A while ago I had the misfortune of working with a product called BroadVision that was sold to the IT Director. Information on the internet about it was pretty sparse so we knew nothing about how it actually worked until we recieved the discs, I vowed to contribute back to the internet to give my own personal opinion of it sometime, I forgot until I was reminded today by looking at some BPM diagrams.You should do your own research if you are likely to be interested in buying any of it, but beware a company that doesn't want your developers to see their framework until you've signed a contract.

It was a sign of things to come that they had sent us discs for the wrong OS so we had to wait even longer for the correct ones to arrive. It was a stack of open source products together (The editor was based on Eclipse, but an oldish version!) with the work they had done in a kind of BPM type of way. From what I could tell from the internet and one of their consultants Broadvision started out as some kind of TV/internet concept but it didn't do that well so they reused code for the new model of selling self service e-commerce apps. If you use it and you wonder why some of the naming is a bit odd ("channels" for example) that's why!

We had no end of problems, it was buggy and i'm not even sure it was finished (you had to write a custom java class to be able to persist a checkbox as a boolean!). It was sold to the IT Director with tales of how you can just draw these flow charts connect up the boxes, click a button and your application is done. From the start we needed the consultants for practically everything even during our supposed training course - at one point something wasn't working and we couldn't figure out why. He couldn't figure out why either. Eventually he decompiled a class (which we weren't allowed to do) and discovered a catch block swallowing the Exception.... I asked the consultant (his desktop wallpaper was his red sports car in front of his nice house) how often he expected we'd need to have a consultant come visit and he said something like "2 days every fortnight", a cost my company had never expected - this was supposed to be a system that almost didn't need developers! We also found that we would have to buy more modules than we expected to just be able to do a fairly simple shopping cart.

I will spare you the rest of the messy tale but lets just say it got much worse and dragged out for a few months. They never did fix the checkbox bug I raised a ticket for, and then we were back to normal java - ahhhh.

They may have totally changed, their website looks different now - but despite it saying "View demos and download free software" under the "Attention Developers!" banner I couldn't find anything to download except marketing media that seems to still be claiming that you much less developer resource.

Am I the only one who thought this would be even cooler if the dots were sheilds/bullets and the developer was a ship - like a 2D shoot em up :-)

I've been setting up remote controls on mythtv recently but one of them is a bit old and clunky. It occurred to me that it would be nice to use my smartphone to control mythtv instead. I found an existing app for smartphones but installing the .net libraries onto my phone and compiling a C program for the server too seemed a little too much when I don't even have activesync installed. What I do have on my phone already though is a web browser.

I wrote this ruby script to create a web interface, it generates a page and translates the links into telnet commands that are passed to mythtv.

Because it simply translates the urls you can use pretty much any of the mythtv telnet commands by just inserting a slash where there would normally be a space. It's been a nice application of Ruby, it was quick to write (in fact an attempt at KISS) and is self contained apart from needing Ruby of course.

mythcontrol.rb

Change 192.168.1.6 to the ip address of the frontend you want to control

run by typing mythcontrol.rb

point your browser at :

http://127.0.0.1/

You can do everything you need with the buttons i've exposed but all you need to do to add/change them is change the URLs in the code - check out mythtvs docs for a list of possible commands

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Telnet_socket

The web is agreement

Except, presumably, web based forums :-)

First impressions of Netbeans 6 are good, to be honest I haven't tried it with Java code but I like the Ruby support enough to make it worth using for that alone. There is a relatively small 19MB download if you only want ruby support.

download here

I like ruby and don't have much need to actually code in it but enjoy when I do have an excuse.

I think its rise might be assisted by the news that you can now run Ruby on .NET

It was a surprise to hear that Apple have released a beta version of their browser, Safari, for the Windows.

After thinking about it I'm not sure that they actually want to compete with the many other browsers on Windows at all. The other piece of the puzzle is that the soon to be released iPhone doesn't run third party applications and is instead restricted to running what can be displayed using safari - web apps and DHTML. Apple probably want the iPhone to be another iPod in that it is bought and used by people who don't necessarily have macs and some of those will be developers who might like to contribute a widget but can't test it - which is where the Windows version of safari comes in.

I still think the fact that you can't run any real apps on it is a bit of a gaping hole and means that they are lagging behind windows mobile.

I am getting a little bored of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" parodies but this one made me laugh.

I think that other jar might have jRuby in it ;-)

I had to reset an MSN id today and faced with a CAPTCHA that I had difficulty reading. I thought I would hit the button to use the audio version instead and just type it in, nice.
Just as I was thinking this was too easy the sound kicked in..... I listened to it twice and still couldn't make out properly what was said and had no interest in listening to that nightmarish noise again.

I've been improving and extending some javascript recently and have been missing something like Junit or Test::Unit.
I started writing a quick set of assertxx functions to be able to test and then start test driving the new code.

After a short time I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel and a google later I found jsUnit. It has the nice comforting green bar and finds testxxx functions at runtime. Check it out.