The morning was panels and general discussions – the brightest spot being learning about the whirr project. I’m afraid the link has 100% suck to it because it says nothing about what the project is. I haven’t ready through all the code, but reports from others at the conference say that it is “nice tools to work with Hadoop”. Hopefully so. It’s a maven/java project with zippo documentation – not even a README that has an overview of any use.

The afternoon I sat in the “intermediate” track and picked up some really interesting pieces. I got the in-depth scoop on what’s happening with Hadoop and adding security from Jakob Homan, got a great introduction to Mahout from Jake Mannix (about to be a search geek employed at Twitter), learned about Prezi, which I’m thinking I’ll inflict on my coworkers some time, and was amused and interested in cascalog.

Cascalog = Closure + datalog + cascading

It turned out to be surprisingly (to me – I’m being unfair to Closure really) expressive and readable for making interesting and complex queries from Hadoop data structures – a very nice abstraction setup. I snorted at the thought of handing it to someone who had trouble with SQL though – it’s for programmers, not business analysts. I do wish I’d been able to get more skinny and in-depth viewing of cascading – it looks really effective at making queries and processing hadoop based data. I would have also liked to get some real meat and details on Oozie, which is Yahoo’s workflow engine for submitting mapreduce jobs into their hadoop clusters.

I took off a little early from the conference, but it was very definitely worthwhile. I wish the amazon environment had better wifi connectivity (rather sucked for guests), but in the end I didn’t really need it for what I gathered.

“Ahh!”, I thought – an easy intro to getting into the project and it’ll give me an excuse to really read the code. So this weekend I started taking a stab at doing a little light buff and puff on the code to get the PEP8 and pylint code scores up a bit.

What I found is that it took some work to get everything from the codebase ready to really do some work on it. And the notes aren’t all in the same places on how to do that – what notes are there are all written mostly for Ubuntu. I was pretty sure most of this could be done on a Mac too – at least based on the dependency documentation, so I cobbled up some notes on getting rolling with Launchpad, this code base, and being able to run the tests to verify that my cleaning didn’t really break anything.

I put the resulting notes on the OpenStack wiki page http://wiki.openstack.org/HackingNovaMacOSX.

The big thing that I’m not sure about is the testing. Just a stock install is failing on one unit test, and it’s in an area I’m not very familiar with (auth & creating certificates). If any the OpenStack folk are reading this, here’s the error I’m seeing:

[ERROR]: nova.tests.auth_unittest.AuthTestCase.test_209_can_generate_x509
 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/heckj/Documents/code/nova/nova/test.py", line 222, in run
    d = self._maybeInlineCallbacks(testMethod)
  File "/Users/heckj/Documents/code/nova/nova/test.py", line 182, in _maybeInlineCallbacks
    g = f()
  File "/Users/heckj/Documents/code/nova/nova/tests/auth_unittest.py", line 162, in test_209_can_generate_x509
    signed_cert = X509.load_cert_string(cert_str)
  File "/Users/heckj/Documents/code/nova/.nova-venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/M2Crypto/X509.py", line 655, in load_cert_string
    return load_cert_bio(bio, format)
  File "/Users/heckj/Documents/code/nova/.nova-venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/M2Crypto/X509.py", line 639, in load_cert_bio
    raise X509Error(Err.get_error())
M2Crypto.X509.X509Error: 140735090166816:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:/SourceCache/OpenSSL098/OpenSSL098-32/src/crypto/pem/pem_lib.c:650:Expecting: CERTIFICATE

update: Turns out the error was directly related to the version of OpenSSL installed on my laptop. I had version 1.0.0a from MacPorts installed and in my default path, which caused the error. Version 0.9.8l (base install in MacOS X) works fine.

sudo port deactivate openssl

did the trick and the tests are all running now. I updated the bug against Nova with those details, leaving it open – it ought to at least fail reasonably.

Economic pressures being what they are, it is getting more effective to own what you absolutely need of infrastructure, and rent the rest. Shoot – if you’re small enough, owning anything at all for infrastructure may not make sense.

The problem comes when you want to start moving between those network oasis’ of happiness. Like, oh say, to a cloud provider. The end result is our services have all become addicted to this concept of secure, high-bandwidth, reliable access between tiers – that happy oasis. And that addiction is one that isn’t healthy – at least not in a world of elastic scaling architectures. We’re getting used to breaking that addiction when we integrate with external services – facebook, twitter, etc. The mashups are breaking the mold of how this has been done in the past. And we need to break our addiction!

Why am I asserting this? As I look at a large number of applications, they don’t fit a “cloud provider” very well – at least not when you start to get into the realm of dynamic or elastic scaling. Most providers have something akin to an “internal network” which we can leverage as consumers. As we get to the logical conclusion we will find ourselves wanting to shift work between one “oasis of network happiness” to another. The solution today? Expand to fill all available resources and then buy some more at the same place.

