Jim Caristi and I ran an Extreme Programming (XP) workshop at SIGCSE in Reno. We needed a dozen computers networked together. At least one of the computers had to be running a web server. We wanted to host a Wiki . Since all of us were working on the same codebase, we needed to be able to have CVS clients on all of the computers and server on one of them.

Apple sponsored our workshop by providing eleven iBooks and an Airport base station. Setting up the eleven machines plus my TiBook was trivial. Of course, as it turned out, the Airport base station was superfluous, but it was nice to have. I have been at similar workshops that ran on Windows boxes — they weren’t nearly so easy to set up.

Setting up the Webserver on a Mac is trivial. You open the System preferences, select sharing, check a check box and the Apache Web Server that ships with every copy of Mac OS X is up and working.

Setting up a Wiki is also trivial. I used Ward Cunningham’s Quicki Wiki, but now would probably use the Wiki that is a part of Bob Martin’s Fitnesse application. For the Quicki Wiki I dragged a few CGI scripts into the CGI directory. For Fitnesse I would have started up a Java application.

Getting others configured to find my server also requires no work. On a Mac, open the new Apple browser Safari. Look at the list of Rendezvous servers. One of them was the name of my TiBook — automatically discovered on the local network. Click on it and you’ve found the home page on my machine. Add the appropriate extension and you’re at the Welcome page of my Wiki.

As the technician plugged in and powered up the iBooks, I followed him and took less than a minute to bookmark the Wiki. Later a participant decided to start up the web server on his machine. A click of a check box later and we saw his machine bookmarked in our Safari browsers.

What remained was CVS. The CVS on my TiBook is configured to use ssh. How hard would it be to get everyone running CVS? Turns out it was no problem at all. All Mac OS X boxes ship with CVS included. It took less than a minute per machine to pop open a Terminal window and checkout the repository. I set the CVS_RSH variable to ssh. Then I noted that Rendezvous had named my machine danielsteinberg.local. With this information, I entered the CVS command to do the initial checkout and moved on to the next machine.

It may seem that I’m beating a horse to death but even as an experienced Mac user I was astounded at how easy it was to set up these machines. It took forty-five minutes to set up a lab from scratch.

Related link: https://www.macworldexpo.com

Last year, IDG announced that they had made arrangements to move the Macworld Expo to Boston, MA starting in 2004. Some of us might remember that Macworld used to be in Boston many years ago. The east coast’s largest tech expo then moved to the Jacob Javits center in New York City. After IDG chose to have the expo return to Boston, Apple issued some statements about not wanting to go to Boston, and that they’d have to re-evaluate the following year’s Macworld Expo at the Javits Center.

Of course last year’s following year is this year. We’re now going into the third month of 2003 and I’m still not sure if there’s going to be a Macworld Expo in New York this year. The Expo’s website (link above) shows the dates July 14-18, but the registration pages still show information for the San Francisco show. The original fuss about Apple’s refusal to go to Boston was all over Mac rumor and news sites for almost a month, but the noise died down and now I’m left with that one big question: Will there be a Macworld Expo in New York this year?

I certainly hope so. Last year was the first time I’d attended such an expo and I was quite impressed. I paid for the Users Conference and attended the keynote; getting swept up in that (in)famous Jobs reality distortion field. I clapped loudly to the announcement of Jaguar and other great products (iCal, iSync, 17″ iMac). I attended various seminars given by Apple employees and Macintosh experts. I chuckled as David Pogue sang show tune parodies and described the next decade of Macintosh computers.

Perhaps the thing I enjoyed most, however, wasn’t all the whiz bang of the major presentations and classes, but just being amongst a group of people who share that one passion: the Macintosh. I’m still fairly new to this platform. I’ve less than two years under my Mac belt. The thing that will keeps me from switching back is the great community that has built up around this one company and its computers. People who are generally approachable, helpful, and work to educate the non-believers in what Apple is all about. A community that has thousands of developers creating neat little programs to help bolster the platform, like Konfabulator. A community that sticks together and keeps things pleasant. Such a thing just doesn’t exist for the Windows platform.

