I pull my iPhone from a pocket of my Jeans as the guy besides me starts talking: “Ahh, an iPhone 5. Nice! It’s twice as fast as the iPhone 4S”.

I try to ignore him and open Tweetbot to check my Twitter timeline. As I’ve been pairing with a colleague on a project the whole day I haven’t looked at Twitter for the last 9 hours and there are 50 new tweets.

The guy goes on: “It’s rectangular, rather flat, has rounded corners and does what it’s meant to do.”

Oh dear, where does he get something like that from. I throw a sideways glance at him. Could be from an ad agency, at least he talks that way.

Most of the new Twitter posts are boring. A post from someone reporting about his 10 km run. I’ve muted Runkeeper and some other running related clients and hashtags, but from time to time some post of that kind still filters through. There’s also some new consultancy wisdom tweeted and retweeted by my colleagues. No funny posts and nothing really exciting.

“Movies look great on the iPhone 5.”

Really? I open Riposte and check out App.net. That’s a much more nerdy timeline and not as crowded as Twitter.

“But the battery sucks. Yeah, the battery really sucks. I had an iPhone 5, but I returned it because the battery sucks. I’ll probably get myself a Samsung Galaxy.”

Huh, what’s changed. Is he getting offensive because of being ignored?

“Are there any good apps for the iPhone 5. I didn’t find any back then. And it sucks for games. I think they rushed the release of the iPhone 5 a bit.”

No way opening the Kindle app and trying to read my current novel “Third Shift” by Hugh Howey as the guy tries hard to get some reaction from me. I don’t feel like arguing why I like my iPhone, though. I’m not religious about it. It works for me. If something different works for you, then by all means get that.

“But movies look great on it.”

In that instant I remember hearing David Lynch talking about how you can never experience a movie on a phone. That still holds true for an iPhone 5 - even with it’s 4” display.

Luckily I need to change trains now.

A half year ago I saw this trailer of the then announced movie “Cloud Atlas”. The trailer got me interested. So I browsed around the web a bit and found out that it is based on a novel said to be spectacular and impossible to make a movie from.

So I bought “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell in Amazon’s Kindle Store and since I prefer to read the book before watching movies based on it, I started reading.

The book is great. It consists of six stories ranging from the 18th century to some more or less distant future. Each of the stories is written in its own style and uses a language matching the time.

The first story – the one from the 18th century – is quite difficult to read – It is written in a rather archaic English – and for me it was also quite boring. But the rest is all a very good read. The stories are told in two parts. You read the first parts from past to future and then the second parts come in reversed order from future to past.

All stories are somehow connected. There are people reading the older stories or watching them as a movie, but there are more than those obvious connections.

Now I also watched the movie. It is impossible even for a movie of nearly three hours to show each scene described in the book, but it captures the essence of the book.

One interesting aspect of the movie is that it tells all stories simultaneously. Sometimes you see 5 minutes of each story and sometimes the movie runs in a mere amount seconds through all six stories. At first it is a bit irritating, but in the end it is a good technique to bind all stories together and to remind the audience what the current situation is in each story.

The book carries some subtle notion of reincarnation and the movie reinforces that notion in a kind only a movie can, but you’ll have to see for yourselves.

One more tidbit maybe: In one of the stories taking place in the future a sort of fast food restaurant is described that uses golden arches in it’s logo. My brain made a connection to a currently existing chain of fast food restaurants. It’s hard to make that connection when watching the movie. Either the book isn’t as explicit in that case as I imagined or the movie makers decided to not be as obvious as the book.

So definitely first read the book and then watch the movie.

There is a Markdown plugin for WordPress, but then all posts are handled by it – even if they weren’t written using Markdown.

Back then I read about Jekyll and Octopress and started playing with it.

Octopress seemed like a good starting point as it contains some useful rake tasks and a framework for a blog. I didn’t like the theme and even being able to change the colors wasn’t enough to make it attractive for me. I was satisfied with the theme I used in the WordPress blog.

