Aehso’s Output

Recently I switched to O2 (Ireland) in order to be able to replace my aging Sony Ericsson t610 (workhorse!) with a k800i (über-phone!). Vodafone will probably release the same handset at some undefined date in the distant future but their customer service was completely incompetent in dealing with my queries.

Anyway, the k800i is a full on 3G phone – video calling, mobile email, blog-this-photo – lots of features I have no immediate plans to use (and it turns out lots of features that the O2 configuration & network do not support ‘out-of-the-box’). It does support RSS feeds though and that will be useful to me for a number of reasons. Plus it can run Opera Mini so I use it occasionally to get my PVR (EyeTV+Mac) at home to record tv programs via TVTV mobile.

I’d use it a lot more for data were it not for the incredibly expensive data pricing plans that O2 have in place. 1c per kB (O2 refer to them as ‘kb’s – I hope to God they don’t mean kilobits!) is the default rate. So, that 21kb BBC News RSS feed that SonyEricsson pre-install (actually a wrapper feed URL that is not accessible from full internet browsers?) costs 21c for every update. It gets better though – downloading a single MP3 (say a conservative 3000kB) would cost you, wait for it, 3000c = €30 for the data alone. Hahah, you’re having a laugh O2, no wonder nobody uses these services.

Meanwhile, over in the land of the rising sun, they have massive adaption of their 3G services primarily because of flat rate data plans. A relevent quote from an article today on Read/Write Web:

A lot of people in Japan buy not only digital (music, games, videos) but “real” or “offline” goods on their mobile. They use auction services, blogs and use assisted-GPS powered navigation services to walk the city. And they have been doing so for already 2-3 years, at least. Market maturity is not only about getting a device in people’s hand, it is also about the service offering and the actual usage rate.

But you don’t even need to go to the orient to find examples. T-Mobile UK offer flat rate unlimited internet access (with fair use policies) for around an additional £7.50 a month.

In Ireland, it’s like the switch from dial-up to broadband internet access all over again. Except in this case there are no excuses like decades of underinvestment in infrastructure or a low density population. Nope, we just have a duopoly that just like to charge extortionate prices for services that are way behind those offered in rival information societies.

Ireland an Information Society? My ass.

aehso internet, irish, mobile, tech

At Cape Clear we use PDEBuild, controlled by CruiseControl driven Ant scripts to build our Eclipse features. As Oisín Hurley pointed out recently it has got a steep learning curve but once it is up and running it allows development teams to contribute to features by doing what is natural – using the Eclipse workbench tools to create and modify plugin projects.
Where PDEBuild wins big time is in eliminating redundant build metadata in your build system. The developers workbench is in sync with your build server because they both work off the same Eclipse project metadata. About the only pilot errors that trip up our builds occasionally are

• missing entries in the plugin/bundle build.properties files cause PDEBuild to leave resources out of the packaged jar (or folder). Unfortunately these missing resources don’t always get noticed until runtime. e.g. missing icons showing up as red boxes because the icons didn’t get packaged.
• missing entries in the PDEBuild map file cause PDEBuild to fail to resolve bundle dependencies. If it can’t find the source it can’t build the bundle!
• missing entries in the feature.xml (for a newly contributed plugin/bundle). PDEBuild will only build the plugins listed in the feature!

That’s all well and good for us Eclipse plugin developers. But what about building other types of projects? Headless builds of Java projects (not plugin projects) can be achieved by using the AntRunner application entry point in conjunction with an Ant build script. Unfortunately the Ant script needs to be pre-generated (or hand-written) so one end up back in the situation where the Ant build script can easily get out of sync with the project metadata. For large project sets (>10) this type of duplicate build metadata is difficult and frustrating to maintain.

