Author: Roo

Retrospective

I’ve decided to start including work related items in my blog here.  Please view the About page to see the standard disclaimer.  A fair number of the things I do at work can’t be discussed in public until they arrive somewhere in product form, by then they usually feel like old news to me and often information has been leaked via other channels.  Thus, some of the work related posts might seem a little boring to those “in the know” but I hope to help people put 3+4 together by linking to various bits of information, or simply provide a “straight from the developers” viewpoint.  I guess we’ll see how it goes, requests and feedback are welcome.

Recently Rick DeNatale posted a nice personal history of Smalltalk, I’m quite proud to have been part of building several of the products he mentions.  The OTI VM team started out building Smalltalk, but moved on to Java by first doing VisualAge for Java, followed by J9 for embedded.  Currently we still actively develop J9 which is primarily used as the core of the IBM JDK, but we still do embedded work as well as a Real-Time Java offering.

A Tale of Two iPods

So a while back I posted about my how my video iPod had stopped working.  My investigations pretty much pointed at the logic board being bad.  I do have a classic 512MB shuffle that I’ve been rocking, but I miss the display to figure out what album (or even sometimes artist) I’m listening to – also I had been using the video feature to watch transcoded TV shows from my MythTV PVR.

This had me surfing the apple refurb store and considering the $89 nano there since a replacement logic board will run somewhere around $90 (and I don’t get a warranty).  The local used market also was very tempting as video iPods seem to run around $100 – $120.

The usedottawa.com site seems to generally have the best local prices, but I really wanted to find one for less than $100.  As luck would have it, someone posted a black 30G video iPod for $60 the other day – I leapt on the opportunity.  I figured at this price, it was going to be a little banged up, but as long as it worked I could do a transplant.

My busted iPod is on the left, the used (but working) iPod on the right.  Note the scratch on the screen area and tape on the lower right side.  Generally the surface has been badly scratched up, this iPod has had a rough life.

Even the metal back shows serious signs of wear.  There is also gunk inside of the dock connector making the cable connection a bit tricky (I’m pretty sure if I clean out the gunk – it will be fine).

Even the side of this case is starting to bust apart (thus the tape).  I’m sort of amazed that this unit still works – it sort of restores my faith in the quality of the iPod devices.  While $60 might have sounded like a too good to be true deal, based on its condition I paid a fair price for it.

Well, next step is to strip both units down and do a little transplant surgery…

Fantastic Contraption

I ran into this flash based web game a while back, it sucked up a couple of nights while I compulsively played through the first 18 levels. I was going to post about it back then, but decided against it as there are plenty of other discussions about fantastic contraption out there already.

For the geek crowd, it should probably be renamed to fanatic compulsion.  Today I saw that two of my coworkers had just recently come across it (one of them with a physics background no less!) – they were both clearly trapped by this meme-like game.  Consider this posting a warning – it is a huge time suck.

The game allows users to save their contraptions, and share them with others via a link – so a little internet searching will find you solutions to view if you need hints.  As well, once you complete a level, you can see the solutions others have saved.  Pretty neat how 5 simple elements can be combined to create so many solutions.

Astute readers may notice that I’ve posted a Google Chrome screen capture.  This was actually taken running on Ubuntu using Wine.  Instructions came via LifeHacker, but be warned lots of things don’t work (like any https:// connections).  There is of course also CrossOver Chromium, but this is basically Wine linked to Chrome – so it suffers the same shortfalls.  I used Chrome here because for whatever reason, the flash engine included with the Wine setup is much faster than the one embedded in my Firefox (same machine).  I have more opinions on Chrome, but will save them for a future discussion.