That ain’t gunna to cut it.

For us as consumers of infrastructure of a service, we want one provider to be as good and flexibly as another. That means commoditization of the infrastructure (which I believe we’re starting to see now, although the infrastructure providers will fight it tooth and nail). That means we need to be able to shift from one to the other at a moments notice.

Here’s an example:

You have enough resources for 100 units at provider A, and you are running up to a high level usage that looks like it’ll exceed that. You call up Mr Infrastructure A, who reluctantly informs you “Sorry, all sold out – it’ll take 6 weeks to add capacity”. You also happen to have a not-quite-as-good deal with provider B that costs a little more. All sounds good so far – your uber-cool software provisioning system smacks down a couple of VM images and spins them up…. except it’s a got a problem: connecting the stuff running at provider A to the new stuff you’ve just spun up.

And that’s assuming that you’ve solved all sorts of somewhat evil configuration problems knowing to indicate to a component what it is and who it should be talking to to get its work done. That’s a topic for a different post though.

I don’t have THE answer, but I do have AN answer. Follow the mashup leaders: take the OAuth & REST pattern back into your office, workspace, colleagues, whatever. That’s what we’re doing after all – mashing up some services. It’s just that we normally think mashup means “with someone else’s stuff”.

OAuth and REST work together beautifully and with some coordination can be the answer to providing the answer to the security question “Should I allow this external request to access these resources?” The OAuth 2.0 spec has a segment in it – section 1.4.4 (version 10) – that walks through the flow for this to happen. Routing over SSL does a pretty reasonable job of getting the data encrypted as well. The cost: running an Authorization server.

(You can pull off this same trick with OAuth 1.0: the not-quite-standard-but-defacto “2 legged OAuth” routing. The problem: not everyone and all the libraries agree on how to make that work seamlessly.)

In order to allow our ourselves to start treating everything – infrastructure as well – as software with it’s speed of change we need to be able to dynamically allocate resources. Once we have services that are all chatting across OAuth authorized links (encrypted or not), we’ve removed a huge impediment to being able to elastically scale our services.

Yeah, configuration. Kind of bitch, ain’t it. Another post, eh?

The thing that we’ll label as a “CMDB”, to me, isn’t. It isn’t a configuration management database. For us, it’s an inventory of assets – digital and physical. It’s a metadata store that allows us to assign ownership, and an ancillary data set that makes categorizing incidents, requests, and changes in the classic service management sense a bit easier across a very wide organization. If any small company came to me and said “yeah, gotta have a CMDB!” I’d be looking very closely at how potentially insane they were. Most small orgs and companies just don’t need it. It’s honestly only useful when you breach some amount of scale.

The worst part is the ITIL definition of what should be in a CMDB has been effectively unachievable because of the costs associated with it. The classic ITIL world of CMDB has this data repository being updated with process (typically manual) as changes are approved – it’s meant to represent the “desired state” of an operational world. Only it doesn’t. Really, it never has. And even with the highest priced tools on the market today never will. At best it’s an audit-against tool that you can see “yeah, it matched or didn’t match when we ran that scan a few days ago”.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. What most of us want from a CMDB is what we get implicitly, to some degree, from many of our monitoring solutions – a digital map of our environment. The monitoring pieces created their own version – typically configured by hand, or sometimes configured automatically with a hand to help guide (Zenoss and Hyperic both do a pretty good job at this). The monitoring systems then use that data model to know who to alert when something goes wrong, or if they’re really good – to share some set of analysis around “service X is down because the component A that it relies on is down”.

Virtualization is pushing this all right over a critical tipping point. The “old” CMDB is dead, lets jump to the new. We need a model of our environment that maps our physical and digital assets. We need it to show us dependencies in an ever increasing world, and we need it to help inform us – especially in a larger organization, who to contact if there’s an issue with a service. If we have to fill out all this data and information by hand, we’re lost. The rate of change is increasing, and we *want it* to increase. Look to the model of continuous deployment, the natural successor to the software development process that is continuous integration. Now in classic #devops style, let’s apply that right on through and into operations and running our services.

What doesn’t exist today, in our collective musings about a DevOps toolchain, are (currently) the tools to integrate the knowledge that the deployment tools have into updating a digital asset model . Even these tools don’t know the dependencies (i.e. what database is this rails app using, which memcache server/port combo is being used, etc) – but it’s there, just slightly under the covers.