I’m certainly hoping that I have another opportunity to attend a Macworld Expo. I look forward to meeting new people, making new friends, and seeing my peers enjoy themselves. Let’s keep our fingers crossed…

Have any news on July’s Macworld Expo? How about any good Macworld stories?

In XP (Extreme Programming) as in other forms of development, there are different types of tests written. Unit Tests are written before the code it exercises. Unit tests are written by developers. In true Test Driven Development you don’t write any code without a failing unit test and you don’t write code to tackle any other tasks until you have gotten your unit tests to pass. In the xUnit family this is the green bar.

A Unit test might do something like this: create a new Calculator object and check that when the Calculator adds 4 and 6 it gets 10. This won’t even compile until you create a Calculator class that has an appropriately named method with the right signature. You then tweak the add method to return the sum of 4 and 6. For Java developers, JUnit is a popular framework for writing and running unit tests. It has been integrated into IDEs such as Eclipse, JBuilder, and IDEA. There are other solutions but JUnit is the current favorite.

Acceptance tests are a very different sort of test. The first distinction is that they are written by customers. An acceptance test is tied to a user story. It is how the customer tells the developer — when your application makes these tests pass then I will agree that this story has been completed to my satisfaction. Typically, these tests are not running at 100%. In fact, the code that implements the acceptance tests might not be written for a while.

Running this sort of test has been difficult. Ward Cunningham’s Fit framework allows the customer to write tests in language that they understand — spreadsheet type of tables. The developers then write a little bit of code to allow the tests to call into their code and acceptance tests can be automated so that the customers or the developers can run them whenever they want.

The newest piece of the puzzle is Fitnesse . Fitnesse is a small application that allows you to host Wikis and sub-wikis that contain acceptance tests that can be easily run remotely. Fitnesse requires Java 1.4 because it uses some of the regular expression library for parsing. It is easy to set up and run. Thanks to “Uncle Bob” Martin and friends for Fitnesse.

Your thoughts on the different testing frameworks?

In looking at the Mac.com site this morning, I noticed that Apple has released a version of the iDisk Utility for Windows XP users.

If you’re not familiar with the iDisk Utility, it’s a small app that lets you:

• Connect to your iDisk
• Connect ot another .Mac member’s iDisk
• Mount iDisk Public folders
• Control access privileges and/or set a password for access to your iDisk’s Public folder
• View how much space you’ve used or have available on your iDisk

However, the Windows XP version doesn’t seem to allow you to control the access privileges for your Public folder.

The iDisk mounts as a Network Drive. To see how much space you have available on your iDisk, select it from the My Computer view, and look to the left in the Details section. You’ll see something like:

chuckdude (E:)

Network Drive

File System: FAT

Free Space: xx.xx MB

Total Size: xxx.xx MB

To unmount the iDisk or Public folder, right-click on its name and select Disconnect from the menu.

Not only is Apple targeting Windows users to “Switch” to the Mac, they’re also starting to make it easier for people who use a Mac at home to use their .Mac services from their Windows XP machine while they’re at work.

Are you a “Windows by Day, Mac by Night” user? Will you use the Windows XP iDisk Utility? Share your thoughts…

Related link: https://guests.evectors.it/zoe/

Sometimes I feel like I’m behind the times. Or maybe it’s more that I don’t feel like I’m really in touch with all of the great open source projects out there. I mean sure, I know about Apache and Samba. The big ones are easy. Sometimes though, a smaller player slips through and comes to my attention. Zoe is an example of this.

While Zoe might be in alpha phase, it is a very solid program and presents a working example of something we all should have: a personal database of all of our email. Sure you can create folders for messages in your mail program. With my Mac.com IMAP account, I have the folders kept on the Apple servers. Folders for friends’ correspondence, client conversations, and so forth. The problem is that this method of organization is general at best. If I wanted to know what discussions I’ve had with O’Reilly folk, I can just hop into Mail.app and go into my O’Reilly folder. Then use Mail’s search field to find a specific word. This can be cumbersome at times. Also, my IMAP account is only 15MB. Mail eventually gets deleted to save space on the server.