So really hard editing and much cleanup was needed. I learned a bit about liquid, the templating library used in Jekyll and had an occasion to code in Ruby again.

Unfortunately, the transition won’t be as imperceptible as I would wish for. I have never before looked into the templates for RSS and Atom feeds but since Octopress only comes with a template for an Atom feed and I still wanted to serve a RSS feed for those who have subscribed it, I needed to have a deeper look into this topic.

Wordpress generates its page numbers as ids for the entries in a feed even though you don’t see that page number anywhere else and permalinks use a human readable format.

The new feeds now again contain ids based on the permalinks and many feed readers will most likely display the feed as a whole bunch of new entries. Sorry about that.

Thanks to Apache rewrite rules everything else should work as before.

You’ll probably notice that there is no more search box at the top. That’s because there is no database. All pages are generated and served statically. Take a search engine of your choosing and search for anything you’d like to find there with “beeger.net” as a context. Since it’s all static again, the search engines should have no problem indexing the site.

At first beeger.net was pretty empty. It only contained a logo and I only had it registered to have the e-mail-adress robert@beeger.net. Anyway it looked way to empty and as I learned about blogs, I decided to start one myself. I started it by using a Windows tool simply called Blog. With this tool I typed my first posts into an integrated editor and Blog generated the HTML files for me which I then uploaded to the server.

I wanted a cool logo for my website and began sketching some ideas until I had one that looked fairly cool in my mind. Unfortunately my limited talents could not transfer the image in my mind to the screen of my computer or a piece of paper. So I started programming the generation of the logo in Java. The logo is a combination of arcs and lines. I remember running the program over and over again and moving lines and arcs around till it looked good.

Also of note on this one is the background color. Somehow I always liked beige and creamy colors. It also shows in the Squareness look and feel which I created some time later and the current design of the blog.

Back then table layouts were the way to do website design and the table layout is clearly visible in this first version.

After using Blog for a year I switched to MovableType . Back at that time MovableType was a fresh blogging system that I could host myself on my website. It had a nice templating system and posting new blog posts was a joy. But it wasn’t until 2005 that I changed the look of the site.

The logo stayed the same, but the background got changed to white and was less aggressive. Though it was still a table layout, it was a bit more subtle by leaving out some borders. Also notice the side menu. Side menus were the big new thing - at least for me - and I spend considerable time to get the CSS right. I also added some CSS-only buttons telling things none really wanted to know like what MovableType version I was using and that the site was valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS.

One of my biggest problems of all time is that I always want to create something visually cool but simply fail to make it happen. There’s always so much that gets lost or wrong on the way to the paper or the screen that I dump it. So I’ve always played around with ray tracers and such tools. By combining things in a script like for POV or by arranging them in a tool like blender and then applying materials to those objects one can things that look good without having to be overly talented in drawing.

In January 2006 I was playing again with blender and somehow ended up creating a scene that looks like some highway in cyberspace. I think Tron inspired me here. I spend much time fiddling with it and even added motion blur to it. I liked it so much, I rendered two shots of the scene, came up with the title “Travelin’ The CyberSpace - A Nerd’s Blog” and made it the new theme.

I also played around with CSS and discovered negative margins. You see how the menu and the post box overlap the main content block. It was so nice and looked so cool. Well it did until I tested it in InternetExplorer. InternetExploerer was a real spoilsport. It just ignored those negative margins and it all looked really bad. But I won this fight by adding a transparent margin on the left and right side of the background image. Gotcha, IE!

One of the biggest pains in MovableTime has always been the update procedure. You had to upload the new files to the server, make sure you uploaded some as binary and most as text and then there always were some other steps to take care of during an upgrade. Also it got more and more bloated with each new version. So in November 2010 I decided to move to WordPress. With the move to WordPress I also decided to give the site a new look. I took the minimal HTML5 starter theme and tweaked it until it looked like this:

Actually that’s not entirely true. Back then the main title was just “beeger.net”. Unfortunately moving away from static publishing with MovableType to dynamic publishing with WordPress has the effect that the wayback machine can no longer make snapshots of this site. Anyways the look is still the same.