The other place where we want/need this knowledge stashed? Our monitoring systems. The continuos tests against our live services to assert they’re OK. Many open source systems include some level of a model just implicitly in their configurations. Nagios, Munin, Zenoss, Hyperic, etc. I am still struggling to find monitoring systems that have the concept of dynamic configuration through an API access built in to the base of them. Still – much of their configuration is something that we might naturally want to store in a map of our services.

The way to get this data? Drive it from the tools that are implementing the changes. Have it as a service that can be updated and modified through simple API’s that Buildout, Func, Capistrano, Fabric, ControlTier, or whatever can access and inform. Use the manifests and details that the system configuration tiers (BCFG, cfengine, Chef, Puppet, SmartFrog) have been built with to populate this map as they deploy and invoke their services.

This is all a step to moving all of our infrastructure, historically so very physical, into the digital world. There are tremendous efficiencies to be gained – both financially (using our physical assets more effectively, or just using what you need from an existing infrastructure provider) and from a service perspective (being able to reconfigure and deploy your services to match the market needs).

Much of devops is focused on deployment, because that’s where we spend most of our time today. That’s good – but we can not forget that it is just one small part of the overall process for these services from inception to retirement.

…

And before any of the classic CMDB folks find me and start shooting, yes – I’m very aware of the work that is going on at CMDBf around federating CMDBs. The idea there is good – they’re heading in the right direction. At a 10,000 foot view they’re going the right direction with their standard. The foundation that it is built on is – in my opinion – now outdated and needs to be revisited. The implementation needs to be simplified. I would recommend you look at the labels of the members that are coming together around the federated CMDB concept. Do you see anything in there that shouts of “open, adaptable, flexible”? I don’t. I see the same kind of collaboration that led to J2EE standards and the W* standards around “web services”. What is needed is something simpler, more open, and with publicly available implementations. I would never expect BMC, CA, HP, IBM, or Microsoft to help provide that – it’s just not in their best interests when they have revenue tied to the services and software they provide in this space today.

If you’re new or newish to Django development, it’s a book that I think would be good to have in your stable. Even with Django 1.2 now released, everything in the book is super relevant, and Karen Tracey has done a really wonderful job of explaining and then showing with details the soup to nuts run of how to do and deal with testing a django application … and more importantly how to debug when things go awry.

The book covers unit tests, doctests, testing through the WSGI interface with the Django unit test extensions, and even driving a website test set with twill. It’s thorough and chock full of examples and walk through goodness.

The debugging is even more detailed – going to a lot of trouble to explain tracebacks, the format of the Django error pages, how to get convenient debug data on your django project (using Django Debug Toolbar), and finally – how to even use the python debugger to step through execution. She goes to a lot of trouble to set up real-world scenarios that are slightly and subtly broken and then walk through the whole process of solving the issue with the tools at hand.

I’ll be keeping John’s copy for another day or two, and then getting my own copy to stack into the reference shelf.

I still completely prefer the Mac, but the installation was relatively painless, the browser setup pretty good – and installing all the tidbits that I wanted to fiddle with for development was very easy.

I don’t even really know what I’ll use it for – other than something to experiment with and try out. I don’t really need another VM with a desktop interface, but I thought it would be interesting to see where it’d gone.

I recall Mark Shuttleworth (for whom I’ve a great deal of respect) making a comment earlier this year about “this is when Linux takes the desktop”. He might be right no. I recall at the time thinking, “Dude – Apple’s doing this iPad thing and you’ve better change your sights!”. Well, based on what I see in his blog with the “Unity” interface, they’re taking a pretty interesting stab at it. One of the things that I think Apple really has going for it in the tablet space is the multi-touch programming interfaces. They cooked them for several years with the iPhone, and now they’re solid and beautiful to work from a programmer’s and designer’s point of view. I don’t know what Ubuntu or any of the linux distros are doing with the interface space there, but I hope they’re paying close attention to the programming paradigms – that’s what is making the platform so damn powerful.

Now that I spent an afternoon installing it, I think I’ll probably nuke it and get back that 20GB of space, but it was fun to play with…

Since I started using WordPress several years ago, it’s really come along solidly. I upgrade it these days directly from subversion. My hosting solution doesn’t have FTP access, which makes upgrading the plugins a bit trickier, but all in all it’s been really slick and clean for the using.

It’s no secret that most of the conference focused on the iPhone and iPad – what they’re now calling “iOS” (and yeah, I thought “Hey, doesn’t Cisco own that brand name…” when I first heard it). The desktop/laptop Mac OS X didn’t get much play time, the iOS operating system instead getting the red carpet treatment.

