but use the space we got by removing the couch (and some other re-organization) to give her a sewing area as well.
Those were the unexpected big issues. There were also a couple of other painful (but expected) things that we had to deal with:
Dennis wanted space more than storage.
This meant that we had to remove all of the shelving units and cupboards that were in my room, which was a big job since they were all wall mounted and there were quite a number of them. Also, there wasn’t room for most of them in the room upstairs, so they too ended up in the garage, to be given away. (You can see them in the background in the picture above.)
The network router and file server needed to move.
Even if there had been space for them in Dennis’ room (and there wasn’t), I end up fiddling with them too often to want them to be two floors away from me. I also wanted to make use of the wired connection in Deb’s study as the main conduit for running the network through the house, which means that, now that she isn’t switching rooms, she has inherited our dsl modem, router and (the imaginatively named) FILES the file server. They’re sitting on top of her bookshelves. [Insert obligatory short person joke.] My machines (including the server that provided this page) are sitting on the other end of a matched (WDS) pair of Airport Extremes. So far, I’ve been happy with the result. In any case, with the help of another wire pulled through the basement ceiling to reconnect Dennis’ setup in the basement, we’re all up and running again.
Things are starting to converge, finally. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of the new layout. First my room:
Note the new M-Audio Axiom 49. There wasn’t room for my old Alesys QS 8.1 between the bookshelves and the treadmill (just out of sight in these pictures).
And here’s Deb working in her new space:
I’d show you a picture of Dennis’ room in the basement, but I keep forgetting to snap one, and it’s time to get this posted…
The Mojave Experiment is an attempt by Microsoft to show that if people don’t know they are running Vista, they like it. Essentially, people are given an overview of a “new” operating system called Mojave, and then given a brief chance to try it. Afterwards they are told it’s Vista, and they say things like “Wow! This is much better than I thought it would be.” Sheesh. How shallow do they think we are?
Here’s the thing: Vista looks shiny, and if you get told that it runs all your old programs but gives you the security you need, then of course you’re going to like it. But if you actually installed that OS on the home machines of all those noobs, and made them live through the constant, irritating security prompts, crashes, and incompatibilities, I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take long for reality to set in and the average rating for Vista of 4.5 out of 10 to once again be the norm.
Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco:
At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!?
I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop moving long enough.
With a heartbeat that would make a pacemaker envious, another awesome Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Ganymede home page.
I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and absolutely professional people once again on this release, and I’m very much looking forward to getting started on our new challenges in R3.5 and e4.
I would like to call out the unrelenting effort of the p2 team in particular this year. They did everthing necessary to make p2 a successful part of R3.4, going above and beyond the call every day for many weeks. As a result, I believe we now have the basis for a truly world-class provisioning story, something that will help the whole Eclipse community.
I was listening to CBC1 this morning and heard a review of a movie called “Ben X” that’s coming to the Bytown (Flemish with English subtitles). The movie starts Friday and runs until July 3. I’m probably going to go, so ping me if you’re interested and want to coordinate.