I wanted the website to be readable on a mobile device like an iPhone. So by applying some “mobile first” thinking I got rid of the side menu. There are now only three buttons at the top and a search box. Here’s some more playing around with CSS. Inspired by Mac OS X segment buttons I used children selectors to make the first and last button round at one side. Since it should be readable on mobile devices and mobile devices are often on the way with low bandwiths, I decided to try to make a theme that would use no images. I browsed Google’s WebFont library and came across a font named “Reenie Beanie”  while searching for some font that looks like handwriting. The description of the font tells us that “Reenie Beanie could be used to represent the scribbling of a mad scientist, or the recipes of a genius chef.”. As the subtitle of the website was set on “The Ravings of Robert F. Beeger” the font was a perfect match. Even after more than a year I like this combination of Reenie Beanie for titles and Trebuchet for the rest of the text.

The latest change is only 3 months or something like that old. “beeger.net” looked like a boring title and one day as I registered some more domains, I thought it would be fitting a nerd to have some regular expression as a title. So that’s how the current title came to be. All of the domain names you can generate from it forward to this site.

And well, the background is again a beige tone. Not as aggressive as 10 years ago, but still.

expect(a).to(equal(b))

For my taste there are too many parentheses there and normally you get an additional pair around it when you put it into a one-line it-block like in

it('a should equal b', ()
  => expect(a).to(equal(b)));

So I want to get rid of some of those parentheses and working on my project I took inspiration from Dart’s event system which provides a nice approach for defining event handlers. Here’s an example

someElement.on.click.add(....)

Now I’m experimenting with a new form of expectations

expect(a).to.equal(b)

That looks better. But what about negations and combinations?

expect(a).to.not.equal(b)

can be implemented quite easily, but

expect(a).to.equal(b).or.equal(c)

is another matter. There is no way to know that after the first equal-matcher an and-matcher and another equal-matcher follows as there is no finishing method call that completes the expectation. A solution is to find some expression that puts a marker at the start like

expect(a).to.either.equal(b).or.equal(c)

but “either a or b” is definitely not the same as “a or b” and isn’t really flexible.

Doing it Yoda-style seems to solve the problem

to.equal(b).or.equal(c).expect(a)

For the fun of it, you can make it sound even more like Yoda

to.equal(b).or.equal(c).expect(a).hmm()

I’m unsure whether it solves a real problem, though. Tests shouldn’t be that complicated that the need for combinations of matchers arises. And though it’s fun, the original form where you know the subject before what is expected of it is more readable.

It was one of those books you start reading and only stop to go to sleep or eat something. It had it all: a gripping story, characters you could identify with and a cool setting. Although I nearly never reread books since there are so many interesting ones I haven’t read yet, I just thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool to read it again” and bought it in the kindle store. And as before I read through it until I finished it.

Nowadays books like “Ender’s Game” are categorized as “Young Adult” books. It’s not a hard science science fiction book. The plot isn’t overly complicated, but it has it’s fill of philosophy. It’s also a book that is easy to read. But despite being like that or perhaps because of it, it’s a recommendable book even for the no longer quite so young adult.

In the nearly 30 years since it’s publication Orson Scott Card has written some sequels  and prequels and stories taking place at the same time as the original book.

There are some reoccurring elements in those books, but nonetheless they are all at least entertaining and definitely good reads. In my opinion the best of the Ender books is “Children of the Mind”. It comes with several new ideas not seen in the other books and the story is as gripping as the original one.

There are rumors about a movie based on “Ender’s Game” and I wonder what it will be like. Most movies based on science fiction novels are just action movies in a science fictional setting. There’s much action in that book that can make an action movie, but I hope they won’t cut out the profound parts.

I downloaded it and started writing my first tests. I didn’t like that it used a style that I perceived as being inspired by JUnit 3, though. It also has a nice grouping feature, but groups looked a bit to unspecific to me.