The engineers at Apple have managed to build, update, and ship an entire OS for specific platforms once a year for the past 3-4 years. I’ve got imagine that they’re nearly, if not completely, mentally bust at this point. I’m not at all surprised that “iOS 4″ won’t be out until Fall for the iPad – I suspect they’ll call it iOS 4.1 or 4.2. Apple’s not growing like mad (at least that I can tell), which means to me that they have been and continue to push at a fevered pitched for the accomplishments they’re making. I hope they don’t push so hard they fry their best and brightest that make up the core of the culture that’s doing all this impressive lifting.

The “other focus” of the conference was around new developer tools – Xcode 4 (developer preview) is quite a bit of engineering and accomplishment. To me it’s centrally a fulfillment of an idea that Chris Lattner presented and posed for possible futures in an LLVM session two years ago. It is more than that, and I’d love to wax a bit more enthusiastic about it, but I’m afraid that runs into NDA covered territory, so I’ll stop here on that topic. I did come away from the conference having submitted more enhancement requests than ever before around that tool chain.

Dr. Michael Johnson (@drwave) gave a talk in the middle of the conference, impressive in display and content, and really talking to the “why” and “how” of making tools. The message I took away this year from his talk was akin to an artist extolling “know your medium”. He didn’t outline the pros/cons of each medium that he works in per se, but just expressed what he could do in each and why knowing that medium was important. I’m still reflecting this year’s talk off the meme that he was touting a year or more ago (and was reflected a bit in this year’s talk too): “using tools to remove the tension in the room”. I guess it was two years ago at WWDC, we talked a bit. He related a viewpoint that “tools shift power” and was being very mindful of wanting to shift it in a way that was ultimately positive, not negative. Being a bit of a tools guy myself, I find myself reflecting on that quite a bit. The real bitch is that it’s often hard to predict which way the “right way” is between organizational politics and getting our jobs done.

For all the cool and amazing stuff that I saw at WWDC, I’m finding that I’m not walking away from this one inspired, scheming, and planning for something new, cool, etc. Oh, there’s the idea for the iPhone or iPad client application to this or that, but really I find myself instead thinking about my day job.

This week has given me some much needed time to step back and away from the office. I deleted my mail accounts from my iPad and iPhone to make sure I wasn’t even tempted to check them (those red badges can be like a red flag to a bull when you’re a somewhat compulsive person). What are we really focusing on and what difference is it going to make? How do we push or pull the whole organization forward to make it better? I have ideas. Some “maybe 60-70% right” ideas but no definitive “I’m 100% sure of it” answers right now.

Abby is 16, and was going for a record: youngest solo around the world. Pretty damned impressive.

At the article in the Seattle PI online, the first comment was made by someone calling themselves “Bobert”. He wrote:

I don’t know who this person is, but whomever they are – they symbolize something that is very, very wrong with our society today. Preserve and protect at all costs. What the fuck have we come to? Our rites of passage are down to “driving”, “graduating from high school”, “getting laid for the first time”, and sometimes “graduating college”. What happened to Thomas Jefferson’s american ideals – where the hell did we loose them? Maybe what passes for mainline culture thinks a rite of passage is a barbaric, untidy thing. It’s “dangerous”, and not for those who haven’t “proven themselves responsible”. They might get hurt.

How the hell do you prove you can be responsible in this day and age? By looking down, fitting in, not making waves, and getting by? We need to be looking up and out, trying things, and reaching out for our limits. We need to think, plan, and move ourselves forward, not just follow along.

I don’t know about being in the Indian Ocean during the winter months down there, but to my mind Abby was taking a rite of passage. Also trying to get the youngest-solo-around-the-world record is neat, but to me somewhat irrelevant. She was going out and doing something that I’m sure has touched her in some significant ways, and none of the externally visible.

One of the best things I did around College was go one a four-month walk-about in Europe. By myself. Right after college, I got a backpack and my parents got me the tickets and a Eurail pass. I was off. I think that was my most significant rite of passage. Being by myself for months, in countries where I didn’t even speak the language, teaches you something about yourself.

So to the Bobert’s out there – wake up and fucking smell the coffee. We are not going to make a difference in the world by being sheep. Going on a rite of passage, by whatever you want to call it, should be praised for the effort, not belittled.

I used to send myself every other year. Strangely, I’ve been attending for over 10 years now. Seems odd that it’s been so long. It’s been wild watching the changes in the conference over the years. This year is no different. There’s hardly any “just” MacOS X sessions now – iPhone and iPad (not surprisingly) crowd out the whole schedule. The time to selling out the conference is shorter this year than before, and I rather expect the crowds to be as insane as ever. Fortunately, many of my friends from Seattle Xcoders will be there – even if they love taking digs at each other over sax interface xml parsing code and “unnatural love”.

Best of all, the really big project weighing on my mind for the past month is out – I can go play, hack, drink, laugh with my friends, and not worry about deadlines for a while.

