Tuesday, April 29, 2008

On Planetesimals...

Have you ever been asked the question, "What planet are you on?" I know I have... Going forward, I'm afraid I'll have to confirm peoples' suspicions when I respond, because I'm actually on more than one planet now that Embarcadero has launched its new blog aggregator, Planet Embarcadero. It makes me wonder whether I should start calling my blog a "planetesimal" instead of a "pob"...

Monday, April 28, 2008

On Giving a Damus...

And another one gone, and another one gone. Christian Damus is the latest addition to the growing list of prominent Eclipse committers in exile, and he's got a clever new email address to boot! I think the answer to Ian's recent question about the effect of open source participation on career progression should be a resounding "yes". Best of luck, Christian!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

On a FESTivus for the REST of us...

A number of special occasions recently have reminded me of one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes. Remember Festivus? If only we could really escape commercialization

Speaking of fests, Embarcadero recently launched db FEST, a series of challenges that, in addition to introducing the world to its professional grade database tools, will provide each participant with a free T-shirt. I’ve already got mine, and I have to say that they’re pretty cool. Have you taken the challenge?

Another occasion that’s been on my mind lately is EclipseWorld 2008. Submissions were due on April 16, so I spent some time last week putting together a couple of abstracts for technical classes. One of my submissions, entitled “RESTful EMF”, would highlight the ways in which EMF supports the design principles of REST, and identify some best practices for working with resources using EMF. This is especially pertinent, IMHO, given the many enhancements the EMF team has made as part of the upcoming Ganymede release to support things like URI handlers and content type definitions, among other things.

Friday, April 11, 2008

On Fake Ed Merks...

Evidently, the most popular session at EclipseCon 2008 was the keynote delivered by Dan Lyons, a.k.a. “Fake Steve Jobs”. In case you missed it, Ed provided a nice summary of the session (which I witnessed him write in real time because we happened to be sitting together) on his blog. Speaking of Ed, I’ve been wondering for a couple of weeks now where the real one was on Thursday at EclipseCon. I mean, there was a guy who bore a striking resemblance to Ed, blogging furiously, at the Eclipse/OMG symposium that day, but I never would have expected the real Ed to sit through nearly four hours of discussion about the OMG! Maybe times really are changing...

I personally think the symposium was a success. Admittedly, we didn’t have nearly enough time to discuss the issues that were raised (which, in my mind, is better than having no discussion at all), and the participants might have felt a greater sense of purpose had there been an “official” OMG representative in attendance (the fact that the OMG Technical Meeting took place in Washington the week just before EclipseCon made this infeasible)… but I think the level of participation and the quality of the presentations were a testament to the fact that people are indeed committed to a future that involves more collaboration between Eclipse and the OMG. Of course, this was just the first of two symposia being jointly hosted the two organizations – the second one is scheduled to take place at the OMG Technical Meeting in my home city on Wednesday, June 25. I heard a rumor that there might also be an Eclipse DemoCamp that same week, so there will be more than one reason to join the party in Ottawa. Hopefully I’ll see you there (here)!

Friday, April 4, 2008

On Doing The Right Thing...

Another frequent pain point of mine revolves around shopping carts. More specifically, the things people do (or rather, don’t do) with them. For example, I often find myself reorganizing the corral in the parking lot of at Loblaw’s or Costco just so that vehicles (including mine) can get by. Are people so concerned with their own interests that they can’t exert even a small amount of effort to return their carts in an semi-orderly fashion? Have we as a society become so preoccupied with our busy lives that we’ve forgotten simple things like common courtesy? Why is it that children so often seem to know better than we do? I was on a Family Day walk to Starbucks with my kids few weeks ago when they discovered a couple of abandoned shopping carts at a strip mall. Watching them struggle to push the carts all the way to the other end of the mall so that they could be returned to the corral got me thinking…

What is it that makes a community really successful? Is it not a critical mass of members that are committed to doing The Right Thing? Do the members of a community not get to decide what The Right Thing is? What if those members don't see eye to eye? Are the inevitable conflicts that arise not actually good for the community in the end? Is conflict not a necessary prerequisite to growth?

Projects at Eclipse have a responsibility to build and be responsive to three communities – contributors/committers, users, and adopters. What happens when what’s in the best interest of one of those communities is at odds with what’s in the best interest of another? I had to face a situation like this during the Birds of a Feature session that I moderated recently at EclipseCon 2008. The current leadership of the UML2 Tools component stated that one of their goals, in attempting to address the needs of the adopter community, was to regulate the commoditization of UML tooling at Eclipse. Many of the attendees seemed surprised to learn this, and made it clear that while working towards eventually being able to completely generate tooling using GMF is a noble pursuit, what the user community really needs now is a set of robust, usable editors for UML models. I’m quite happy with outcome of the session – representatives from at least four different parties (so far) have offered to pool their resources (nearly three times as many as the number of committers on the current component) in building a complementary set of exemplary end-user UML tools at Eclipse (most likely as part of a new component of the MDT project). Some may argue that this will only serve to further add to the confusion that already exists within the Modeling project, but I’m not sure I agree. Regardless, I’m encouraged by the prospect of what appears to be a true community-driven initiative to do The Right Thing at Eclipse...