The Void trilogy is another three volume space opera by Peter F. Hamilton. It’s not really revolutionary. But if you liked “Night’s Dawn” or the “Commonwealth Saga” – his former space operas – you’ll like this one, too. It’s a sequel to the Commonwealth Saga and since persons from it make reappearances here and situations from it are referenced reading the saga first is a good idea.

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.

It’s been nearly 5 years since the last redesign of my blog.

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.

“The Mongoliad” is Neal Stephenson’s new book project and it fits perfectly in with his most recent books - the Baroque Cycle and Anathem. So if you liked those books you’ll like this one, too.

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 iPad is a great device for reading ebooks. The bigger screen is a big advantage over the smaller screen of the iPhone. On the iPhone I always used a small font and small margins to get as much text as possible on the screen. It worked pretty well, but it looked a bit crowded. Now on the iPad with a font that is more comfortable to read and margins that make the pages actually look like pages of a book there’s still more text on a page than on the iPhone.

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.

When I first read about this book, I thought that there must be some typo in the title. Surely it should be “Rainbow’s End”, shouldn’t it? We all have read stories about rainbows’ ends and all the wealth that awaits there. So it was a natural reaction to assume that this book by Vernor Vinge would be some variation on that old story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Osmorc, a plugin that enables development of OSGi based applications with IntelliJ IDEA and that is developed by Jan Thomä and me, won a “Honorable Mention” prize in the “IntelliJIDEAL Plugin 2008 contest”.

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.

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.