Roman’s blog

A Java applet runs in a 100% pure java fantasy world, neatly enclosed in its rectangular real estate. Putting code in a page makes sense if you can control that page; doing your little masturbatory stuff, alone in your tiny square box makes no sense. That’s why javascript made it and java didn’t: javascript acknowledged that the game was about getting intimate with the page, and getting your hands covered with slimy tag soup.

Reddit comment by fab13n on Joel’s article “Strategy Letter VI”

User Interface:

• Bumptop Prototype [youtube.com]
• Jeff Han on TED Talks [youtube.com]
• Information Software and the graphical Interface [worrydream.com]
• Readability Of Websites With Various Foreground/Background Color Combinations, Font Types And Word Styles [hubel.sfasu.edu]

Miscellaneous:

• Why I quit my 6-figure job: [menshealth.com]
• Many English words have Latin roots, but what are the roots of Latin? [straightdope.com]
• Flight patterns [users.design.ucla.edu]

Elliote’s notes on Architecture & Design World:

In Ivar Jacobsen’s lunch keynote he reveals that he’s pretty much given up on large, all-encompassing “processes” like RUP. He’s now advocating picking and choosing from a grab-bag of individual “practices”, which is what most shops were doing anyway.

Elliote’s notes on EBay scaling issues: Ebay has gone through three major changes in their architecture. The first version was based on Perl, the second on C++/IIS (ISAPI.dll) now it’s Java.
OSCON 2007 Presentation papers [conferences.oreillynet.com]
OSCON Presentation on AJAX Performance: Performance Javascript mantra: Be lazy, be responsive, be pragmatic, be vigilant.

Web browsers are more like mobile phones than desktops. Limited, flimsy, temperamental platform being stretched beyond its initial design goals. But everyone’s got one, so it’s still the best place to be.

http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org: An effort to open OpenOffice APIs to non UI-driven applications, like document generation or conversion (think of PDF!)

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.6 because of security issues. The upgrade was easy as always: Just copy the new files over the old ones, request an upgrade page, finished. Everything works as before: plugins, themes, etc. Fine piece of software.

Finally had some time for a new theme. I switched from the default Kubrick layout by tweaking the CSS and some of the PHP sources. I’m by no means a CSS expert but during the whole thing I learned quite a bit:

• Prefer paddings for spacing instead of margins especially for elements like headings and lists. Margins tend to obscure your layout since you can never be sure if a neighbour element’s margin pushes you around. Set 0px margins explicitely to avoid browser defaults.
• Don’t make something inline what is normally block (e.g. for preventing line-breaks between a heading and a smaller caption). This will catch you just behind the next corner.
• Beware of the IE “Double margin bug”. What a PITA, cost me an hour!
• Use floats for your sidebar, don’t do tables.
• Fonts have very different sizes for the same “Point size”. This is expressed by the so called aspect ratio. Problem should be solved by the font-size-adjust CSS property which unfortunately isn’t implemented across various browsers.
• The X11 base font equivalent to “Georgia” is “Utopia” not “Times New Roman”.
• Keep your CSS simple. Browser quirks WILL byte you. Restrain from dirty CSS hacks, even if they’re well documented.
• Use browsershots.org for cross-browser/cross-platform testing.

As for the layout itself: I switched to a serif font (Georgia) for readability reasons. Don’t use Times for this prupose as it renders badly on computer screens. The content area is now emphasized by having a dark surrounding. I used grey instead of pure black since latter would mean too high contrast and hurts the eye. Finally I streamlined the look for various pages. The main page, archives and detail page now all have a sidebar. This is for consistency, the original layout switched to a “wide-content” layout.

Surfing around:

• Removing features from the Java SE platform (blogs.sun.com)
• The JVM as an (Un)Common Language Runtime (www.artima.com)
• Strongtalk has gone fully Open Source! (www.strongtalk.org): Now that’s interesting. Did you know that Sun bought and locked away a strongly typed VM-based Smalltalk variant in the mid-90’s?
• Subreddits (sub.reddit.com)
• How often do you visit reddit (www.tezaa.com)
  
• T.E.D.D.Y. Converts 2D Images into 3D (techeblog.com): WOW!
  
• Raw Shooter bought by Adobe (www.pixmantec.com): This makes me kind of sad… Raw Shooter products will be discontinued while Adobe will incorporate RS technology into something called “Lightroom”. Read here for more information.
  

Finally! A gallery documenting Romina’s birth and her first days. For a login drop me a line or call. Note that there are comments on the pics as you zoom into the thumbnails.

In “Why not Jython” I moaned about Sun not embracing dynamic languages. Well it seem’s they want at least jump on the Ruby bandwagon and are hiring two core-developers of JRuby fulltime. Read some reactions to Sun’s move here. On another front Jim Hugunin (the original JPython developer) released IronPython 1.0, a .NET Python implementation. Note that this is a Microsoft project now and Jim is also an Microsoft employee. Update: Read Artima’s take on this story here.

On August, 28th at 3:22am our dougther Romina was born. She and her mother are in good health. Romina’s birth data: 3010 grams in weight and 49cm tall.

To satisfy the eager demand for photos I put one here (cklick to enlarge), a gallery will follow soon. Last week’s feelings range from pure happiness to utter stress. Suddenly you’re faced with huge responsibility and completely changed priorities. Words can’t describe how you feel If you’re holding such a little fragile nothing in your hands, not to speak of changing the diapers for the first time or driving home with it from the hospital. As a father I really recommend to take vacation for at least two weeks, you’re mentally twisted and good for nothing anyway. And don’t even think of sleeping for more than four hours ;-)

Somewhere on a wall in Hamburg:

Love you to :-*

I migrated this blog from BBlog to Wordpress. I started to look for Wordpress when I realized that every Blog client had MoveableType and WordPress as the minimum supported blogs on their list. Not that I’ve been unsatisfied with BBlog, it met all my blogging needs. It’s just the tool support which led to my decision, another example of networking effects. And btw. after playing around a bit I have to say that Worpress really is a fine piece of software. For a good comparison of different blog software head over to BlogHaus.