Open Wonderland

Just wanted to take a few minutes to blog about the virtual world I learned about yesterday through the FLOSS weekly podcast, Open Wonderland. I am not a gamer and I have never spent more then 5 minutes of my day thinking about games or gaming technology. On the other hand, having worked for a virtual company for several years, I find myself intrigued with the possibility of being able to create virtual 3D work environments. As I am told you can do in the popular online game Second Life, you can create an avatar and maps for your workday encounters. It seems very real and there are dynamics that can only be captured by recreating this type of environment or meeting in person. The latter can be rather expensive and time consuming.

I spent 30 minutes yesterday evening and was able to get a small environment setup using Open Wonderland. This will definitely stay on the list of things to investigate. One idea would be to create an AMI with the Open Wonderland server pre-installed and ready to use. Then by executing a command a virtual workplace could be brought online. The attendees would receive a link to the workplace which would launch a Java Webstart application to provide them with entrance.

Several things I haven't looked into yet, sound, land-line connections, and video chat.

Java Date Parsing down to the millisecond

Today I ran into a problem where a String needed to be converted into a java.util.Date. The String looked like this:

    String date = "16MAR2010:09:08:27.126000";

So the code to parse the date was originally written like this:

String date = "16MAR2010:09:08:27.126000";

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("ddMMMyyyy:HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");
Date value = format.parse(date);

System.out.println(value);

The problem was that the value printed out was several minutes ahead, 9:10 instead of 8:27. The problem turns out to be that the date parsing format does not allow more then 3 values of "S" in the milliseconds placeholder.

Solution
Strip off the last 3 zeros and change the parse pattern to

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("ddMMMyyyy:HH:mm:ss.SSS");

Syntax Highlighter for Bloggers

Just so I don't forget and I can easily find it again I decided I would make a blog entry on where to find Alex Gorbatchev syntax highlighter. Adding the appropriate CSS and javascript references to the HEAD of my blog on blogspot allows me to use the simple syntax of this library anytime I need to show a code snippet in my blog. Thanks Alex!!

Syntax Library

A good example of using this library on blogspot can be found here

Blogger Instructions

The basics is to click on Edit Posts > Layout > Edit HTML and add the following to the header section.

Skillcaster uses GWT

For those folks that missed my talk last night on Skillcaster here is the video that I was going to show. One of the things covered last night was why GWT was chosen to build Skillcaster. The video does a nice job of explaining some of the interesting parts of GWT and does it in a way that is more interesting them me yammering at the front of a room.



I went over the application and then technologies used to build the tool.

• GWT - Rich UI Framwork


• Guice - Server side injection


• Gin - Client side injection (Javascript)


• gwt-dispatcher - Command pattern RPC


• gwt-presenter - MVP framwork


• gwt-log - logging framework


• gwt-pectin - binding framework

I will be working on getting the project moved to Google Code soon and I will send out links for everyone that may be interested in learning more or contributing to the development of Skillcaster.

Decentralize the web with Diaspora — Kickstarter

Very interesting site to get funding for a project. Need to research this later.

Decentralize the web with Diaspora — Kickstarter

Todo.txt Command Line Interface - Task tracking for CLI lovers

This is a cool spin on task management. I learned of this listening to TWIG.

Check it out!

Communication

The other day I came to the realization that what I need to be good at is communication. Sure my programming skills are still important and my ability to right solid code is a must, but if I can not wrap it in a useful and stunning user interface my coding may be in vain. Many times when I am reviewing applications online I spend less then 10 seconds on their website. If it doesn't load quickly and isn't impressive at first glance I move on. How do I make a stunning interface? How can I get people to pause and learn more when they visit my site?

I know that this sounds silly, but it all started when I started working for an Ad Agency in Cincinnati. As a web developer and a backend, server side programmer, I had spent years developing web based applications that typically were targeted at a single browser, internal audience. Now the applications where public facing and the browser or platform was not controlled. I learned very quickly how hard developing UI and cross browser functionality could be. This wasn't necessarily new as I have known of these issues, at least their existence , for a while now. I have been investigating Google Web Toolkit as a way of navigating around some of these issues. GWT does not provide very much in the way of UI components and most of there stuff is very basic. However if someone knows CSS and HTML fairly well then they can enhance and use the basic components to build more sophisticated components that work well across the browsers. I was determined that CSS was a must to know.

Learning CSS I started with this book. Now for the past several months I carry this thing under my arm as a reference when working on website user interfaces.




During this same period of time I was asked to give a couple different presentations. I had been to the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences and seen some really good presenters. I knew that I did not want to give a boring, read from the slide, bullet riddled presentation. How do you create a stunning presentation? Luckily I work with some really smart people that had already turned me on to a book on Zen presentations. I found it at the book store and glanced through it. It gave me some good ideas that boiled down to finding beautiful pictures from stockphoto. There had to be more then that though. I was very much interested in how to communicate using my presentation tools. After all this post is about communication.

I finally found this version of the book by the same author and it gives details starting with the idea of Zen presentations, going through the different type faces, color themes, photo/video techniques etc...



Conclusion is that I need not only to write good code, but I need to articulate my thoughts in narrative form (blog), live (presentation), and finally in my craft as stunning UI.