A Windows Feature I'd Like on the Mac

Both Windows and Mac OS X let you "minimize" windows to the task bar / dock.

Both let you bring a window back by clicking on the task bar / dock.

But on Windows you can click on the task bar icon a second time to minimize the window again. I've got in the habit of using this to take a quick look at a window and then hide it again. I keep trying to do that on the Mac but it doesn't work.

I can see one argument against this feature would be that people often get confused and double-click instead of single-clicking. If implemented naively, a double-click would show and then hide the window immediately, frustrating the user. But Windows solves this problem by treated a double-click the same as a single click.

If anyone knows a way to make this work on the Mac, leave me a comment and I'll owe you one.

One part of this that is nicer on the Mac is that "Hide" minimizes all of an application's windows, and clicking on the dock brings them all back, whereas on Windows it's one window at a time. I have a vague memory that Windows 7 might improve this.

The iPhone Software Revolution

Coding Horror: The iPhone Software Revolution

Someone else who finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone.

And this rave review is from someone who isn't an Apple or Mac fan.

Apple Sells Over One Million iPhone 3GS Models

Apple Sells Over One Million iPhone 3GS Models in the first three days.

And one of those was me - I finally broke down and bought an iPhone, surprising some people, because although I love gadgets, I don't like cell phones. I could have bought an iPod Touch, but although I didn't really care about the phone, I wanted all the other features like 3G, GPS, compass, camera, etc. that don't come with the Touch. And I'm sure I'll end up using the phone occasionally now I have it.

I'm already loading up on iPhone apps. With over 50,000 available they're one of the best parts of the iPhone/Touch.

Ultra High Speed Photography

kurzzeit.com - Kameras

1 million frames per second - amazing!

(I couldn't get the videos to play in Firefox but Internet Explorer worked.)

Mac OS X Hangs from Lightroom

More often than I'd like lately, when I import photos into Lightroom (from an SD card in a USB reader) it hangs my whole Mac.

I can understand how Lightroom could crash, but I'm a little baffled that it manages to freeze the whole operating system. You get the spinning beachball and you can't to anything - can't switch apps, can't pull down menus, can't do Ctrl + Eject to shutdown.

At first I thought it was because I would start to view photos while it was still downloading, so I quit doing that, but it's still happening.

The strange thing is that Lightroom is normally very stable. It doesn't crash or hang when I'm working in it, no matter what I do. I suspect this is more of an OS bug, or at least a bad interaction between the app and the OS.

This seems to have become a problem recently, perhaps related to either Lightroom updates, or OS X updates, or both. (That's one of the downsides of all these automatic updates.)

I wonder whether it has someting to do with importing directly from the SD card through USB. Not that that is an excuse for the OS to die, but I could see where there would be some low level device stuff going on. Maybe I should copy the files to the Mac and then import from there. Although that's quite a bit more hassle since Lightroom auto-detects memory cards and goes straight to Import. However, I think you can set up Lightroom to "watch" a directory, so maybe I could do that and copy to that directory.

Continuous Obsolescence

I see my 13" MacBook has already been replaced by a new model.

It's been moved to the "Pro" label, gained its Firewire connector back, and now has an SD slot (which I'd like for downloading photos).

Apple seems to be coming out with new models faster than ever. The model I have was only out for 7 months before being replaced! Most software doesn't get upgraded that quickly, let alone hardware.

I like the rapid improvement, but I hate the resulting feeling of being left behind! Too bad we can't get automatic updates like software :-)

Edward Bear and Software

I just started reading Java Power Tools and the opening quote on the preface was this:

Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

-- "We are introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and some bees, and the stories begin,"
Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

What a great quote for software development!

Too Good to be True

I should have known that it was too good to be true that all the tests up to the N's were succeeding. I was a little suspicious, but who likes to question positive results.

What I wasn't remembering was that TestRunner reports errors at the end, not after each test. And I was never getting to the end because I'd get an unhandled exception (i.e. crash).

When I'd hit an unhandled exception I'd run that individual test by itself so once I fixed the exception I'd see the errors caught by TestRunner and I'd fix those, generally by implementing missing methods.

So the tests weren't succeeding up to the N's, they just weren't crashing. When I realized this, and specified that TestRunner should stop on the first failing test, I didn't even make it past the A's :-(

Oh well, there was nothing wrong with fixing the crashes first. I'm just nowhere near as far along in the process as I over-optimistically thought.

Back to slogging :-)

A Sigh of Relief

The last while I've been working on getting the Suneido standard library tests to run on jSuneido.

Mostly this is a matter of implementing built-in functions and methods. Occasionally I find a bug in the existing jSuneido code, but thankfully that hasn't been too frequent.

It's actually been going quite well. The tests run alphabetically and I've got them succeeding all the way up to 'N'. Actually, I'm surprised that many tests succeed since I still have quite a few built-in methods to implement. 80-20 principle, I guess. (i.e. 80% of the tests only require 20% of the built-in functions.)

But one thing that's been nagging me during this process is that the tests report how long they take to run, and they've been running extremely slowly. I wasn't surprized they would run somewhat slower than cSuneido, since I'm not using the fast server JVM and I haven't done any optimization.

But jSuneido was on the order of 100 times slower. That was a little scary. If it was really going to be that much slower then I might as well give up now. But I figured there had to be a reason for it, probably something stupid.

As I expected, it was something stupid. Suneido loads and compiles code from libraries on demand. Once loaded, the compiled version stays in memory. I had this all working, but I missed one small but critical piece - I wasn't saving the compiled version. So it was re-loading and re-compiling on every reference. Yikes! It's not surprising it was slow.

Now the tests actually seem to be running faster on jSuneido than cSuneido, although I'm not sure the resolution of the timing is accurate enough to tell. At this stage, as long as there's not a huge difference, I'm happy.

Google Squared

Here's my first Google "Square":

8000m peaks

My initial search for "8000m peaks" only came up with 7 of them. Clicking "Add next 10 items" at the bottom added 6 more, plus some climbers which I had to remove. For some reason it didn't find Cho Oyu. But it was the first suggestion when I clicked on "Add items".

It automatically came up with reasonable columns - Image, Description, First Ascent, Height, and Location.

I couldn't figure out any way to sort them, e.g. by height

OnDemandBooks

OnDemandBooks

This is pretty cool. But I can't help think they're perfecting yesterday's technology. I guess that's typical - by the time we perfect some technology, we've moved on to something "better", albeit less perfected.

Just like a big fancy machine in the music store to burn cd's on demand has pretty much been made obsolete by mp3 players and buying music over the internet.

Now if only someone can open up digital book distribution the way Apple has opened up digital music distribution.

Amazon has digital music and books, but US only. Even Indigo's new digital book service is US only, despite being a Canadian company! I realize the US is a much bigger market, but I still can't help being annoyed by it!

Currently, most digital books are "proprietary", i.e. if you have a Sony ebook reader you have to buy your books from Sony, and if you have an Amazon Kindle you have to buy your books from Amazon. Even Apple, who are famous for their proprietary approach, let you play their music on devices made by other companies.

I'd really like to go digital with my books the way I have with my music, but we're not quite there yet.