We ran into a failure during our final validation runs, and it opened up a potentially nasty can of demon worms. The basic functionality of a ticketing system isn’t usually the problem – it’s all the tendrils and automation into other components in the organization that are such a pain. In this case, the system that took in email and created tickets from that showed a rather nasty flaw at the last minute. Nasty because it was so damned inconsistent.

Even though we opened a “Pri 1″ bug with our vendor, they didn’t seem capable of getting a developer to look at the code and tell us what the hell was going on. After about 6 hours on the phone with various support technicians, I was personally convinced that they solved the “how to do this problem” in perhaps the most complex and ass-backwards way possible. It spurred us hard to go find all the key elements that were sending in email (quite a trick) to create tickets – which we did, and found that all but one of them were working for a launch. So we did what we probably should have done and created our own mail processor – python and the email library makes that brutally simple, and from there we just push in tickets into the system through their web services (ugh – SOAP) interface. I’ve become reasonably competent at using python suds now as well – it’s a pretty reasonable SOAP library for the basics. It is maybe 3-4 days work all told to get that all in place, extend our REST API interface that we’ve wrapped around their crappy SOAP one, and make sure it passes a battery of half-way sane tests. We’re still finishing that work up now, but it should be all out and rolling early next week.

So we pulled back from launching on Tuesday and ended up launched on Thursday morning. The best part of this launch was getting the deluge of complaints Friday about something not being bolded, the default sort order being wrong for this or that person, and the general user experience model that the application provides (it really likes to use pop-up windows). It absolutely made my day, because that’s all stuff that can be fixed pretty easily – and nothing in it was a major “I can’t do my job now…” kind of thing. My team successfully did an engine transplant on the organization while we kept on running down the road. I expect we’ll falter and hesitate a few days from this – it’s pretty deeply embedded in the org – but we pulled it off.

I think the thing that stands out most profoundly was a tidbit in the kudo’s/Thank you note that my VP sent out about the project:

I talked to the lead Program Manager from ENTERPRISE-VENDOR yesterday about our implementation and he told me that he hadn’t seen a better one in the past 4 years.  Apparently we did in 3 months what most companies take a full year to do!

Not too damn shabby.

It’s not a fancy end-user facing application, it’s not an iPhone/iPad or Mac application. Shoot – it barely even has any python associated with it. It’s our service desk – internal ticketing and workflow system.

For the past six months, we’ve been working towards completely tearing out and replacing the ticketing system that technical operations uses – and it’s associated integrations points. We had some software that was “end of life” last year (meaning we had to pay a bunch more to even run it this year if we wanted support). We did the analysis last fall, worked out some large enterprise vendors into a hell of a froth, and made our choice.

We didn’t go with the fancy one, or even the one I considered to be the best technically – we went with a combination of the cheapest cost and the least effort to maintain and run. We have been implementing it – replicating most of the core functionality that we’ve built up over 8 years with the previous software as a “central platform” in our office. For the past month we’ve been in “UAT” (User acceptance testing). What that did was show me how far behind the ball we were for a cutover. So the past month has been 60 hour weeks (and 6 days of 7) at the office, cranking on getting us to some level of feature parity.

Given that the product we are replacing had 8 years of organic growth and tidbit development, that we’ve accomplished this much in 6 months is pretty damned impressive. This project could easily have been a year-long implementation if we’d let it. I’ve been keeping it as focused as I could – enough to get the job done and a few improvements besides – but not every bell and whistle that you can imagine.

We go live tomorrow. All the incidents (outages/errors), workflow, service requests, and changes flow through this system. I’m both elated and terrified, and I know that we have an easy month more of post-launch work to get us to where we want to be running on a regular basis.

When I took on this new position in Technical Operations, I’d rather hoped and planned on building some new frameworks and tools to automate our processes – driving down manual effort into more “self service” and making us more responsive, agile, and consistent. What I found when I really dug into things was a ton of technical debt and core systems that couldn’t be the foundation to building upward. The biggest, nastiest roadblock to that original vision of mine is falling away tomorrow.

For the next two weeks the team will be doing what we lovingly call “hypercare” for the rollout. It’s the “all hands on deck – and watch every twitch that anyone makes”. Keeping an eye on all the critical aspects of the system, making sure it’s running smoothly, and if there are any hiccups, smoothing them out immediately.

I’m also personally looking forward to a longish break a week down the road heading to Apple’s WWDC, rooming with Gus and having a damn good time with the Mac/iPhone/iPad developer crowd in San Francisco.

After all that? Take a deep breath, look around, regroup, and figure out where to attack next.

Here’s the details:

Do you love programming for the Mac and iPhone and think Objective-C is the bees’ knees?  Are you sick of your boring 9-5 job and wish you had more interesting problems to solve?  Would you like to join an indie Mac shop in the heart of downtown Everett, Washington?