At it-agile, the company I work for, everyone gets 30 slack days per year we can use however we want – as long as it has some connection to agile software development. So I decided to invest some slack days and try to implement my own testing framework. I wanted it to use matchers like the ones provided by Hamcrest. I liked that grouping feature of the existing testing framework but wanted to give it more meaning. As I pondered this I remembered that my colleague Sebastian Sanitz once introduced me to a JavaScript testing framework named Jasmine and upon revisiting it, I decided to build something similar for Dart.

As it is inspired by Jasmine and is implemented in and for the Dart programming language, I named it “dahlia”. Like “jasmine”, “dahlia” is the name of a kind of plant and its name start with the same two characters as “dart”.

A dahlia test looks like this

describe('two equal strings', () {
 it('should be equal', () => 
   expect('test').to(equal('test')));
});

Like in other BDD testing frameworks (the most widely known being RSpec), the describe-part describes something that will be tested and the it-part specifies and tests the behavior of the tested object. So you read this text “two equal strings should be equal”.

The parameter to expect() is the actual value, the one you want to test. Typically you call a method on the tested object here and test whether it mets your expectation. The testing part is the parameter of the to method. It is a matcher. Here an equal matcher is used that simply tests whether the actual value equals the expected value which is passed as a parameter to the matcher. Currently there are only a few basic matchers but the number of available matchers will be expanded in the near future. It’s fairly easy to implement your own matchers should the need arise. You just need to implement the Matcher inferface and provide a convenient function like the equal-function in this example to provide a new matcher.

The expect-part is - similar to the describe- and it-parts – meant to be easily readable. In the example this leads to “expect ‘test’ to equal ‘test’”. The it-function takes a function as its second parameter. In many cases those will be simple one line functions like the one in the example, but if some setup code is necessary, a full multi-statement function can be passed here. The it-call is also called a specification as it defines a behavior and a test for it. Every it-call is therefore counted as a “spec”. The total number of specs, of failures – failed expectations – and crashes – any other exceptions that may occur – is displayed at the end of a testrun.

Currently there is only one reporter that prints the test run results to the console – be it the Dart VM console in DartEditor or Dartium or the script console in any browser –, but other reporters that  create HTML and other formats will be added later. As dahlia is currently ment to be used for unit testing, the output to the console is the kind of output one needs the most.

dahlia is available at GitHub. If you are interested in Dart or are already developing with Dart, please take a look at it.

Several features of Closure made me take some time to dive into it:

• The closure library contains many small useful frameworks that fit together. So there is no need to mix and match different frameworks for functional programming, ui composition etc.
• There is a working module concept. You can separate your application into different parts and specify which of the many frameworks in the closure library you really need.
• You can use static typing and there is a compiler that checks it. So many errors can be found by the compiler. You don’t have to find them while running the app in the browser.
• Since the compiler knows what is used from the huge closure library and your own code, it can delete unused code from the compiled application and run some other advanced optimizations that make the resulting code much smaller and faster.

Especially the static typing and having a compiler that checks the code before it is executed, appealed to me. Debugging in a browser is quite comfortable nowadays but if there is a chance to get rid of bugs without having to debug, I’ll take it. As someone having developed in Java for over a decade now, using an IDE and a compiler feels natural to me.

But there is a downside. The static type information for Closure has to be typed in into comments since JavaScript itself as a dynamically typed language doesn’t provide any constructs for this. Having to put type annotations into comments is quite cumbersome and after some time my initial enthusiasm for Google Closure somehow waned. Was it really worth the additional effort?

Dart seems to be the answer for all those loving Closures’ features while disliking the notation needed to get them. Dart is a new class-based language by Google created for the development of client-side web applications.

Dart has optional static typing. You can provide static typing information and if you do, the compiler that generates JavaScript from your Dart code, will check it. If you choose not to provide that information, it will obviously not be checked.

Static typing in Dart only affects compilation. It isn’t used while running a Dart based application.

Dart also comes with real classes and inheritance among them. The notation for classes and inheritance is much simpler than the prototype-based notation in Closure. It all just looks cleaner and more readable in Dart than it does in a Closure class.

