Since a couple of you were asking about it, there are now OGG versions of last week’s Java webcast videos (the webcast plus the ‘talking head’ segments from RMS, James Gosling, Mark Shuttleworth, Tim O’Reilly et al.) on Sun’s Open Source Java page.
Category: Work
DTrace your Macintosh
From the OSX Leopard sneak peek:
When you need a bit more help in debugging, Xcode 3.0 offers an extraordinary new program, Xray. Taking its interface cues from timeline editors such as GarageBand, now you can visualize application performance like nothing you’ve seen before. Add different instruments so you can instantly see the results of code analyzers. Truly track read/write actions, UI events, and CPU load at the same time, so you can more easily determine relationships between them. Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.
Cool or what? Now, if they’ll just open source their GUI so we can reciprocate by including it in OpenSolaris… 
Cool idea, but…
Any chance the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach poster could drop the “Linux” bit? Or did I just imagine that we spent the last six years fixing, distributing and supporting GNOME on Solaris?
Sun Birthday Cluster
An inordinate number of people I know seem to have birthdays this week… not least my own (and two other members of the Sun desktop team) yesterday, which signalled the halfway mark to my threescore and ten. Or probably threescore minus ten, given the genetic predisposition of Lanarkshire folk to fatal heart attacks.
Today, one of the projects I work on has its first birthday too… OpenSolaris. I only work at the desktop end, which arguably isn’t where most of the coolest stuff is happening, so I’ll let the other bloggers talk about that sort of thing… but nonetheless, the result of all our hard work to integrate GNOME 2.14 into OpenSolaris just before Christmas is that for the first time in quite a while, I can generally use my Solaris desktop box all day every day to do my job, without resorting to Linux or OS X for anything other than testing. That has to be a Good Thing, and long may it continue!
apt-get install java
From now on, that’s pretty much all you’ll need to do to install the latest JRE/JDK on your Linux box1… Sun have just changed the way they license Java binaries to Linux (and OpenSolaris) distros. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo are already taking advantage of this, along with NexentaOS, BeleniX, and SchilliX on the OpenSolaris front. Read the DLJ FAQ, or get more info at the jds-distros project website.
1 Ok, actually it’s apt-get install sun-java5-[jre|jdk]
Disruption
Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing“, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose
All over the Places
While working on a proposal for desktop defaults for our next version of the Java Desktop System, I’ve been somewhat perturbed by the mess that our concept of “Places” is in.
These screenshots are from Ubuntu Dapper as I’m on my Powerbook at the moment, but IIRC the vanilla community version isn’t significantly different (except for the Documents ‘place’ that Ubuntu has– but we have that in JDS too so that’s part of my problem as well). I have one bookmark and a few network places set up– this is one of my everyday, working desktops, so my experiences are presumably fairly typical.
The user’s first encounter is most likely on the Places menu on the panel:
Then when they open a file, they get this collection of Places instead– now their bookmarks are at the bottom, and they can choose from devices that weren’t available on the Places menu:
Using nautilus in spatial mode, we get this different content and ordering again– and a third different term for the home folder:
And using nautilus in Browse mode, the Places sidebar and Go menu don’t even agree with each other, let alone anything else:
Now, obviously a wee bit of context sensitivity is appropriate… in the file selector, you’re unlikely to want to open files from the CD Burner or Trash locations for example (although I’d be quite happy to allow opening from Trash– I always get annoyed at OSes that force you to drag things out the trash before you can look at them again). But surely we can do a better job of consistency here overall? My Places are my Places wherever I’m accessing them, and in general I’d expect to see the same ones in the same order.
Or is it just me…?
Ack! FUI!
Glynn mentioned Marney’s departure1 and her Bonehead List… just to remind folks we’ve had a (slightly older and slightly GNOME-ised) version of this list on the GUP website for a couple of years, which I’d encourage everyone to think about before they start a new project. It’s interesting to see how the list has evolved since Marney worked in the Accessibility Program Office, and as Sun have become even more involved with open source projects… I should probably update the list on the GUP website accordingly.
1Which I’m also sad about… Marney was one of the people who interviewed me for my job at Sun, and was my dotted-line manager for a couple of years.
Mutiny
Don’t send Glynn your CVs/resumés, send them to me… I need the recruitment bounty more than he does
Nexenta
Notwithstanding some (fairly pointless, IMHO) debate about the open-ness or otherwise of having to register for its pilot programme, Nexenta looks like being one of the most exciting projects to spring from OpenSolaris so far.
