Mike Roberts » Tech

Syncing music to iPod / iPhone from lossless iTunes library

Mike Roberts — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:02:09 +0000

For listening to music at home I use an Apple TV plugged into my fancyish sound system, and so I use music stored in lossless format. Since I use an Apple TV this music is stored on a computer using iTunes. I also have an iPhone, and my music library is on there too, but I can’t fit my entire lossless library on there (it’s more than 100GB) so up until now I’ve also kept a totally separate iTunes library, on a different computer, with the same music in 128kbps AAC format that can fit on my iPhone.

iTunes for a while has had an option where when syncing to an iPod shuffle it will automatically convert songs to a low bitrate to fit more songs on. I realized a couple of weeks ago that this option now exists for iPods and iPhones too – it appears on the main iPhone screen when you look at the device in iTunes

Thanks to macyourself.com

I tried this out last week. It definitely works, but takes a long time, about 15 hours syncing from my ~4 year old iMac. I can live with that slowness though now I don’t have to look after 2 separate libraries and manually convert all my music to smaller formats myself.

Dual KVM Pairing

Mike Roberts — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:15:29 +0000

Previously when I’ve pair programmed (2 people programming at the same computer at the same time) I’ve always used one keyboard, screen and mouse (KVM – V means Video). In the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying out ‘dual KVM’ pairing though – in this scenario each programmer has their own keyboard, mouse and monitor, where the screens are setup to mirror each other (each person sees exactly the same thing)

This style of pairing isn’t new, and certainly is common on other teams at DRW, I just hadn’t used it before. In fact I had concerns, the principal ones being:

Wouldn’t something be lost in communication with not having a shared physical screen? (I point at things on the screen fairly often when pairing)
Wouldn’t programmers be constantly aware that they might be fighting each other for control of the mouse pointer / cursor if they had their own keyboard and mouse?

It turns out that I really like this style of pairing. My concerns with communication about the screen are largely alleviated by turning on line numbers in the code editor, and the keyboard and mouse fighting isn’t nearly the problem I feared. The benefits are chiefly ergonomic, but they are significant. Being able to look straight forward, and not having to lean in towards the keyboard and mouse makes work a lot more comfortable. The only thing I slightly miss is being able to use 2 screens for a stretched desktop, but that’s a price worth paying – I can always switch back the screens to this mode when I’m not pairing.

Experience using Scala as a functional testing language

Mike Roberts — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:16:54 +0000

6 months ago my team decided to migrate our functional tests to being coded in Scala rather than Java, the native language our application is written in. However we have now reverted back to writing them in plain Java. What follows is an experience report of this exercise and our reasons for bringing it to an end.

Background

The application under test is a message-driven server application. We define the functional tests of this application as those that run against the largest subset of our application we can define without requiring any out of process communication. The functional tests themselves run in process with the application under test.

Each functional test is written in a style that treats the whole system (mostly) as a black box. We stub out all external collaborators – those stubs simulate collaborators sending messages, and also collect any messages that they receive allowing the tests to make assertions about the application’s interactions with its environment.

Our application is not trivial; writing functional tests that are concise, understandable and maintainable is a tricky task. We’ve created a fair number of support classes that start the system and act as the collaborator stubs described above to help keep the tests themselves clean.

We use functional tests extensively, and typically write at least one functional test per work item on our backlog. Just in terms of numbers about 10% of all the automated tests we have are functional in style, the rest are per-class-level unit tests.

For our development environment we use IntelliJ as our IDE and Rake as our command-line build environment.

Switching to Scala

We were interested in trying Scala as our functional test language for 2 main reasons:

To improve clarity and maintainability of the tests
To assess Scala as a possible production-code language

We already had a good number of functional tests going into this exercise and so our first task was to rewrite these in Scala. We also rewrote most of our test-support classes in Scala.

Since this was our first time writing Scala the translation wasn’t a blisteringly fast process but the Intellij Scala plugin’s ‘copy Java, paste as Scala’ feature did help us get going. If nothing else it was a useful guide when translating generic code.

Another initial task was to setup our development environment to support Scala. Intellij’s Scala plugin, while having a number of deficiencies, does the basics well and we were very quickly compiling and testing Scala alongside Java in the same project. Even though Intellij will support Java and Scala code in the same source we kept all Scala code in a separate source tree to avoid complications with the command line build. With that setup updating our rake script to compile Scala and run the Scala tests was relatively easy.

What was good

The main thing that attracted us to Scala was the ability to write code in a semi-functional style much more concisely than can be done in plain Java. We’ve also been coding a good amount of C# recently and we sorely miss the basic functional support in C# 3 when switching to Java. We were not disappointed by Scala’s abilities in this regard: there were many occasions where we could write 1 line of concise, readable Scala where previously we’d had 8 lines of a Java method.

Why drop it?

There were several reasons we decided to roll back to Java, and to be fair to Scala most of them were not it’s fault.

The biggest reason was that despite 6 months of experience we still found we were slower to code and debug Scala than Java. We probably spend around 5 to 10% of our coding time working with the functional tests and that just isn’t enough to really ‘get’ the language. I think this would be similar for most languages – you’ve got to use them significantly to become fluent in them – but I think this is particularly true with Scala since it is a large language with an equivalently large library.

I don’t think its just the time aspect either. Tests are a very specific style of coding and mostly procedural. Where we got most of the benefit of Scala were in our test support classes, but even they aren’t hugely complex. We never got into any meaty problems in our Scala realm and so never really pushed our knowledge of it.

