Mobile Platforms

For work purposes I am currently carrying two phones- a Blackberry and a Palm 650. I like both of these OSes, although the Palm OS does crash quite a bit. I've also been testing a couple of mobile GIS applications running on Windows Mobile 5. We're trying to figure out where to go next with it- RIM, Symbian, Linux (iPhone), etc.

While I like RIM and Palm OS, with a edge to RIM, Windows Mobile is completely unappealing to me. The main plus from a development standpoint is that it is relatively standard across devices. However, this is easily eclipsed by the usability, the memory consumption, and the way in which closing most programs doesn't close them- it just hides them. The stability varies pretty widely across devices, but it's about on the level of Palm OS.

I am still waiting for the mobile OS that implements virtual memory paging (with an SD card as the pagefile holder). It might be slower, but the RAM is so easily consumed in simple apps, it would enable a variety of applications that just don't work now. I know, you just have to wait a couple of years and it will all change, but right now it's a very tough decision if you want to figure out which mobile OS to develop on.

Now, some might say- why not just do mobile friendly web applications versus applications? For a lot of applications, you need more interactivity than the limited browsers on the phone provide. For others, the constant lag is the impediment. Overall, it's an area of potential, but limited to only the simplest applications today.

However, the mobile device is where some of the virtual machine technologies can really come to bear. In particular, Java Mobile Edition is pretty widely available, even if the apps look as out of place as they often do in Desktop OS land. So, you can do a Java app and get a reasonable percentage of phones to work, although they all seem to implement slightly different profiles.

Now we have the Apollo, Silverlight, JavaFX model of what are in reality enhanced web browsers that build UIs out of things other than HTML. JavaFX mobile is one picture of how things could go in that direction, where the environment could provide all of the basic phone functions, in addition to providing a decent programming environment for content delivery. Of course, I am not sure how much of that is really one thing, or if it's a set of technologies that Sun is lumping under one banner.

Anyway- let's say I have an opportunity to port one of these mobile GIS apps to a platform or OS- which way should I go?

Productive Thoughts

Scott Simpson: I love saving things to del.icio.us w/ a "toread" tag. Offloading work to the future, incredibly productive, version of myself. [link] Kind of a cool idea for using del.icio.us, especially if you use the firefox plugin. Just highlight a bit of text and then tag it. So easy. I haven't gotten as much out of the more advanced del.icio.us bookmarks plugin, but that might be because my current bookmarks are a pile of junk.

The main garbagey bit about del.icio.us is that there is no good way to manage tags with the default apps. Idea! I am going to hunt around to look for someone that has done that or start digging into the API a little bit.

I guess one of the main competitors to this stuff is Google Notebook, but I really don't enjoy using that for some reason I don't yet understand. Those little links in the search results pages are tempting thought.

del.icio.us friends

Thinking again. One of the things Steve Poland is going after is the concept of webothlike:

Basically the idea of WeBothLike.com is to connect like-minded people — people that have the same interests. You’ll go to the website and answer questions, as many as you want. The more you answer, the more profile data we have on you — and the more we can contrast you with others in our system, and match you up with them

I think rather than asking questions it would be better to try a recommendation style algorithm on your del.icio.us links, or bookmarks, etc. so that you could get a match score for how similar you are to other people. Basically you could submit all of your links and get a quick score for who else is tagging the same things as you. You could take a similar approach with OPML comparisons to find who is reading the same things as you. On the one hand, the output of this would be suggestions about what to read- and really, who doesn't have too much to read already? On the other hand, a cooler output suggested by WeBothLike would be to find people to scheme with.

Anyway, I have a feeling someone has already done this somewhere, but it's not part of the main del.icio.us application, and it probably should be.

Google Reader Reader Robot

How about a project that downloads your unread feeds from Google Reader, uses a speech synthesis program to convert them to mp3, adds the mp3s to a podcast server, which you then script to sync to your portable device? Then you can listen to all of your news on the way to work, as read by your choice of a feminine or masculine robot.

If you like that one, wait until you hear about my idea for Google Reader Printer for my poor friends that have no internet connection at their desks.

Hopefully someone else is working on a good Podcast transcriber, like Podzinger. Once there is a great speech to text solution, I can come up with a convoluted name for that.

Okay, these are lame ideas, but someone's got to pick up for that Techquila Shots guy.

Reporting and OR/M

Just an off the cuff thought about using Object Relational Mapping (Hibernate, TopLink, ActiveRecord, etc.) when doing reporting: Does it make sense to have objects corresponding to specific reports that result in denormalized data, so as to hold the results of the query? It makes it a little more sense if you have a view corresponding to the report, and then a object corresponding to the view. At some point it does seem to cross a line of excessive abstraction and an overgrown data model.

Simple

I think this is the route I am going to go when I have to do another Java web application. I have become improbably enamored with horizontal scalability. The primary downside is that they started using xml configuration files. Curse you XML configuration. The XML config is just there to compensate for the lack of dynamic language features...

Seriously though- the old way of building Java web applications is seriously threatened by the latest .Net stuff on one side, and the dynamic language stuff on the other side. I think the .Net 3.0 is not helping much on the complexity angle.

It makes me laugh to think how much the REST architecture resembles the Java Servlet Spec. All of these frameworks to abstract away HTTP verbs, when that was what really needed to have application structures that are concordant with the architecture of the web itself.

Ruby Community

I don't know who "Dan" is, but I like the way he rolls.

"I have no idea what the "Ruby Community" is. How do you define
membership in this community?"

No, no, the "Java Community" has a defined static membership, but the
"Ruby Community" is more dynamic. As long as you respond to the right
messages, you're just assumed to be a member.

Productivity tip?

I am considering switching back to using Lynx as my primary browser. My theory is that it makes the web so much less compelling that I won't be as distracted by it. Slightly easier in terms of keyboard navigation so I don't have to touch the mouse. Runs great in cygwin too. The biggest downside I am seeing so far is that Google Maps doesn't run very well.

I don't see them doing much to fix that. Oh well, back to 9 tabs of FireFox I suppose. Apologies for the mind drip.

Language Games

I've been following with great interest Jeff Atwood's series of posts on Alistair Cockburn's work on software development as a cooperative game.

I was wondering if he was going to dig down to the philosophy level on this, and he may, but this concept of the cooperative game is an extension of Wittgenstein's concept of language games, first outlined by Pelle Ehn. Reading Wittgenstein, more than anything else, really opened my mind to an incisive type of analysis that attempts to dissolve a seemingly unanswerable question by proving that it is nonsensical out of the context of the particular language game that gives it sense.

The digression between the purported "process" that underlies a project and the actual intuitive set of rules that guide the behavior of and between individuals are clearly different things. It's obviously important to pay attention to both. This is why Cockburn's approach to agile "method shaping" is so important, every strict process must itself have a meta process by which it is applied to any particular collection of individuals.

I really like Alistair's interview with Bob Payne (especially the parts where Mr. Cockburn is speaking) on the Agile Toolkit podcast.