As of next week I’ll officially be a product manager instead of an engineer. I’ll no longer be spending my days coding and for our core products I won’t be allowed to make changes to them. I will however be doing a bunch of prototypes and smaller integrations of our products etc so it’s still a hands on role.

Obviously I need to keep my general technical skills really high so that I can quickly whip up prototype integrations and stay on top of new technologies etc. For general technology issues like that I’ll probably need to be more on top of things than I am now, and I’ll wind up working in a much wider range of languages and with a much wider range of technologies. Definitely interesting stuff ahead. What I’m not sure about though is how in touch I should keep with the Ephox development team and how they are going about developing our products. I clearly need to know what the new features they’ve added are, but I’m not sure how much of the implementation details I’ll need.

Welcome to the blog world Brett! It’s about time. Brett’s the engineering manager at Ephox and we’ve been nagging him to blog for some time now. I’m biased, but you really should go check out the theme – apparently he’s working on a post to explain the hamster….

After the whole Andy fiasco, we’re making sure we out Brett’s new blog early and often. So who’s going to be the next Ephox blogger?

I’ve spent most of this week working on making the start up experience for our applet better. It should look better, take longer and most importantly feel fast to the user. The first step is obviously to profile and optimize – the faster the start up time actually is, the easier it is to make it feel fast for users. There were a few things we could do to help out there, but nothing that really made a dramatic difference.

It’s amazing the amount of work that can be required to get from something that is perfectly wonderful for internal use to something that’s ready to be distributed to the public. For quite some time, we’ve been using a custom made WordPress plugin to allow us to edit blog posts with EditLive! It’s used on three blogs within Ephox, two blogs on this server and I’m pretty sure Rob’s using it too so it gets quite a workout. It’s stable, feature packed and all-round wonderful.

Every so often I want to play around with something new on my blog without trashing the public site. I have a local instance of WordPress that I do most of my playing around on but it generally doesn’t have the some database configuration as symphonious.net so I can’t be sure that things I develop there will work here.

It is however simple to completely clone a WordPress instance to a new URL – but I never remember precisely how, so this is a note to myself so that next time I’ll remember.

So everyone knows Google has a vast amount of data about you and that Google tracking cookie that basically never expires. Now they own Double Click, completely with it’s own tracking cookie that tracks you on pretty much every site on the internet.

Essentially, Google now know what you search for, which links you follow and now between Google AdSense and Double Click, they probably know everything you do on that site pretty much regardless of which site you pick.

We took delivery of a brand new, shiny Dell preloaded with Vista today and I set about setting it up as a pairing station. Sadly, in the first 30 minutes I’d crashed Vista to the point of having to hard reset the entire machine.

Finding anything in the control panels is a nightmare, not just because it’s impossible to guess where things will be, but because it takes so many more clicks to get there now. Worse still, when you finally do get there, you wind up looking at the old XP dialog. What’s the point of all the fancy graphics and categorization if when it comes down to it I’m still confronted by an ugly, confusing dialog with a million tabs and settings coming out it’s ears?

If you’ve recently upgraded to PHP 5.2.1 (which is included in an upgrade to Debian Etch, the new Debian stable distribution), use WordPress, use the secure admin plugin and are now just seeing a blank page when you view your blog, I have a solution.

Quick Fix

For those who don’t care why this is broken and what I’ve done to fix it, you probably just want to download the updated plugin which works on my server, with my very brief testing. If you see any problems let me know, but be warned that it is very much untested and could destroy everything – make sure you have a good backup and try it on a friends blog first. I strongly suggest you wait until Haris takes a look at this and comments on whether it covers all the original functionality or not – I could easily have missed something critical. I’m also not sure if this works on versions of WordPress before 2.1.3.

I felt brave this evening and upgraded this server to run Debian Etch since it’s been marked stable now. The upgrade was not without it’s flaws and the server experienced some down time so if you found the site unavailable in the past few hours, now you know why.

I still have no idea what kernel I’m supposed to use with the fancy virtualization – I suspect that it doesn’t really matter since the virtualization software seems to handle that level of things. Either way, the server rebooted and came back with everything working so I don’t really care.

As part of a restructure of the engineering team last week I was moved into a product management role, focussing on our ready-made integrations with third party products (eg: our Alfresco integration) and to be formally in charge of LiveWorks! There’s a bunch of details regarding what the new role entails that I’m still not completely clear on, but I’m sure they’ll be worked out soon enough. I expect there will still be a fair bit of technical work so I’ll still be hands on to a reasonable degree, but what I currently see the job being about is community. There are a number of aspects to this:

I’ve reached a point where I really need a logging framework for a small library. The trouble with logging in small libraries is that you want to avoid using a full logging system like Log4J or java.util.logging so that applications that use your library are still free to pick the logging system they want to use. Jakarta Commons Logging has been the de-facto solution for these situations for quite a while now, but it’s a library that people love to hate because of “class loading issues”. Now I happen to know a fair bit about class loaders, I know why the problems occurred with Commons Logging, I know how to avoid them, work around them and I understand why they’re not a fundamental flaw of commons logging. However, I also know that commons logging is a very simple logging framework and there is scope for a project to build on the basic idea of commons logging but provide more power and flexibility rather than just the absolute lowest common denominator functionality.

I’m going to show my ignorance of the actual differences between URLs and URIs here, but I was a bit surprised by the fact that java.net.URL didn’t extend from java.net.URI. Along those lines URL.toURI() suggests that some URLs can’t be converted to URIs. Is this just in the context of the URLs that Java previously successfully parsed or is this a generic constraint?

My main reason for asking is I’m trying to determine, when implementing an HTTP caching library, I should be using java.net.URI or java.net.URL to identify the source of resources. My original thought was to use java.net.URL because that’s what pretty much everything uses and besides I’m used to support Java 1.3 (URI was only added in Java 1.4). Somehow that seemed overly specific and I should use URI instead. Partly this is because it felt more generic and partly because it just seemed to have more geek cred. I must admit though I really don’t have a firm grasp on which I should use when and why. So dear lazy web, can you help?