Flying Meat ( http://flyingmeat.com/ ) is looking for a full time programmer to work on our award winning applications for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

The ideal employee has real world experience with Objective-C, programming with Xcode, a friendly attitude when talking to customers, and a penchant for figuring out tough problems.

Location:
- Downtown Everett, WA.

Responsibilities:
- Programming (fixing bugs, adding new features, etc) on our existing applications, and help bringing about new ones for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
- Assisting with 2nd level support.

Requirements:
- Experience with Objective-C and Xcode.
- Experience with Subversion or similar version control systems.
- Ability to work with at least a couple of scripting languages, such as Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Bash, Lua, JSTalk, etc.
- Experience shipping an iPhone, iPad, or Mac application.
- Highly professional, with the ability to multitask and deliver solid work on tight schedules.
- A sense of humor and an easy to get along with personality.

Experience that will help you stand out:
- Ability to work comfortably with Mac OS X graphic APIs such as Core Image and Quartz.
- Familiarity with network protocols.
- Ability to zip around in Terminal.app while blindfolded.
- You know the Mac HIG inside and out.

Benefits:
- Paid vacation.
- Profit sharing.
- Relaxed working environment.
- Retirement plan.

How to Apply:
Please send resume in plain text to gus@flyingmeat.com .  Make sure to point to projects you’ve worked on, and we would also love to see code you’ve written!

And yes, it hasn’t left my side. On of these days Karen might get to use it. Maybe. When I get a 3G version perhaps…

Anyway, it was time for the new experiment! I purchased a pogo stylus for working with the iPad. I originally saw one that an apple employee was using in an Apple Store (she wouldn’t give it to me, strangely enough), but she couldn’t tell me anything about it. I later saw an article from the Brushes help page on it, and went out and ordered one. Since I had the stylus, I wondered how different it would be to sketch with that instead of just my fingers. Pretty good, actually. Although I’ve got to admit I’ve become somewhat of a sucker for pressure sensitivity that you get with a Wacom tablet….

The end result is that you have to press a little harder, so in the end it doesn’t feel like a stylus – or at least not like any medium that you might be used to. There’s no scratch of paper, texture to the draw, and hard or soft and angle doesn’t make a different on an iPad. The good news is that you can see what you’re drawing a little better – as the stylus is about half the width of any finger, if not a bit thinner.

I’m still very much learning to use the application (Brushes) too. I have SketchBook Pro, which is pretty cool too – just haven’t really tried to work with it much yet – focusing on Brushes to start with.

I’ve learned to start sketching with really light opacity and a variety of thicknesses, repeating strokes to firm up lines. I’m also just now starting to get a handle on even the basics of textures with Brushes. It’s super flexible, but that just means I’m super lost right now too. The hardest thing to get used to is slowing down some of my motions, or making sure only the stylus touches – it’s very easy, if you’re a little sloppy with your hands – to make it thing you’re trying to double-tap when hatching a background, or to inadvertently “pinch/zoom” instead of making a stroke. Still, I’m happy with the initial results, even if I have a long way to go to get to the amazing quality of artwork I see others producing out there.

“Uh… No, but then i didn’t write OneBusAway either. I wrote SeattleBus…”

That bit of confusion resolved, we talked some more about Brian Ferris’ very impressive work with OneBusAway and contributions that it’s made to Seattle Public Transit. I thought it was worth writing some here for more public consumption too.

I am incredibly impressed and whole-heartedly applaud the work that Brian has done with his web site, public and open API, and general efforts to improve the daily life of folks using public transit in and around Seattle. I think the opportunities to do some interesting things with that site and the iPad are tremendous, even more so if you look at some of the cool things that the WalkScore folks are doing as well with their open source graph server.

I’m keeping SeattleBus an iPhone only application. I originally wrote it for me, and I continue to use it on a regular basis. My concept for the application is really only meant for the iPhone setup. Brief, very direct access to the route information you need right then. There is a lot you can do with more screen real estate, more detailed information about routes, etc. That’s not what I want SeattleBus to be. The narrow focus is the important thing to me, and the larger format screen of an iPad just doesn’t seem needed. Glorious, yes, but not needed.

For the folks hacking away at similar things – I can assure you from feedback that I’ve received: There is desire to have something more. I would encourage you to look closely at Brian’s work for ideas and inspiration. He has requested that anything using his site and APIs be made freely available (non commercial) – a perfect platform for hacking and learning while also benefitting the community. Take advantage of what he’s made available, go forth, and make some great things.

