Friday, August 31, 2007

Painting feels very similar to writing code.

I´ve never been particularly good at painting or drawing, but during the last several years I have found great joy in it. Yesterday when I was working on an acrylic painting (I won´t discomfort you by showing an picture of it ;) it struck me: Painting this picture feels -very-much- like writing code: There is the great picture (literally), all the details you can see, all the details you can´t see, all the technique you chose to use, and chose not to use but is still considered and thus part of the mental process of the painting etc. But most of all it is exactly the same feeling of intense joy seeing an abstract idea turning into reality with some degree of persistence.

In contrast, playing an instrument (I play several) feels quite different from writing code. When playing the level of concentration is so high, and the result lacks the same kind of permanence that code or a painting does, so the feeling of accomplishment when getting a passage right on the instrument is different from the feeling one gets when getting a data structure right, the latter being quite similar to the good feeling one gets when painting a nipple that looks quite realistic (when squinting, in a dark room :-).

It´s not exactly the biggest of revelations, but it felt rather powerful when it struck me yesterday ;)

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Getting Polish up&running

I recently looked at the blueme chat client. It seems quite interesting. GPL2 code, available on SourceForge. However, it uses the J2ME-Polish library, so I needed to get that up& running. The installation guide for NetBeans wasn't all I needed, so this is what I did to get it up & working.

  • Follow instructions on page 21 in "The Complete Guide to J2ME Polish"
  • Install Nokia series 60 emulator (if you like, Sun WDK 2.5.1. is perhaps even better).
  • Click on properties, use defaults wherever possible (except as described below)
  • If NetBeans gripes about being unable to find libraries, add all polish-supplied jar (enough*.jar) files to property jars (this is probably overkill, but just adding the enough-j2mepolish-client.jar file wasn't enough)
  • Selecting "Generic/Midp2Cldc11" as configuration will trigger use of the Sun WDK 2.5.1. emulator, which is nice, and usually works pretty well.

Then I was able to run & debug apps. We'll see what comes out of it ;))

The purpose of this blog

This blog is a personal, informal lab diary.

I'll log some of the things I do, some of what works and some of what doesn't. I'll mix both work and private projects. In most work settings this kind of mix wouldn't be a good idea but since just about all the coding work I do professionally is done on open source projects, I think it's ok :-)

I work as a research scientist at Telenor's Research & Innovation, in the iLabs (innovation labs) project . Our most important project is probably the ilabs mobile toolbox. Another project I've been working on is the "RestRoom" storage server (it stores files, and it uses a REST protocol :-) The RestRoom server is used by the facebook and blogger clients in the mobile toobox project.