But lately, the question seems to be less and less academic: Google’s Voice Application for the iPhone got rejected and two existing applications (GV Mobile and Voicecentral) were removed from the AppStore! This is an extremely nasty thing to do to the developers.

To make matters worse, Apple is seeking to sue users who jailbreak their phones. Yes, you can actually sue for that!

The latest WFT-Apple moment was the news of the Ninjawords dictionary application which was forced to censor naughty words out of wiktionary.

So far, Apple’s actions have mostly hurt developers. But eventually, when developers on a platform suffer, users suffer as well.

You may think Microsoft is a bloated company and that Steve Ballmer is a weirdo, but when he shouts “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers” he understands something that Steve Jobs just doesn’t get.

So the iPhone is seeming rather unattractive now. I’m looking forward to what seems to be an Android-filled fall!

Den norske regjeringen har besluttet at en felles IKT-arkitektur for offentlig sektor ville være fint. Jeg fikk greie på arbeidet på tirsdag, og har lest rapport til den store gullmedalje. Jeg er fortsatt ikke helt sikker på hva som menes med “felles IKT-arkitekt”, men jeg kan se omrisset av mange store evighetsprosjekter i dokumentet.

Jeg har forfattet et svar på rapporten.

Spesielt er jeg bekymret for at dette skal bli en unnskyldning for store SOA-prosjekter uten veldefinerte formål. Rapporten beskriver en god del ønskede effektmål, men disse beskrives i såpass runde former at man aldri kommer til å etterprøve om prosjekter faktisk oppfyller dem. Formålene er ting som økt grad av interoperabilitet.

Frykt nummer to ligger i hvordan SOA-krigen går om dagen. Rapporten nevner veldig lite konkret på teknologier, så jeg slapp unna å gå inn i dette minefeltet. I stedet må jeg ligge våken og frykte effekten av de usagte ordene i rapporten.

Jeg har startet å høre om dogmatiske SOA-prosjekter som ikke lykkes, til tross for store investeringer. REST starter å bli mer akseptabelt å snakke om i høflig selskap. Men fremdeles virker det som om at “SOA prosjekt” er et kodeord for “vi skal kjøpe dyr WS-* programvare fra Oracle, IBM eller Microsoft”.

Jeg skulle ønske jeg hadde mer erfaring innen offentlig sektor før jeg skulle uttale meg om dette, men dersom det er som noe annet jeg har sett, handler interoperabilitet grunnleggende sett om å sende eller motta informasjon på et standardisert format. Det betyr tre ting: En aksjon (les, oppdater, lever), noe som identifiserer et objekt (søknad, personopplysning) og et innhold (“Jeg ønsker med dette herved å søke om bla bla bla”).

Og her har WS-* skadet oss mye. Når man bygde standarden SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, som verken er enkel eller handler om “object access”), skrellet man vekk to fine deler av HTTP standarden: Verb (GET, POST, PUT – det vil si “aksjoner”) og URL’er (det vil si den nøkkelen som representerer et objekt). Det betyr at vi ikke lenger kan si “legg til” (POST) en “søknad” (http://etat.no/tjeneste/soknad/) som inneholder noe data (ikke en del av standarden). I stedet må vi si “send en melding som inneholder informasjon om noe vi tenker å gjøre” (ikke en del av standarden).

I en rimelig verden burde interoperabilitet betydd at å utveksle informasjon om objekter burde være en del av en universell standard som er akseptert rundt hele verden. En standard basert på å sende meldinger om å utføre én eller annen oppgave (som for eksempel å utveksle et objekt) virker sørgelig utilstrekkelig. Og offentlig sektor i lille Norge kan vel ikke være den som brøyter vei her.

Så lenge SOA-krigen pågår er jeg ikke optimistisk for sjansene til at en rimelig standard dukker opp.

As many who know me are aware, I always have a pad of Post-It notes and a pen in my left pants pocket. I use the sticky notes for todo-lists, note taking in meetings, planning talks and doing brain dumps. After the jump, I post a few examples of Post-It notes from my pocket.