The Dart team provides an Eclipse-based IDE for Dart called Dart-Editor. It’s still in the alpha phase and lacks many features that simply belong to a good IDE like refactoring support, but even in this very early stage it’s useful for the development of Dart applications and the exploration of the Dart libraries.

Currently much is happening in the Dart universe. The language is far from fixed. Frequently new proposals or changes that will break code from a month before are announced. Some weeks ago for example a change of the meaning of the == operator was proposed. Currently Dart is not for the faint of heart but it’s fun.

My initial enthusiasm for it melted away after half a year. I haven’t read a single chapter since June or maybe even May. Serial novels don’t seem to work for me. I prefer to read a book at my own pace. I just cannot stand to have to wait for the next chapter for a week or maybe even two or three weeks.

It’s the same with tv series. I watch the first episode and maybe the next two. Then I get impatient and if the series isn’t really gripping or otherwise fascinating, I don’t watch it anymore.

I had expected that The Mongoliad would keep me reading longer because Neal Stephenson is part of it, but somehow it isn’t like any other book from him.

I suspect that either he doesn’t participate in the writing of the book or that the serial character of the book isn’t doing it any good.

Though I don’t know anything about writing fiction books, I can imagine, that it’s quite hard to write a book if you cannot return to an earlier chapter and fix a part or add something to make the whole book work better. The Mongoliad looks – at least to the point where I left it – like a cronologically sorted collection of stories about some people. The stories themselves are OK, but somehow there is something missing, something that makes me want to read on.

Then Delicious wasn’t shut down. It only got sold to another company. So somehow I returned to Delicious. I don’t have many bookmarks. I collected 350 of them and sometimes there are weeks when I really don’t add a new one. So it’s not as if the bookmark manager were a vital tool for me.

Anyways Delicious started to irritate me a bit recently. It looks bloated and they seem to add features I don’t really need. So I returned to Pinboard recently and will probably stay there. It still has the clean and nice interface and a useful mobile variant of it. The feature set  hasn’t changed for ages, but as it’s good as it is it doesn’t need to.

There’s one difference to Delicious that will matter to some people. For a Pinboard-account you have to pay a one time sign up fee of currently 9,51 $. The fee is getting increased by one cent for each new account.

In case of being interested you can browse my public bookmarks at Pinboard.

As in his former books, in the Void trilogy there’s a conflict that threatens a whole galaxy. People travel faster than light in space ships to prevent the catastrophe and some nice political and religious games are played out on a great stage.

This time around a singularity – the void – is the cause of great concern. Science fiction has seen some books about singularities – great artificial or somehow otherwise strange intelligences – in the past and many of them probably with scientifically better theories, but Hamilton’s take on the subject is nevertheless a good read.

Actually there are two stories told alternately. One takes place inside the void, where people have some amazing psychic abilities. The other one takes place outside the void, where people view the inside story while dreaming. Naturally some of the outsiders want to get into the void while others try to prevent them from getting inside.

Both stories provide lots of suspense  and fun and merge in a nice final.

Time to change it again. This time a lot of things change.

Naturally the design is the most apparent change. It’s very minimalistic now. There are no images in the header and the footer and no boxes around the individual posts. I’m using a webfont from Google’s font directory to give the headings a somewhat distinctive look. The HTML is html5 with all the new shiny tags like article and header, but that’s something nearly no reader of this blog will ever notice. I have also put some work into making it readable on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

The biggest change is in the backend though. I’ve moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress.

With the move to WordPress I also decided to deactivate commenting and trackbacks on this blog. Comments and trackbacks have mostly been spam in the last few years and a pain to sort out. I have included tweet and flattr buttons on each post. So you can comment on my posts via twitter or if the comment doesn’t fit into 140 characters on your own blogs. If you like a post you can flattr it.