Enter Zoe. I’ve configured it to work in parallel with Mail.app in grabbing mail from my various email accounts (three in total). Zoe also comes with a Mail bundle that makes it easy to search for information in just a few clicks. A new feature (added in today’s release) supports RSS aggregation. Zoe will pull your selected RSS feeds and display them in sequence along with your email messages. You can then pull this combined feed in Zoe’s RSS export. Pretty cool if you want to consolidate your information.

Give it a try. It’s not obtrusive at all, pretty easy to use and setup. My favorite part thus far is being able to use Zoe’s search box for something like “Samba” and seeing emails from my subscribed mailing lists, professional correspondence, and RSS entries all pop up in one place. A great way to keep track of your personal Internet experience.

What do you think of Zoe? What other sources of information would be useful to have archived?

I recently downloaded NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.2 to help me stay atop breaking news via the Internet. After a few days of use, I have to tell you that Brent Simmons and friends have created a beautiful, functional, RSS news reader for Mac OS X users.

I know I keep beating this drum, but the stuff I see being developed for the OS X platform by folks like Simmons convinces me that this is a happening place for independent developers. NetNewsWire is available through ranchero software, and there are two flavors: the lite version which is freeware, and the full version that has a $29.95 USD price tag. The full version has an weblog editor and an Internet scrapbook. I’ll be purchasing it very soon.

Both flavors of NetNewsWire come chock-full of interesting, informative RSS feeds, including our own Mac DevCenter. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, find new feeds, and organize all of them in a logical, easy to use manner. Talk about the perfect mate for Safari. Internet news has never been this fun.

Bravo Brent!

Related link: https://www.konfabulator.com

This past Monday, Konfabulator 1.0 made its debut.

“Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to.”

It’s a great little shareware app whose strength lies in providing an easy-to-program scripting engine. Developers can create Widgets using JavaScript and XML. The Konfabulator programmers have posted a PDF document which describes both the XML and JavaScript portions of the engine. They have also setup a message board for Widget developers to discuss their creations and ask questions.

It seems to be taking off quite well. On Monday, there were about a dozen Widgets available. Some basic clocks, a weather widget, a calendar. Five days later and the count is well over forty, with Widgets for search engines, controlling iTunes, and even some small games.

The program is very easy to use, simply download the disk image and drag it into your Applications folder (I also recommend setting it up as a Login item). Once you run it, an excellent wizard-type program walks you through Konfabulator’s use and features. The initial set of Widgets are nice, but one of the first things you’ll want to do is click the Konfabulator icon in the system menu and select “Get More Widgets…”. This will take you to the Widget Gallery to pick out and download more Widgets.

Registration for the program is $25. Currently, the Widgets are all free, and I think that’s the way the developers want it. This is definitely a program to try out and will certainly grow a large set of Widgets.

Now… I’m off to learn some JavaScript so I can write a Meerkat Widget :)

Have you tried Konfabulator? Have any favorite Widgets? Any Widgets you’d like to see developed?

Related link: https://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2067.html

End-users can just create presentations with Apple’s Keynote application using toolbars, menus, and palettes the same as they would use PowerPoint. That’s where the similarities end. Apple has published the Schema for their “Apple Presentation XML … for developers who wish to create or modify Keynote presentations programmatically.”

I’ve been taking every opportunity to move domain registrations off of Network Solutions and onto Dotster. Currently trying to transfer betips.net to a new owner and a new registrar simultaneously, but to do that, I need to retrieve a password. And to do that, Netsol’s password-retrieval system needs to be up and running. For a week now, I’ve gotten nothing but a “this service temporarily unavailable” message from them. Nor has their technical support team responded to my requests. Netsol is being trampled under its own weight and sloth by dozens of smaller, nimbler competitors. Now, it seems, they’re resorting to desperation to keep people from migrating off their services.

I really like the two-button mouse. And even though Apple has yet to offer their own, Mac OS X does a great job of supporting right-clicking mice by other folks.