I accumulate tasks on a TODO list. Sometimes the tasks are organized by topics, other times not.

As I complete tasks, I scratch them out (not done), or check them off (done).

When the TODO list looks sufficiently messy, I just rewrite it and throw the old one away.

Who needs Visio?!

After a meeting, I refine my notes from the meeting until I have the distilled conclusion on a single note.

I often draft documents or emails while on the bus. I usually go through about ten Post-Its (to be thrown away) before I have my final outline. Creating this outline took about 5 minutes.

When there’s a lot on my mind, it can be hard to sleep. If I just get it all down on a piece of paper, I can sleep like a baby.

When people ask me for my contact information, I have stopped digging around for a business card. Feel free to drop me a mail!

Tag you’re it! How do you make notes?

Ole-Morten Amundsen

One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly. Here is what you need to do to get your first application up and running on Heroku.

1. Apply for an account on heroku (or mail me for an invitation)
2. When you have gotten your account set up, go to the heroku page for your applications and log in.
3. Press the big button labeled “Create New App”
4. Click the button that look like a gear in the lower left hand corner and choose “generate” from the pop-up menu.
5. Enter scaffold article title:string author:string content:text and click “run”
6. Press the yellow text labeled “Migrate now” to create the articles table in the database
7. (Optional) Select “rake” from the gear pop-up menu and type test
8. (Optional) In the “rake” window, type db:fixtures:load to populate the database with test data
9. Press the button with two right arrows (“>>”) on the top right corner and you will be taken to your application, done being installed on the heroku server. Add /articles to the url to see your newly generated application
10. You can now play around with creating, retrieving, updating and deleting articles
11. Click the button with two left arrows (“<<") on the bottom of the screen to return to the IDE
12. (Optional) Make the application publicly available. Click the name of the application (“unnamed-xxxx” on the top left corner). Pick a name for your application, select “Public” to have it deployed to the net, and press rename

You now have a fully working, running, deployed Rails application. It requires no installation on your part. From here, you can follow the rest of my articles on Rails pretty much straightforward. Welcome aboard.

Failing unit test

Unit test succeeds

Thanks to Litrik de Roy

Litrik used my C code to control the lights of the Dell XPS computer and integrated them into an Eclipse plugin. Coolest plugin EWAR!!one!! See more about it on the project blog.

How to use:

xps_lights>make all
rm -f *.o *.dll *.exe
gcc -mno-cygwin -Wall   -c -o xps_led_control_lib.o xps_led_control_lib.c
gcc -shared -o xps_led_control_lib.dll xps_led_control_lib.o
gcc -o testexe xps_led_control.c -L./ -lxps_led_control_lib
testexe -all 4 [all the leds turn turquise]
gcc -mno-cygwin -Wall   -c -o xps_led_control.o xps_led_control.c
gcc -o xps_led_control xps_led_control_lib.o xps_led_control.o
ruby xps_led_control.rb
Cycle array [the side and top leds cycle through a list of colors]
xps_lights>ls
Makefile     xps_led_control.c    xps_led_control.o   xps_led_control_lib.c    xps_led_control_lib.h
testexe.exe  xps_led_control.exe  xps_led_control.rb  xps_led_control_lib.dll  xps_led_control_lib.o

Enjoy.

The new version of the code has a “-touchpad” argument. Specify “-touchpad 1″ to turn the XPS 2 touchpad light on, “-touchpad 0″ to turn it off.

Here is the updated source code and executable. The executable should work without Cygwin now. (Note to self: Use “-mno-cygwin” gcc option to strip out the dependency)

A post on Notebookforums made med aware of the tool API Monitor, which allows me to see how a program is using the Win32-API. From there, it was easy to recreate a program to do the same. The hardest part was that I decided to try to use the Ruby Win32API interface to call the methods. It was hard to find out how to pass the arguments, and in the end, I ended up with a pure C solution.

The final solution is a command line program, which allows me to script it. I have encapsulated the modification of the LEDs in a simple function for easier reuse.

For any reader with an XPS who would like to replicate it, I have posted the C source code and Executable. These files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution2.5 License.