As the title - The Mongoliad - suggests mongols play an important role in this book. It’s 1241 and the mongols are on their way to conquer the world. They have already reached Poland. Here’s Neal Stephenson talking about the setup:

The Mongoliad is different from those earlier books in one important aspect. It’s not a book in the classical sense. You cannot buy the finished product printed on paper or as an ebook. It’s published on its own website one chapter each week. And beside Neal Stephenson there are 6 other writers and even more people who are somehow involved in the whole thing.

The Mongoliad is not the first book of its kind. Some years ago Tad Williams tried the same approach with Shadowmarch. Shadowmarch was canceled 2002 after one year because it didn’t attract enough subscribers to pay the bills. It was published as a printed book sometime later.

I think this time around it could work. You don’t need a desktop computer or notebook to read it. You can read it on an iPad or any other of the forthcoming tablets. There’s said to be an iPad app waiting for approval by Apple that will improve the reading experience.

There are also some kinds of social features. You can rate and discuss each chapter with your fellow subscribers and with the writers. There’s also a forum. Those features are rather unimportant for me and till now I haven’t partaken in any of the discussions.

As with classical books, the content is the one and only thing that interests me. The already released four chapters present a gripping and well written story. So I think the 10$ for the yearly subscription fee is well invested money.

The advantage of having more text on a page is simply a reduced amount of page turnings. It’s the same with ebooks as it is with normal books. Each need to turn a page introduces a brief distraction in the reading flow. This becomes very apparent when reading on a small screen like the one of an iPhone.

On the iPad there are many different apps for reading different kinds of ebooks. Since starting reading ebooks in 2003 - on a Palm Tungsten T - I’ve been buying ebooks on ereader.com and reading them with the ereader app, which was called PalmReader back in 2003. Unfortunately ereader was not updated for the iPad, but fortunately Stanza is a nice alternative to the original ereader app. It can read DRM-protected ereader ebooks. It also provides a simple access to the free books from Project Gutenberg.

Apple’s iBooks app also looks nice and you can read any ePub book with it. It’s not limited to ebooks bought in Apple’s iBook store. I haven’t tried it with any DRM or otherwise protected ebooks, though. O’Reilly and The Pragmatic Bookshelf among others sell their ebooks without any such protection. Reading ePub books from those publishers works without any problems in the iBooks app. iBooks is a beautiful app with nice page turning animations. It looks nice and works great. It’s perfect for reading novellas and other kinds of books that mainly contain just text with an occasional image without any layout specialities. You can change the font style and font size and the text will be laid out in a way that it perfectly fills the screen. But that’s also the biggest problem with ePub when used for technical books. As a software developer I often read books with code listings and tables and images in them. I’ve never tried to read those kinds of books on an iPhone. The screen is just too small, but with an iPad there is enough room for listings, images and tables. It doesn’t work with ePub versions of this kind of ebooks. Listings just look weird. Probably reducing the font-size would fix it, but then there is a ton of other problems with ePub such as syntax hightligthing and special symbols pointing out interesting parts of a listing. And footnotes are displayed on the last page of a chapter.

So, the only solution seems to read the PDF variants of those ebooks, which are also available. PDFs are laid out with a specific font at a specific font size for a specific page size. It’s perfect for technical books although it takes away the possibility to change the font-size to one’s liking.

iBooks was recently updated with the ability to show PDF ebooks, but PDF-reading isn’t as good an experience as with other apps.

My current favorite is GoodReader. Earlier versions of this app were quite slow and changing from one page to the next was rather sluggish, but that got fixed in a recent update. So now it works fine. One of the greatest features of GoodReader is its crop tool. Pages in technical PDF-ebooks have normally big margins and and footers and headers containing information about the current chapter and page number that aren’t necessary when reading a book. With the crop tool you can crop away the parts that you don’t need and zoom into the content of interest. With a bit of cropping the books by the mentioned publisher are pleasant to read on the iPad.

Fast PDF has a similar feature but with an unnerving characteristic. Every time you change from one page to the next it zooms out of the currently zoomed in page, changes to the next page and then zooms in again to the desired portion of the page. That makes the app totally unusable for me.