So what’s the big deal about right-clicking? Ah … contexual menus. What a joy! In case you haven’t wandered into these waters, the contextual menu is what appears when you right-click on a two-button mouse, or for single-button mice users, hold down the ctrl key while clicking. These menus are called contextual because what you see listed depends on where you are when you click. You’ll get a different menu in Safari than when you right-click in the Finder.

Mac OS X includes some nifty features in its default contextual menus. One of my favorites is the Open With command that allows me to open a file with a different application than what I’ve set in my system preferences. Maybe I don’t want to load Photoshop right now, and would rather use Preview to look at that Jpeg. Open With easily allows that.

But independent developers have also been busy scratching their own itches by building contextual menu plug-ins, and I want to share my three current favorites.

• GrimRipperCM 1.3.2 — Tired of looking like a dope when you send Jpegs to your Windows friends? You send one file, but Windows users receive two and have to guess which one is the picture, and which one is the stupid resource file. GrimRipper lets your right-click on a file and remove its resource fork. Nice.
• PicturePopCM 1.0 — Maybe you just want to see what “IMG_1579.jpg” is without opening Photoshop, or any other application for that matter. Simply right-click on the file, select PicturePop from the contextual menu, and the image appears on your screen. Now that’s convenient. And you even get some metadata.
• MP3-Info CMM 1.1.1 — Speaking of metadata, Norbert Doerner of CDFinder fame, offers a slick little contextual menu plug-in that lets you see the metadata for your MP3 files right there in the Finder. This is very helpful when you’re moving lots of MP3s around on your Mac.

And the best part … all of these helpful plug-ins are free. You can download them right now and start playing.

If you’re interested in creating your own gems, then take a look at Contextual Menu Workshop 1.3.1, which is a free framework for creating Contextual Menu plug-ins for Mac OS X. It’s also free.

That’s why I like the two-button mouse. Even though I could hold down the ctrl key and get the same results, right-clicking is faster. And besides, I need my left had to hold my coffee cup.

If you have a cool CM plug-in you’d like people to know about, post it here.

It’s been a month since Apple started off 2003 at Macworld San Francisco. Apple seems anxious to
make this their most memorable year yet. Product updates and price changes seem to be coming on
an almost weekly basis.

So far this year, Apple has:

• Updated iCal and iSync.
• Released an excellent web browser.
• Released a gorgeous presentation app.
• Unveiled a lite version of their popular pro video editor.
• Given full version updates to iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.
• Ported a Quartz accelerated rootless X11 server.
• Begun shipping Macs with some of the first 802.11g implementations (Airport Extreme).
• Begun shipping some of the first machines to have built-in Bluetooth.
• Designed the world’s most compact, full-featured notebook (12″ PowerBook).
• Designed the world’s first 17″ notebook.
• Added FireWire 800 to their line (the first machines to have it).
• Revamped their PowerMac line including price drops, more features and an ultra-fast dual 1.42GHz machine.
• Revamped their display line including /massive/ price cuts and a new display.
• Updated the iMac line to include speeds up to 1GHz, DDR, Bluetooth and Airport Extreme.
• Dropped the price on the eMac.

Quite impressive considering we’re just a little ways into the year. If the rumor sites can be believed,
we should see an update to the operating system, bringing it to 10.2.4, in the very near future. If history
can be believed, we should see the release of Mac OS X 10.3 later on this year. Not only that but the iPod
line is due for an update. This should be a busy year.

The main thing I’d like to see, however, is Apple at Macworld in New York this year. Last year’s Macworld at the
Javits Center was the first one I’ve had the opportunity to attend. Prior to that I wasn’t really a big Mac fan
(ok ok, I /hated/ them), so I never considered going to the expo. I have to say that it is one of the coolest
experiences I’ve ever had. I’m really hoping there’s a New York Macworld this year so I can go again. Plus I’m sure
there would be even more product updates and releases at Macworld New York. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

What else do you expect to see this year?

As someone who is neither a programmer nor a biologist (me), but who appreciates both disciplines, Lincoln Stein’s keynote Wednesday morning at the O’Reilly Bioinformatics Conference was the talk I had been waiting for.

Before getting into the details of BioPerl, Blast, and life science clusters, I wanted to know what is bioinformatics and where does it stand in the world of science, er programming, er both. Lincoln proceeded to help me understand this issue.

