wissel.net

10 years ago the biggest adventure of my life started. It is still on and I'm still learning.

Happy birthday Anthony and Ernest!
Being a geek dad we celebrate with the appropriate present and stuff to chill out afterwards.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 5:41 PM, Category Twins | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Singapore is one of the most wired companies in the world with a Broadband penetration exceeding 100% (Korea take that ). I recently switched to Starhub from SingTel on one of their midrange plans (not the alledged 100 MBPS one), so I was curious and headed over to SpeedTest to check how I'm doing. Locally I got 8.42 Mbps and overseas 5.37 (Boston), 4.76 (San Franscisco) and 5.3 (Texas) Mbps.

Should be ample power for any web based application isn't it? Not so fast. Just recall how most of the web 2.0 applications with their Ajax goodness actually work:

(Image shamelessly borrowed from JustGoodDesign.com
You will realize that while you want all the speed you can get for watching video or download files, you want fast reaction to your requests too. Reaction time in the internet is called latency. How long does it take the other side to react. There are many factors influencing latency. Physical distance, quality of lines, number of nodes to traverse, things happening on that nodes (packet inspections, firewall activities) etc. In a local network you can expect latency in the range of less than a milisecond up to 3-4ms. Once firewalls get inbetween figures get higher. Here the Singapore figures (mesured using ) look different:

Locally I got 31ms (just 15x slower than a 2ms local network), overseas between 200ms and 350ms (just 100x and 150x slower than the lan). You can imagine what that does to your "chatty" web2.0 application. While 100 calls in the lan take just a fifth of a second you would need to wait 20sec on the slow connection. Now travel to places sourrounded with great walls or exotic destinations and your app will suck big time. My recommendation for all web2.0 developers: Schedule some time in a remote development facility (Yes people actually write code there) but leave your servers at home.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 4:13 PM, Category Buying Broadband | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

The good Movie Bag is loosing shape and SWMBO insists on replacement. SoI had a look at Varier:

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Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 7:16 PM, Category After hours | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

A collection of quotes I like:

• Thomas T. Nagle:
  Sustainable cost advantages are realized not by constant belt tightening,
  but by the efficient use of resources
• Edsger Dijkstra
  It is never enough to satisfy your own intellect (since it will be laid in your grave with you), but one must teach others, to use their mind.
  The more one focuses on these two tasks, the faster one realized that they are the two sides of one coin:
  Who teaches himself, discovers what can be taught
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.
    Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
  • As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it
  • You know you've achieved perfection in design,
    not when you have nothing more to add,
    but when you have nothing more to take away
  • It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
    What is essential is invisible to the eye.
• Anonymous
  For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong
• Nathaniel Borenstein
  The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents
• Alan Cooper
  Most people know more about how the Vatican works than what programmers do.
• Albus Dumbledore
  You have to choose between what is right and what is easy, ... because what is easy is often not right.
• Derek Bok (a former President of Harvard)
  If you think education is expensive - try ignorance
• Linus Thorwald during the Lotus Devcon 1999
  If you love somebody - set them free
• CenterGate Research Group, LLC
  Technology so advanced, even we don't understand it!
• Leonardo da Vinci
  Poor is the pupil who does not surpass their Master.
• Soren Kierkegaard
  The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.
• The Koran
  They deserve paradise who make their companions laugh.
• Lao Tzu
  • As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
    The next best, the people honor and praise.
    The next, the people fear, and the next the people hate.
    When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves'
  • A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step
• Shi Quin
  When you gaze at the cloudless sky, you either see the emptiness of the sky (xu1kong1) or the emptiness of your heart
• Hugh MacLeod
  Choosing an easy live rarely ends up with much of either.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 12:47 AM, Category After hours | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Over the long live of Lotus Notes the address dialog has been a trusted, never changing compagnion:

Over the years it got some facelift like the ability to drag and drop or the ability to sort by Notes hierarchy, language or corporate hierarchy (anybody seen that?) or to look at details in yet another window. It works OK as long as the number of names is small and diverse. However once you enter cultures that are notoriously short of last names and sport large companies it gets tedious to pick the right Mr. Wang or Mr. Lee. In short: the address dialog is overdue for an overhaul. Since simplicity isn't simple careful considerations are needed. How much more complex the dialog could get to stay reasonable and how simple it needs to be. The requirements I came up with can be quite conflicting.