So what next for SeattleBus? Not a whole lot in the near future. King County Metro is still somewhat freaky about the use of it’s data from a policy perspective. That’s a damper on future development for me. I don’t make even close to a living from SeattleBus and as you might suspect, other projects are taking most of my spare time right now.

I am looking for an application idea to create for the iPad that would fit a iPad. Way more than an iPhone application, somewhat less than a desktop application. I haven’t yet found that fit and inspiration, but I’m still looking and not feeling in too much of a rush to just do something. I’ll strike when I find the right thing. For now… I’ll keep looking around.

This past Thursday evening, after a very packed Seattle Xcoders meeting, i was chatting with a couple of fellows from Omni. They mentioned that in the creation of omnigraffle, they had focused on gestures that could all be quickly explored and were obvious: tap, double-tap, tap-and-hold. That all the functionality of the application had to be accessible from that basis. It makes sense, especially when it comes to needing to test without a device! And what I’ve seen in the applications so far is that most apps can be run with this basic set of gestures.

Keynote and Pages had an introduction document that was a sort of README for the basic use of the application. Omnigraffle followed that same suit. SketchBook Pro, on the other hand, had a little embedded video to show the functions, and in fact is probably the most complex from a gesture perspective. A three-finger tap brings up the controls, which otherwise fade from the pallete to leave you focused on painting. The two finger pinch and zoom functionality appears to be getting generally added with rotational effects in many applications now too.

The downside of the tap and do something sequences, which appear to have a good general traction for pulling up those damned handy pop-over menus, is that it appears to me to be slowing down the interface. The trickiest of these sequences is the tap-to-select followed by a tap to bring up that menu. I find myself wanting to race forward, and the gesture/sequence gets confused with a double-tap gesture instead. I have to slow myself down to make sure I’m not confusing the system. The kicker is at instead of thinking about what I’m drawing or sketching or writing, I’m now thinking about the interface. That’s the last thing any application developer wants.

Tap and hold is a little inconsistent at yet. In editors, you commonly expect it to pull up a spyglass for detailed positioning. I really like what omni did with it, allowing a tap-and-hold followed by a drag to be a selection box mechanism. I don’t know if many are doing it, but I’d love to see a three finger tap-and-hold as a general “select this area of things” mechanism. Ad yeah – riffing that idea straight from the iPad game command-and-conquer.

ps: sorry for the relative lack of links. I’m writing this with WordPress for the iPad and it turns out the making HTML links on text is a complete pain in the butt. The built in text keyboard is just very ill suited to the effort. Although props to WP developers, the text editor saw i was trying to make a link and intercepted the effort and helped me place it down. Another place where that upcoming multitasking will be damned handy – look up a link, come back and paste it in to place.

Karen and I found this furry little friend on our doorstep last Friday night, huddled against our for warmth in a nearly sleeting rain outside. And we’re not about to let a kitten just freeze to death, so we took it in. We took this little furball to the Vet first thing last saturday morning – no collar, but she didn’t act feral. We were hoping for a microchip and to get her returned to her owner. No luck – Vet’s said she was 6-8 months old, and she was a very social, friendly critter. We posted on Craigslist that we found her, and put up flyers around the two blocks.

Last night, I finally called a no-kill shelter that specialized in Siamese & mixes to take her – I just couldn’t see to adopting her myself, although Karen made a damn good run at it. And then today, finally, we found the owner. We had decided to at least take her to the vet and get a feluke test done, and general health before turning her over to a shelter. Karen was showing her off and asking if anyone knew of her owner, and finally we hit the jackpot and found out that she actually lived only two blocks away from our house. And that she’d been “missing” for 3 days before we found her tucked into our front porch.

I’m very glad to have Sparky (as we learned her name) back home, but I’m also really wishing that her owner had given her a microchip – we could have had her back last Saturday and not spent the week busting around and worrying about finding her a good home.

So please, if you have a pet, get a microchip for him or her. The vets all do it quick and cheap, and if your pet is ever lost, it’s the absolutely best way to make sure they’ll get home to you safely.

It’s the Mail application, you see. It bugs me. Well, it bugs me in portrait mode especially, but in general the gestures and constants that I’d sort of hope to see aren’t really nailed down well as yet. Here’s some of that detail -

In portrait mode on the iPad, everything you do with Mail.app is controlled by these relatively tiny buttons at the very top of the iPad, and not near the edges. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even imagine holding the iPad from the top of it while using it, so the “delete” button in particular (which I use a lot with email) is kind of a pain in the ass to get to. On the iPhone, it’s centered at the bottom of the page, which makes it really handy to press & swipe down on the iphone, like you’re pulling off a sheet of paper or something, and it’s a great gesture to just nuke the email and move on. Nothing like that exists on the iPad right now – although I wish it did.