What is Bioinformatics Anyhow?

Is DNA and protein analysis bioinformatics? Managing data sets? Using computers to process large amounts of data in biology? Well, maybe.

Lincoln says bioinformatics is, “Biologists using computers, or the other way around.” He’s not exactly sure what it is, but it’s growing. Bioinformatics is more of a tool than a discipline. Biology is a discipline. It’s a study.

Ultimately, bioinformatics is really biology too: high-throughput biology, integrative biology, but biology nonetheless.

Bioinformatics as a Career

In 2000 this became a hot, possibly an over-hot career choice, with hefty salaries attached. Now things have settled down a bit with comproable salaries with cell biology and clinical research.

(BTW: Writing bioinformatics software is tougher and very competitive. You probably won’t get rich in this arena.)

How to make it in Bioinformatics

1. Learn Biology.
2. Pick a problem that interests you.
3. Know your tools.
4. Don’t be ghettoized.
5. Do it because you love it.

Bottom line, the computer has become an essential tool for the biologist just like the microscope. And bioinformatics will eventually become part of biology itself.

OK, that really helps. Now I’m ready to attend a few sessions and get into the details of this interesting convergence of biology and programming.

As Derrick Story points out, iPhoto 2 is Mostly Good News — lots of great new features — but if you read the follow-up threads you’ll notice that customers don’t feel that performance has improved. Built-in CD archiving is implemented excellently and iPhoto librarian is a life-saver, but it’s still a pain to have to maintain multiple libraries manually if your collection is larger than 1,000 or so images (i.e. amateur size).

Likewise, iMovie 3 is a great leap forward in many respects, but has a couple of media database problems of its own. It’s able to bring my photo database into the Photos view almost instantaneously, but only sees the default iPhoto database, not the one I’m currently working on (fortunately, it is possible to drag and drop from iPhoto into iMovie). The real bottleneck comes when I click the Audio button to see my iTunes database. I clocked this: 35 seconds from clicking the button to registering a 15,560-song library. That’s 35 seconds with no application feedback whatsoever - no beachball, no thermometer. The app appears totally hung as I wait and wonder whether to terminate the process. I get a similar effect when clicking the Slideshow button in iPhoto, since it has to present a track selector before it can proceed. Meanwhile, iTunes itself still struggles to keep up when deleting tracks, selecting items, bringing up the ID3 editor, etc.

To me, all of these database issues point to a similar need — find a more efficient backing store for the iApps. The more I ask around, the more it seems that XML is the smoking gun on iLife performance drags - it’s a great format for interoperability, but horribly inefficient and resource consumptive. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider using XML for the iApps. Maybe, just maybe, Apple should consider using some of the highly efficient open source database code out there — MySQL would do nicely I’m sure.

And since the iLife apps are all so wonderfully integrated now, why not place all of my media in a single, integrated media database? Whether such a database would store media objects themselves (allowing full export to original formats of course) or just references to them (with iTunes-style non-breaking inode references) is unimportant to me. With modern Mac hardware, I should be getting modern media database performance where it counts the most — when using my Mac as the digital lifestyle hub it’s touted as.

It’s important to keep in mind that a future of media collection lies in front of us all. Most of us have been collecting digital video, MP3s and photos for a year or two. What’s your media collection going to look like in five years, or ten, or twenty? Our Macs will ship with terabyte drives at some point in the future, no doubt. How will your iApps deal with that much media? The time to plan for the inevitability of truly massive personal media collections is now. We’re already feeling the pinch.

I like to steer clear of the “armchair CEO” syndrome, where users get in the habit of telling the vendor what it “should” do, so let’s just say this is one of my top wishlist items for the future of Mac OS. Interestingly, when I mentioned iApps, performance, and XML to an Apple employee at the last MacWorld, he rolled his eyes skyward and made some vague reference to “Apple always working on interesting stuff.” Hmmm…

Related link: https://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,854699,00.asp

What do Muzak, the Atari 2600, and Microsoft’s SPOT have in common? This ExtremeTech article explains.