• I want to be able to filter the search scope based on a series of criteria:
  • by organizational properties (like department name or org type e.g. "sales"
  • by geography
  • by job role
  • by tags
  • by favorites
  • by source: internal/external, groups, individuals, from Facebook
  • by communication history: frequency or date
  • by search in communication
  • by search in profiles
• access to list by first name, last name or nick name
• suggestion of addresses from social analytics
• display of additional information (address card + tags + list memberships) to positively identify the receipient
• Indication if encryption is available or not
• Indication if alternate access (e.g. shared communities) is available

I'm sure there are more criteria available. Packing all of them into one dialog might be a challenge. I played around and created a mockup
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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 11:30 PM, Category Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (12) |      

XPages allow you to use JavaScript closures in both client and server side code. There are plenty explanations available, which seem to make them rather more mysterious. After looking at a lot of them I conclude: "JavaScript closures are like riding a bicycle: nearly impossible to explain, but obvious and natural once you get it". So here is my try, from a LotusScript perspective.
First step in the puzzle is the fact, that there is no difference in JavaScript between a function and a class. To get an instance of a class/function you simply call the function with new:
var myInstance = new MyFunction();
The second piece is the fact that calling a function is the equivalent of calling the default method of a class instance. Default methods are absent from Java, dotNet or LotusScript, but were available in VB (typically .text). So myInstance() actually is myInstance.defaultMethod(). The third piece is to understand the functions that return a function/object as sort of factory pattern with an abbreviated syntax. In LotusScript you would write something like:

Option Public
Option Declare

%REM
	Class BaloonFactory
	Description: Creates all sort of Ballons
%END REM
Public Class BaloonFactory
	Private currentGas As String
	Private currentColor As String

	Public Sub New
		me.color = "Red"
		me.gas ="Helium"
	End Sub

	Public Property Set Color As String
		me.currentColor = Color
	End Property

	Public Property Set Gas As String
		If Gas <> "Helium" And Gas <> "Hydrogen" Then
			me.currentGas = "Helium" 'Let us play save
		Else 
			me.currentGas = Gas
		End If
	End Property
	
	Public Function makeBaloon As Baloon
		Set makeBaloon = New Baloon(me.currentColor,me.currentGas)
	End Function

End Class

%REM
	Class Baloon
	Description: We like them in a lot of colors
%END REM
Public Class Baloon
	Private currentGas As String
	Private currentColor As String
	
	Public Sub New (Color As String, Gas As String)
		me.currentColor = Color
		me.currentGas = Gas
	End Sub
	
	Public Sub POP
		MsgBox "You popped a "+me.currentColor+ " baloon filled With " + me.currentGas
	End Sub
End Class

%REM
	Sub Demo
	Description: Comments for Sub
%END REM
Public Sub Demo
	Dim factory As New BaloonFactory
	Dim b As Baloon
	Dim r As Baloon
	Dim g As Baloon
	Set r = factory.makeBaloon()
	factory.Color = "Blue"
	Set b = factory.makeBaloon()
	factory.Color = "Green"
	Set g = factory.makeBaloon()
	Call r.POP()
	Call b.POP()
	Call g.POP()
End Sub

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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 8:27 PM, Category Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

There are wonderful and awesome strategies how to organize your data centers and back-end data processing. Often these back-ends are supposed to be accessed by "Thin Clients", replacing "SickThick Clients" or "Fat Clients" which are considered "legacy (read: tried, tested and boring)". Looking at the memory foot print of modern browsers I can't see the "thin" part. My guess the "thin" actually should mean: "Comes with the Oerating System and doedn't need to be taken care of." Never mind the security patches and frequent updates. The opponents of "Thin Clients" coined the term "Rich Client" which indicates connectedness and rich interaction models. The IMHO real difference is single purpose, disconnected clients (like your old school spreadsheet, minus Quickr/Sharepoint) vs. connected application platforms. And looking at the platforms the dust hasn't settled (yet). Regardless of what platform one picks, the challenge today is device diversity. You might have standardized on X, but you can make a save bet, that a C level executive will hand you a device Y and demands to make it work for your enterprise applications (typically Y ∈ [iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Android, {Stuff-you-never-heard-of}]). Anyhow you face the real-estate challenge:

Your 24" monitor (60.96cm for readers who live in the EU) with its 1920x1200 resolution shows 30x more pixels than the small smart phone with its 320x240 screen. Your strategy should allow for as much reuse as possible. Here are the current options as seen through my personal bias:

• HTML: To be correct you would need to state: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DOM. With the raise of Ajax (Sometimes available technologies "just" need a name to become popular) this seems to be the predominant direction most enterprise developers are taking. Supported by frameworks like Dojo, Prototype, JQuery and others creating rich interaction became way simpler. IBM settled on the Dojo toolkit for all their products, so learning Dojo is a worthwhile investment. Luckily by now here is rich documentation both online and offline available.
  The base line for this approach is support for IE6 which severely limits the platform. If you don't use any of the toolkits you are also hampered by little incompatibilities between the browsers (Quirx mode anyone). Further challenges are (not complete): the lack of local storage other than cookies, no native media capabilities and no uniform extension model. Clearly a legacy platform. This highlights a big dilemma for "thin clients": The browser available on the workstation does matter and the idea of "everything on the server" stays a pipe dream. While all you need to develop in HTML is gEdit (notepad if you are on Windows), you want to use a powerful IDE and a strong debugger
   
• HTML5: This includes CSS3 and a host of new capabilities like <canvas> or <video>. The most prominent representative of HTML5 execution environment is WebKit, the engine powering Konqueror, Safari, Chrome and others. Webkit is also used in iPhone, iPod/Pad, Android and Nokia's Symbian S60 platforms. So WebKit is well positioned for both mobile and PC space. Firefox and Opera also support HTML5. HTML5 provides local storage which let Google to abandon their own toolkit for that (Google Gears). Notably absent from full support for HTML5 is Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8.
  HTML5 is still a very young standard, so some implementation hiccups can be expected (just check for video support) across browsers. Using the same toolkits as mentioned above, you have a save strategy going forward. What HTML5 currently doesn't resolve is cross domain aggregation, this stays a server side task. IBM has committed to HTML5 (not only) as part of Project Vulcan. IBM also spend quite some effort to design a style guide (called IBM OneUI) to ease design decisions for developers. What HTML and HTML5 don't define is the communication between individual modules. Here independent specifications like iWidgets (Part of OpenSocial) need to fill that gap

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Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 11:30 PM, Category Software | Permalink | Comments (6) |      

Netgear's local support was incredible helpful (Thx Andrew Tan). It turned out the motherboard is fried and one of the disk behaves "interesting". The WD green drives look good on paper, but not so much online. Anyway Andrew was so kind to loan me a spare Netgear unit, so I could resync the faulty drive
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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 3:36 PM, Category Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

It is a public holiday here in Singapore, so I can catch up with blog reading while the gentlemen are busy to collect hong bao (red packets). The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is on with a lot of new toys:

The Samsung I8520 Halo running on Android with an integrated projector

Sony Ericsson X10/X10pro
More coverage at Heise (German), Engadget and elsewhere

Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 3:56 PM, Category After hours | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

I love GTD. I'm a happy user of eProductivity (currently not so happy with myself, but that's a different story for a different day). Over time I got introduced to David and his team. In a recent conversation with Michael Dolan, the Director Coaching Services in DavidCo, he mentioned that DavidCo is planning to dispatch a coach to visit Singapore in the near future to serve an existing client. This presents the unique opportunity to engage DavidCo in a Corporate Seminar, get top quality Consulting and personal Workflow Coaching. Indicate your interest by contacting DavidCo.
As preparation I strongly recommend to read the book and try eProductivity.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 1:39 PM, Category GTD | Permalink | Comments (0) |