Dead Ink Vinyl

My computer bag, a Brenthaven backpack I’ve used since my original 17” PowerBook, has gotten insanely heavy over the course of this week. I pulled eveything out to take a look at what has been adding load.

The first items aren’t that interesting. A 360|Flex folder and an Effective UI graph pad I picked up off a table while at that conference (thanks, guys!). I plan to use the graph pad to layout some screens for an upcoming project at work and want to keep it handy in case inspiration strikes. I’m still waiting for that inspiration.

Then I pulled out a two inch thick collection of papers I’d printed (duplex, to conserve paper). On top of the stack is D-Click’s Adobe Flex Coding Guidelines. I really don’t like placing opening braces on their own line. Drives me nuts. (For my money, the Sun Java Coding Conventions can’t be beat.) But, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. I recognize that being consistent (especially across developers on the same team) is more important than the merits of any single convention, so I’m trying to learn new habits.

Next up are printouts of six chapters from Adobe’s Building and Deploying Flex Applications (PDF here). I have only built Flex apps inside of Flex Builder, so I still need to learn the command line tools. My company is big on “repeatable builds”—meaning that any interally-developed production applications should be easy to regenerate from source without developer involvement. In practice, this means that the application must be built with a command line build script (Make, Ant, etc.). Besides, I get nervous when I’m overly dependent on an IDE. I like code completion, syntax highlighting, and refactoring, but I really like to know that I can do it all from vi or Notepad and the raw Flex SDK if desired or needed. Hence my interest in the Building and Deploying Flex Applications book. And I mean book! A full printout would weigh in at 400+ pages! So I picked the most important parts to me and just printed those.

The first chapter is Chapter 3 (Flex Application Structure). I just finished reading this chapter last night. Not a lot to say here. It’s good to have the layout with which I was familiar due to Flex Builder reinforced in print. Next up are Chapter 4 (Applying Flex Security), Chapter 7 (Building Overview), Chapter 9 (Using the Flex Compilers), Chapter 13 (Using ASDoc), and Chapter 14 (Creating Applications for Testing).

Then I come to printouts of various O’Reilly articles about Ruby on Rails that I intend to read Any Day Now™. Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: May, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: Designing for Testability, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: More Designing for Testability.

And finally, I have Greg Hamer’s presentation slides for introducing Cairngorm at 360|Flex. I suppose I can take this out of my bag. I have the general idea of how Cairngorm works. I’m still waiting to write an app large enough to make playing with Cairngorm worthwhile. Okay, that’s not quite right. I’m still working on my first Flex app ever. I’m plugging into the 37signals Backpack API. When I’m done with that, I might look at refactoring it for Cairngorm just to get that experience under my belt.

And that’s wy my computer bag weighs a ton. What’s in your computer bag?

In a previous post I wondered about the Java performance on the new Intel Macs. I now have a benchmark.

Okay, the term “benchmark” might be too strong. I ran one of my favorite applets on the 15″ MacBook Pro while at an Apple Store today. I took screen shots of the results to compare to the performance of my own PowerBook. The applet is a 3D visualization of a KohonenSelf-Organizing Map. The Kohonen Map is a type of neural network used to automatically group similar inputs and provide visiualization of large quantities of data. Another interesting application of the Kohonen Map is to solve very large TSP-type problems.
Anyway, this applet is interesting because it has simple 3D graphics, lots of floating point and integer math, and possibly a good amount of object allocation and garbage collection. I don’t know if the applet is multi-threaded, though, but by the results I would guess that it is not. Thus, this is a highly imperfect comparison between the PPC and Intel Macs.

System specs:
PPC: 17″ 1.33GHz PowerBook with 1.0GB RAM
Intel: 15″ 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1.5GB RAM

Raw Results:
PPC:

Intel:

Numbers:
PPC: 1107 learning cycles in 138.697 seconds (7.981 learning cycles / second)
Intel: 1100 learning cycles in 62.514 seconds (17.62 learning cycles / second)

X-Factor:
The MacBook Pro is 2.2x faster than my PowerBook on Java performance. Assuming that the applet is single-threaded, the MacBook’s JVM 1.47x more efficient per CPU clock cycle.

I’d like to also note that the applet’s 3D animation was much smoother on the MacBook than it was on my PowerBook.

My wife received a new 12″ iBook for work a couple of months ago. It is a very nice computer and she simply loves it. Since I lug around a 17″ PowerBook with the same processor speed (1.33GHz), I didn’t vie for her shiny new machine too heavily.

However, I noticed that she was vertically scrolling her applications “the old fashioned way”, like have to on my PowerBook: by moving the mouse cursor to manipulate the scroll bar. I showed her how to scroll by using two fingers and she was ecstatic. A few days later that I observed that she had entirely converted to two-fingered-scrolling and that it was really working out for her.

Every once in a while, she would hand me the iBook to look at something on the screen, such as a Web site, and I would get to use the two-fingered scrolling. I started envying her that feature. It works so smoothly, so intuitively, I would find myself trying to use it when I returned to my PowerBook.

I tried gaining similar functionality using SideTrack but scrolling along the right side of the pad never clicked with me. I recalled seeing a couple of drivers for earlier iBooks and PowerBooks that mimicked the two-fingered scrolling. Performing a Google search I found iScroll2.

I’ve been using iScroll2 now for three weeks. It’s a good product and hasn’t demonstrated any undesirable side-effects on my PowerBook, which is running 10.4.3. It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the native support in my wife’s iBook — in particular, it doesn’t alway’s “catch” when I’m using two fingers and it’s scrolling is a little jumpy when it does — but it is an adequate solution for me.