The issue becomes larger when one considers that many Eclipse based products implement additional natures and builders that they add onto the projects they create. For example, a builder might need to generate some java code or verify spring configuration files). Theses projects need to be built inside Eclipse (since the builders are workspace/workbench dependent) but currently there doesn’t seem to be any facility to do so in a headless manner. I’m thinking along the lines of an application entry point that can perform the following tasks:

• Optionally import a set of projects into the target workspace
• Optionally clean all projects
• Build all projects in the order determined by the declared project dependencies (in the project descriptor), running all builders as it would if the Workbench UI running.
• For each project optionally execute an action (supplied by a plugin in the workbench) that packages the build output into some external format (e.g. generating a WAR file from a WTP Dynamic Web project, generating JavaDoc from a Java project etc).

The last one above is a ‘nice-to-have’ since the invoking script may well be capable of finding the build output and packaging it using pre-defined rules.

Does anyone know of such a beast? Or is any effort underway to produce such a beast? Bugzilla doesn’t seem to have anything relevant which is a surprise.  This seems like an awfully useful feature for the Eclipse platform to support…

aehso eclipse

BoingBoing have a great expose on the Terms Of Use that apply to (US only)Amazon Unbox service.

This puts my recent gripe about iTunes DRM in the shade. I find it truly astonishing that a global brand would risk their reputation by releasing something with an agreement like that attached. They obviously must have calculated the risk of a Sony rootkit backlash and decided first-to-market was more important (they beat Apple by one week – no coincidence on the launch date there).

aehso drm, movies

FIFA have appointed Sir Seb Coe as the first independent chairman of their new Ethics Commission. Sepp Blatter’s comment on the appointment is telling:

He has total integrity and will have total independence. To have someone from outside of football means he has no links with the football family and he has an ethical approach to sport.

(emphasis mine)

Of course, this committee will not be investigating The Beautiful Bung. No, that’s a existing investigation and perhaps a little too close to Mr Blatter to allow an outsider to look into…

aehso football

A while back I mentioned I’d be creating a HTTP EFS plugin. I finally got around to uploading the source (licensed under EPL) and a binary build onto Cape Clear’s developer website.

Note this is only a first cut but feedback is more than welcome to john.oshea@capeclear.com

aehso eclipse, software

I stumbled across this program last night while checking to see what time MOTD2 was one and I started watching. Talk about blurring the line between drama and documentary! Today, it seems to be generating quite a bit of a stir in the media but the mainstream masses will only remember what they saw.

Why air a non-factual docudrama about such an emotive issue? To entertain? To educate?

aehso politics

Since it’s inception I have bought a few tracks from the iTunes Music Store, initially one out of curiosity and subsequently a few out of necessity and then occasionally one or two because I came home drunk from the pub and just wanted to hear a particular song. Happens to the best of us I’m sure. So probably no more than 10 or 15 in total – now that I try check, I can’t find a way to get a total from iTunes.

Two home macs and a few of windows (work) machines later and I’m now noticing that there are some tracks I cannot authorize on my current work laptop. I was aware of the 5 machine authorization limit when I bought the tracks but I’m now, sooner than expected, discovering that even seemingly flexible DRM like that does not suit my digital lifestyle.

Now I know that my digital lifestyle tends to be an accellerated version of that of normal computer users (I bought my first MP3 player back in 1998) so I’m now finding myself pitying the fools who are buying large quantities of digital content from the iTunes Music Store (soon to be a Movie Store too?). They could use something like QTFairUse6 (hey, that would be illegal!)to strip the DRM and yes they can burn everything onto physical media for safe keeping but does anyone think online purchasers do that? Right after they do regular backups of the rest of systems (yeah right!). There will come a time when they will realize their purchased digital media collection is no longer acessible – man I’d be pissed.

All in all, the whole thing is kind of putting me off listening to music. I’ve even coined a term for it – DRM fatigue – and the same phenomenon seems to be affecting sales of Blue Ray and HD-DVD drives. When system vendors and/or content rights owners make it that difficult to access content (intentionally or unintentionally) consumers eventually get tired of bothering (remember programming VCRs, anyone?)

aehso apple, drm, hardware, music

This morning’s statement by Chelsea Football Club is worth reading, the text is hilariously childish and vindictive. Seriously, who wrote that statement, the press officer’s son?

(The follow up discussion on CFCnet (unofficial Chelsea fan website) message boards is also worth a giggle or two.)

aehso football