It seems that the world of Java on Mac is always full of drama and gnashing of teeth and Chris Adamson has just the article to really kick it into full gear: Mustang for Mac PPC… any point now?

Sadly, I’m inclined to believe that Chris may well be right – the Java 1.6 release for PPC is likely to be a less than wonderful release as Apple focuses it’s efforts on the Intel release. It’s a given that the Intel release will be better than the PPC release just due to the fact that they now get all Sun’s optimizations for free.

Jason Calacanis’ entry on Wikipedia considering adding a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for people to contribute strikes a chord close to my heart. The argument that a WYSIWYG editor will cause more work for administrators is quite valid – making it easier for people to contribute will mean more contributions that need to be reviewed and checked. On the other hand though, the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor isn’t just that more people will contribute, but that domain experts in fields other than computing will be able to and be more inclined to contribute. For Wikipedia, that’s a pretty huge benefit – the people who know most about a subject will be more likely to actually be writing the Wikipedia article on that subject.

It’s census time in Australia and for the first time this year, you can complete the census online. Surprisingly, the eCensus is actually very well done. It supports Windows 95 and above and Mac OS 8.5 and above on IE, Netscape or Firefox – and that’s just the official specs. I didn’t think to run it through the HTML validator but I’d assume it would work quite well in pretty much any reasonably modern browser and a whole bunch of not so modern browsers.

A while back it was pointed out that the cool little footnotes plugin I wrote was always using the same ID names to link back and forth. It incremented the number of each footnote in a post, but started again from 1 for the next post. The problem with this of course is that on the main page all the posts are combined together and the footnote links wind up jumping to the wrong place.

I just stumbled across something interesting that I probably should have realized before. With TDD, the first thing you should do when you get assigned a bug to fix is write a test that reproduces it. This morning I was good and did just that, but surprisingly the test passed.

Now normally when your test passes straight off, it means you didn’t write it correctly and you need to fix the test. In this case though I could confirm manually that the bug simply didn’t happen – a classic works for me. Drop back into bugzilla and mark the bug WFM and I suddenly realized I could prove that it works correctly by pointing to the test.

So Scoble’s looking for a wiki, seems to have gotten a few popular suggestions. Since he wants it hosted I can’t really offer anything – I don’t have the server space or sysadmin knowledge to handle something of Scoble’s popularity. Despite that, can I recommend that you make the quality of the editor your most important criteria? It will make a huge difference to the adoption rate of the wiki. I’ve discussed this before: Wiki Syntax Considered Harmful and Making Wikis Work.

NetNewsWire’s tabs have overflowed into that stupid little these-didn’t-fit menu because I haven’t had enough time to investigate all the things that I wanted to. Time to blog them and move on until they become a higher priority.

• Solr
  • An opensource Google appliance sort of thing. Looks like a simple way to add search to an application to me – just hook it up to fire events over to Solr and use it to catalogue and search. Seems to provide more power than what I get around to leveraging out of Lucene myself.
• Commons Finder
  • Need to find files from Java – this should be useful. Not sure what I had in mind that it would be useful for but one day I’ll need it for sure.
• Plagger
  • Does stuff with RSS and Atom – not really sure what yet. It originally sounded like a kind of base RSS platform to leverage. Sounds a bit like Abdera plus more but could be completely different. No idea really.
• activeCollab
  • Not sure why I’d need this right now and seems to have a fair way to go, but interesting none the less.

The rest is stuff I need to read or respond to, but this should be enough to get the tabs visible again.

I’m not sure there are many platforms that make installing software more painful than Windows. Linux used to present a worthy challenge but apt-get and similar systems are so common and so comprehensive now that it’s generally smooth. Some of the main annoyances are:

• Clicking next, next, next, next just to get the install started. Are all those screens really needed? Couldn’t we at least skip the welcome screen?
• Icons, icons everywhere and not a scrap of user control. I’m looking at you NetBeans – I didn’t tell you to put an icon on my desktop. And you Thunderbird, why the heck do you feel compelled to add yourself to my quick launch bar? Windows Media Player does the same thing. Rack off all of you. You can put a shortcut in the Start menu under programs and that’s it.
• License keys. Is there anything more futile? Why waste my time with them when I can just use the same key on multiple machines to pirate the software anyway?
• Uninstallers and readme’s in the start menu. Add/Remove Programs handles uninstalling, just give me the product and get rid of the extra crap in the menu. You’ll probably wind up with just one icon left and you can get rid of the folder altogether. Kudos to Microsoft for leading the way on this – Virtual PC has no folder and Office has just the programs in it’s folder.
• No auto-sort in the start menu. Is it really that hard to just keep things sorted by name without me having to do it?
• Unlock toolbar, resize quick launch area, lock toolbar, discover the size has changed because the dividers aren’t shown anymore, repeat the process until you get it to the right size. Anyone heard of size to fit?

I think that covers most of the issues I’ve had. It makes me appreciate how nice OS X apps are to install, even if they do hide the applications folder.

A few days ago I did a clean reinstall of my Windows machine to clean up the mess of partitions and OS boot menus that had developed from trying out different OS’s. While reinstalling drivers, I discovered that my computer came with Norton Internet Security so I figured I may as well install it1, I also discovered an nVidia firewall tool and installed that too. Then I started downloading programs to install – firefox, Java etc. Everything I downloaded was corrupt. I disabled both firewalls and everything was still getting corrupted, even though I could download them on my Mac just fine. Even JavaScript files and applets were being corrupted while downloading.

Quite some time ago I talked about redefining and rewriting handler functions in JavaScript, but what if you want to add or redefine methods in an existing class? JavaScript classes1 are based on prototyping so the model is somewhat different to actual object oriented languages. Here’s one way to define a class, MyThing:

function MyThing {
  this.doStuff = doStuff;
}
function doStuff() { }

Note the use of function assignment in there, just like for handler functions. This is one way to do classes in JavaScript, and it’s not really the best – once you get your head around prototypes you’ll probably find that using them directly is much clearer. There’s plenty of tutorials around the web on JavaScript prototyping so I’ll leave explaining it to the experts.

Leon Brooks picks up on my previous post about motivating via competition, suggesting, if I understand correctly, making cooperation a key to winning the competition. It seems to me that coming up with a system of rules to encourage team work is doing things the hard way. If you want people to work as a team, make them a team. Put them on the same side, all striving for the same goal to get shared rewards.

Competition is a strange beast – it can bring out the very best in people and it can cause teams to gel better than they ever have. Something about having a challenge thrown out with the potential to feel superior really gets people motivated. Sadly, there is a trend to try and use this motivation in the workplace by having awards and competitions between work mates. Instead of bringing the team together though, these competitions tear it apart because now the aim is to be superior to your work mates instead of working with your work mates to be superior over someone else.