Both PDF viewers have support for password protected files and both lack the support for word definition lookup, a feature nicely implemented in iBooks., where to just tap on a word, select “dictionary” from the appearing menu and are presented with a definition of the word from the dictionary included in iOS.

Currently I prefer buying ebook versions of technical books over their paper variant. It’s easy to take a dozen of them with you when travelling. So I have them available wherever I am whenever I have a need to look something up in them.

Reading ebooks just became lots better with the iPad.

Once I bought the book and read a few pages, I realized that, as odd as it may sound, the title was really “Rainbows End”. It still amazes me how the absence of a simple symbol - the apostrophe in this case - changes the whole meaning and mood of the title.

The book is a near-future science fiction novel. It takes place in 2025. People are using wearable computers all the time and augmented reality is used by everyone. Well actually some people don’t use those new technologies. Some of them live in a retirement home called “Rainbows End” - a zone free of those new technologies. Some live in the normal world but try to make a stand against the new things by sticking to notebook computers and printed books. There’s a pretty funny scene when one of them tries to prove that all you can do with wearable computers can also be achieved with a notebook and that the new technologies are so much more insecure than the old ones.

There are much similarities to our own times. We laugh at people who are scared by the internet and by computers in general but how will it look like when our generation is the old generation. Will we be flexible enough to adapt or will we stick to what we learned to accept and love now.

The book is much more than that. There’s a a crime of international scale, love and friendship and well thought out protagonists. I enjoyed reading the book very much.

It’s been an exciting time. Especially at the beginning working on Osmorc was a very rewarding task. Finding out, how OSGi could work with IDEA and then seeing that it actually did work, was a great pleasure. And people actually used it. Though there was nearly no documentation people accepted the pain of working out for themselves how it worked. I have been in contact with some people spending time trying to move their projects from Eclipse to IDEA with Osmorc or starting a fresh project with Osmorc.

Jan came around in May 2008 and told me he wanted to be a part of it and that he wanted to develop an integration with Maven. I was amazed that someone was willing to put his spare time into a project of mine.

And suddenly it wasn’t some crazy idea I spent my evenings playing with. It actually was an open source project with two developers and some users who actually cared enough for it to contact its developers and write bug reports and feature suggestions for. That actually was a very strong driving force making me invest even more time into Osmorc.

Now two years are over. Osmorc is useful, but it isn’t finished. There’s a ton of more features to implement. It will probably never be finished since you can always come around with new features that enhance it even more. But if you look back over the two years since Osmorc’s inception, you will notice that the pace in the development has slowed down considerably. That’s because most of the basics are done, the low-hanging fruits are all picked as the saying goes. Bigger features need more time and as more people use it, more bugs are unveiled.

So I took some time off the project and took a look at it from the outside. I realized I wasn’t satisfied with my work on it anymore. I also realized that I would need to invest much more time into it to be proud of it and to be happy working on it again. Unfortunately I don’t see how I could do that without sacrificing other aspects of my life that are dear to me even more than I already did. So since I cannot put enough time into the project, I decided to leave it completely. Better not to work on it than to do it in a way that is unsatisfactory for me and probably also for its users.

Jan intends to keep on developing Osmorc and I wish him the best luck.

I think the biggest mistake in this project was that we didn’t actively try to get more developers into it. When you have 5 developers collaborating on a project like that, you can distribute the development of new features, bug fixing and writing of documentation among them. Then a project like this can move at a reasonable pace, there’s always some progress visible and the developers keep motivating each other because each of them sees that the project grows.

So I hope that some people will join Jan in his effort to keep Osmorc alive.

So because there’s much in the English language that I haven’t learnt during school, I needed a good dictionary and I didn’t want to have to page through a 1000+ pages dictionary searching for a word I stumbled upon while reading a book on the train. I found “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged” and bought Palm Reader because that was the application I needed to be able to use that dictionary. And because I now had an eBook reader installed on my Palm handheld I also bought an eBook just to test, how reading a book on it would feel like. The book I bought was “Hart’s Hope” by Orson Scott Card, who also wrote “Ender’s Game”, a fantastic book I’ve read earlier. The book was strange but gripping. I read through it in no time.