The other common need is something to quickly move to another message. On the iPad in portrait mode, it’s another tiny button, again at the top. I sort of hoped that a swipe gesture (either 2 or 3 finger swipe) would move me to the next message. Since I’m a native english speaker, the idea that a swipe-left gesture would move me to the “next” message would be ideal – but regardless of wether it went up or down the stack of messages sorted by received time doesn’t matter – so long as I could flip through them fairly quickly. That’s exactly the metaphor used in iBook, by the way. I want that same gesture metaphor in Mail.

In landscape mode it’s a little better, but you still can’t quickly jump up or down the queue of messages. A swipe gesture, ideally something that you could do with your thumb would be ideal. In iBook, you can just tap the right side of the page to move it forward too – that’d work, especially as the right-thumb tap in my case. Simple, quick, and I can process the information without having to tap around the screen all that much.

And yeah – for anyone from Apple or other developers, I’ve submitted the feature request: radr://7826844

I made this same feature request to Brent on NetNewsWire for the iPad. He’s got a great “next unread” icon in the upper right of the RSS reader, including a nice indication of if it’s the last unread article in a feed. And it’s in the upper right corner of the screen. I’d love it in the lower right (or lower left) – where my thumbs can tap at it quickly.

Gestures…

In general, the gestures aren’t common place as yet – although I expect them to become more common in the near future. What you use for 1 vs 2 vs 3 finger gestures is a damn good question – something to be sorted out as yet. Three-finger swipe left and right seem to be coming down as “undo” and “redo” respectively. 3 finger tap – bring up some overall control panel. But I’m basing this off a limited number of applications, and some of those drawing applications on the iPad. I haven’t even checked out what Keynote, Pages, or Numbers uses in this respect as yet…

Here’s some thoughts and notes in no particular order about my first day with it:

This ain’t no kindle killer… the iBook functionality is nice, but the device is not a one-hander. You’ll prop or couch the device to be comfortable, and you’ll spend a lot of time with it horizontal, just because you get better functionality from a lot of apps that way. IBook is good, but I’m subtly disappointed with it’s interface (it felt kinda slow and “pause”-y) and there wasn’t much of a selection of science fiction… My technical books from PragProg loaded up great though.

Just because it’s not a one-hand-kindle reading killer, this thing is absolutely going to transform media. As a browser, it’s amazedly fast. The media applications, from the WSJ to NPR to ABC and USA Today have all embraced something that’s almost wholly new in this format – a touch beyond what you can do in a browser, and the overall experience with this super-focused interface makes it something different. Just from the day one launch apps, i can see more possibilities coming on the horizon for this kind of content.

iPhone and iPod apps work – but really, really feel like second class citizens next to the apps that have designed for the larger interface. Facebook, for example, is almost more usable directly in safari than through the Facebook application.

The larger screen real estate is wonderful, especially when viewing pictures or video. Some of apple’s own apps aren’t obeying the “turn anytime” rules of the iPad HiG, and you’ll find yourself in landscape rotation just because you get more immediate functionality in most apps from it.

The drawing apps are really nice, as is Pages and Keynote. They are not, however, always super intuitive. They do a good job introducing the interface, but it’s going to be one you learn. Especially Brushes and SketchBook Pro.

Typing in landscape isn’t too bad, but just typing on your leg is a pain because the device is light enough to flop around a bit, making the typing difficult. In portrait mode, you’ll be doing the two finger hunt and peck routine. Hitting the space bar to speed typing is proving difficult for me.

Spelling checking is nice, but ironically the replace mechanism doesn’t always seem to function properly. Dunno what that’s about.

All in all, I love it. It’s the device that I’ll have near the couch all the time, or sitting on the bed stand. I might drag it around a bit just too see how much of a pain that will be, but it really feels more like a hardback book that you’ll keep handy for reading rather than something you might haul where ever like a battered paperback.

Hal’s response to the Xcoder mailing list was so incredibly well stated that I’m going to completely steal it and put up the response here. By “the group”, he’s speaking of the Seattle Xcoders:

Your best bet is to attend some meetings and get to know some people. The group has been very supportive of new ventures and new developers. But I don’t know any decent Cocoa developer who’s sitting around thinking “oh if only I had a project concept”. You will have some selling to do.

The risk in these “rev share” deals seems to me to fall mostly on the developer, particularly as an opportunity cost, since it amounts to an interest-free loan, to the business, of the value of that developer’s time. Ideas are easy; I have a notebook full of them (and if the value of your idea goes to zero as soon as someone else hears of it, there’s really no barrier to competitors). If I’m going to take on a partner I want to see a proven record in the business side: marketing, sales, management, fundraising. I want to see a complementary skill set with a dollar value comparable to what I would be putting into the venture.

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