Attachments

• XPS Led Control C source code
• XPS Led Control executable program (“xps_led_control -help” for usage)

Update: The previous version of the xps_led_control.exe required cygwin installed on the client PC. I have compiled a new version that presumably should run without cygwin.dll. If you have the chance to test this out, I appreciate positive or negative feedback as to whether it works. Thanks.

I feel very ambivalent about autowiring. Initially, I thought it sounded like a great idea because it reduced clutter, but then people like Jason convinced me that it was not. The more I think about it, the more usure I am.

So, what are we afraid of when it comes to autowiring? Documenation is one thing, definately. In my experience, I don’t use the configuration much for documentation anyway. And we are used to automagic stuff happening anyway, so autowiring won’t be too different. Nothing stops us from explicit wiring in the cases where autowire would be too “undocumented”.

So what can go wrong? Either something gets shouldn’t be, or something doesn’t gets set which should. Autowire ensures nonambiguity, so if something gets set its always what should’ve been set.

As I can understand the issue, using autowire to, say, let all DAOs use the same DataSource seems much easier to manage than explicit wiring: If a class has setDataSource, it has the standard datasource. What could be easier?

I cannot see any realistic way where the first scenario would actually happen. If you have a setter on a bean, having it called can hardly be a surprise to you! Why else would you have it! If it wasn’t needed, it will not cause any harm, and if it was, it would be the right one.

Nor is there any great risk in a property being unset. If a property is critical, we already know how to deal with it: Dependency check or implementing InitializingBean.

So: We all have this fear of autowiring, but I have yet to understand a rational reason not to use it. (And yet, I don’t use autowiring either)

Can someone please explain WHY autowiring is bad without just waving their hands around? What bad things can happen if you autowire? Has anyone experienced any pains after autowiring?

This article has been posted as a comment to Jason’s blog

Here is the introduction to the patent, taken from eolas “technology” page:

The Web Application Platform
Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document

U.S. Patent 5,838,906, Filed in October, 1994, Issued November 17, 1998. Inventors: Michael D. Doyle, David C. Martin and Cheong Ang

First demonstrated publicly in 1993, this invention lifted the glass for the first time from the hypermedia browser, enabling Web browsers for the first time to act as platforms for fully-interactive embedded applications. The patent covers Web browsers that support such currently popular technologies as ActiveX components, Java applets, and Navigator plug-ins. Eolas’ advanced browser technology makes possible rich interactive online experiences for over 500 million Web users, worldwide.

Eolas is currently suing Microsoft for $521 million (whoa!) over this patent, claiming that ActiveX is a violation of the patent. Microsoft has tried a “prior art” defence, claiming that the functionality of the Viola browser was an example of the same idea. The court ruled the Viola “not teach nor fairly suggest that instant ‘906 invention, as claimed.” This may or may not be a fair assessment, but it is beside my point.

The main problem with the patent should be appearant by just reading Eolas’ page about it: If their “technology” “enabling Web browsers … to act as platforms for fully-interactive embedded applications”, how can it be that no web browser obtained a license from Eolas? The plot thickens: It seems that they ALL invented it separately, without using the patent. Eolas on the other hand, sat on their patent seemingly without using it for anything at all.

IANAL, but an idea has to be non-obvious in order to be patentable under US patent law. As far as I can tell, there is a pretty simple test of non-obviousness: If several inventors use the same idea independently of the patent, it must have been pretty darn obvious. According to Eolas’ own testimony, ActiveX (which is a development of OLE, by the way) and applets are both covered by the patent, the same would hold for Flash, or course.

Now, I wasn’t very involved in these things in 1993, but, come on Eolas, that is a pretty bloody obvious idea! What’s next? A patent for comb-overs?

I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty illustrative of the silliness surrounding patents. I have seen a lot of bad software patents, and nary a good one. They proof of the patent system, as they say, is in the eatin’. Oh yeah, and isn’t it cute how Eolas is trying to make it seem like they invented this great thing for the world, and then nobody went on to use their idea about it, just reinvent it! Losers.