I realized I didn’t need the feel of paper pages, didn’t need to be able to physically turn the pages to enjoy a book. After all, the content is what makes a book, not the medium on which it is delivered. OK, a paper book feels better, the print looks nicer and images also look better on a printed page than on a small screen of a handheld computer, but reading voluminous books like Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem” while on the train is much more comfortable on a handheld.

Through all that time I stuck with Palm Reader which somewhen was renamed to eReader. I’ve always found something worth reading on ereader.com which claims to be “the world’s largest eBook Store” and the ereader software was always available on the devices I wanted to use it on: Palm Tungsten T, Palm Tungsten T5 and for the last year iPhone. Up to now I’ve read 26 book that way.

Unfortunately something changes in the eBook scene. Some months ago, an ereader newsletter promoted “Matter” by Iain M. Banks. It was available for a reduced special introductory price. Happily I put it into my ereader shopping cart, but when I wanted to buy it, ereader told me that I could not. The eBook is geographically restricted and can only be bought by residents of the US and several other countries excluding Germany. I was very infuriated and wrote an e-mail to ereader about this. The answer was that that’s how the publishers want to have it and ereader could not change it. I then bought the paperback variant which luckily is not geographically restricted.

A week ago I participated in a survey at ereader and got a gift code. Today I took the time to browse through ereader and get some new eBooks. The first book I looked up was “The Dreaming Void” by Peter F. Hamilton. Uups, geographically restricted to US and Canada. Damn, OK, let’s look at some other books. Hmm, looks like nearly all new releases are geographically restricted.

Funny thing is that nearly 90% of the books in my ereader book shelf are now geographically restricted. “Anathem” which I bought and read a year ago is now geographically restricted. Had I not bought it a year ago, I could not buy it now. I wonder if ereader will ever go Amazon on me and start deleting books from my book shelf. Unfortunately ereader doesn’t sell “1984”. but it would have been fun to link to a geographically restricted version here.

So well, ereader, thanks for the gift code, but it would also be nice if you had some interesting books available to people outside the US worth spending the gift code and my money on.

The bundling of Osmorc has several effects on Osmorc.

One of the effects is that the name “Osmorc” vanishes from the visible parts of the plugin. There’s still a place or two where it appears, but that’s only because I was lazy in replacing all occurrences with something meaningful for people who are looking for OSGi in IDEA. Now that Osmorc is bundled with IDEA that change is a logical one. People using Maia, will look for “OSGi” in the UI to find out how to get their OSGi projects working in IDEA. No one really cares which plugin provides a functionality as long as it’s there and working.

Osmorc also changed the subversion repository. While the branch for IDEA 8 is still active on Sourceforge, the new trunk for Maia is hosted by JetBrains. Osmorc is part of every new IDEA build and Osmorc’s JUnit tests are now part of IDEA’s big test suite that is executed frequently on the build servers.

As developers of a bundled plugin we can directly contact people at JetBrains with questions and as the issue tracker shows, there are quality assurance people at JetBrains testing Osmorc and posting issues for bugs and enhancements. We also have access to some resources not available publicly. We don’t need to wait for the next official EAP build of IDEA for example.

The bundling of Osmorc in IDEA is a great step for Osmorc and I’m looking forward to the future development of the plugin.

Although working on Osmorc itself and the positive and helpful feedback from its users is already a great motivation, the recognition and also the money that is part of the prize adds to it.

If you liked the Baroque Cycle you will also like this one. As the driving theme of the Baroque Cycle was science it’s philosophy in Anathem.

One reviewer from Locus wrote that it’s “porno for polymaths”. Well, I’m not a polymath and don’t know who originally came up with most of the philosophic ideas presented in the book, but you don’t need to know it to enjoy the book. The story is gripping – as usual in a book by Stephenson – and the ideas are fascinating even without making the connection to their origins.