(robertf?)?beeger\.(net|info|org)

The Ravings of Robert F. Beeger

I’m leaving Osmorc

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After two years working on Osmorc, I’m leaving this project.

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.

ereader.com now practically unavailable outside the US

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I’m an eBook fan. I started reading eBooks at the end of 2003. I was searching for a good English dictionary that would run on my Palm Tungsten T. Back then I was reading books made of paper and most of them were written in English. Though I’m German most of the books I read are written in English for two reasons. The first is that it’s an easy way of practicing a language by just reading something that uses the language. The second reason is that some books loose much of their essence when they get translated. When an author starts to play with words and makes jokes that only work with the words he chose in the language he chose, there’s just no way to translate it properly.

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.

Osmorc becomes OSGi Support in IDEA’s next version

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Yesterday JetBrains released the first milestone of the next version of IntelliJ IDEA – codenamed Maia. One of the new features of Maia is “OSGi Support”. The OSGi support in Maia is provided by a bundled version of Osmorc.

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.

Anathem

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Neal Stephenson has written another great book — Anathem. Visit the website of the book for a short summary of what it’s about and some nice videos featuring the author himself talking about the book and reading some passages from it. BTW, the trailer that is also available on the website is totally misleading. It shows some scenes from the book but without the story surrounding the scenes, you have to get the wrong impression of 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.