Scala is absolutely a more powerful language than Java and as I mentioned above we could write code more concisely in Scala than we could in Java. However IntelliJ is a great tool and it makes up for a surprising number Java’s deficiencies. You end up with more code on the screen with Java but I’m not convinced that it takes more time to write it. Furthermore once the code is written the rest of the IDE experience is far better in Java than Scala – compiling is faster, code browsing works much better and debugging Scala in Intellij is no fun at all. (yes, we use a debugger, I know that probably makes us awful programmers in the eyes of some readers!)

Again this isn’t necessarily Scala’s fault – if I didn’t have an IDE at all Java would be more painful than Scala – but I do have an IDE and even if I don’t write the most elegant solution that’s not what my goal is – my goal is to create functioning software as quickly as I can (for the next and following releases.)

Some reasons we ditched Scala though can’t be blamed on tools or the particular problem we were trying to solve with it. Scala is large, larger than I’m comfortable with. I want a language that’s more opinionated, at least when I’m getting started.

Furthermore the libraries, especially the collection libraries, are hard to get a handle on. As a particular example Scala has both mutable and immutable Set classes … but they are both called ‘Set’ . Relying on a namespace definition to specify something as fundamental as a collection type is just plain frustrating. The Interop between Java and Scala, specifically with Collection types, can also be painful (even with some of the updates in Scala 2.8 .)

In Conclusion

To me using Scala isn’t a great fit in a polyglot environment: it’s a large language to learn, the interop still needs work and and the tool chain adds friction in comparison with plain Java. That said I think with time Scala could become a very interesting monoglot language for developing an entire app on the JVM – in that scenario developers would naturally come to learn it more throughly and wouldn’t be brushing up against interop problems.

Using Scala was a good experience overall and has been yet another push for us to write more functional-style Java. We’ll be looking at other languages to enhance our productivity but will likely leave our functional tests in Java.

The death of agile

Mike Roberts — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:19:12 +0000

First go and read this great post by Bill Caputo. Bill’s site doesn’t seem to allow comments right now so I’ll put my response here instead.

I think part of the problem is that the agile ‘movement’ is so top-heavy with consultants. For many of these consultancies its very hard to sell a story like agile, which isn’t for a specific technology, when it’s packaged as a technical solution. They have to make it a business process problem to get through the door at a high enough dollar rate, or (for bigger consulting firms) to get enough bums on seats to make it worth the effort.

Think of other cross company technology efforts like standards bodies. Are all of these racked to the gills with consultants? No, they have a bunch of CTOs, senior developers, or whatever who are having to live with this stuff every day in a consistent environment. They do have consultants too, but not drowning out everyone else.

I know that the agile movement started with a bunch of really smart people, most of which were consultants, and some of its current leads (tip of the hat to some of my previous colleagues still at ThoughtWorks) are brilliant and continue to add valuable insight to our industry.

However for agile to get to anywhere beyond where it’s become (mostly a big mix of fluffy ideas that are easily billable but which don’t really solve anything without the necessary discipline which most companies are incapable of) it needs a much better diversity of background of leaders. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening – it’s just too big. Take the Agile 20xx conferences – they’re now basically 3 things:

101-level training for newbies
an expo for largely pseudo-agile consulting firms and mediocre tools
a small amount of people who’ve known each other for ages catching up and complaining about the state of agile.

So I think you’re right, Bill, agile is dead. It served a good purpose, and did a pretty good job of giving our industry the kick up the behind it needed, but it is now pining for the fjords.

To end optimistically though, there’s still a lot of great stuff going on in our industry, its just these days I’m much more interested in technically based conferences and communities, and having conversations on the side of these around process. Its from these technical communities I’ve learned about things like Kanban, for example. And its a blessed relief not to have to justify whether the team I’m on ‘is agile or not’.

Retlang & Jetlang

Mike Roberts — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:03:54 +0000

Retlang and Jetlang are open-source libraries for the .NET CLR and JVM that provide concurrency through in-process messaging. Mike Rettig, one of my colleagues at DRW, is the lead of both of these projects.

Today at Speakerconf I presented on these libraries, and the slides can be found here (in Keynote ’09) and here (in PDF).

I encourage you to use the project mailing lists (for Retlang and Jetlang) if you are interested in learning more.

2008 Gadgets Review – #4 – Twitter

Mike Roberts — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:34:33 +0000

Strictly speaking I signed on to Twitter in 2007 but never used it very much. I didn’t find a way to read it that I liked, and there wasn’t that much I found interesting to read.

This changed this year though. On the application front I started using twitterific on the iPhone. It’s a great thing to check a few times a day when I have a spare couple of minutes away from my computer and not talking to anyone else, waiting for something to happen. I’ll leave the exact details of when such scenarios occur as an exercise to the reader…

Secondly, I started getting a critical mass of people to follow who wrote enough that I always had something to read, but not too much as to be spamming 40 tweets a day. OK, not usually (*ahem* Josh Graham )

One interesting thing about Twitter is that it’s very much a uni-directional broadcast. People can subscribe or unsubscribe to my feed as they want and really it doesn’t make any difference to me, and I don’t really know about it. Compare this with Facebook, for instance, which is far more of a joint relationship – if someone removes me as a friend from their contacts, they are also removed from my contacts. If they want to add me back, there has to be a confirmation on my part, so I would see them attaching and detaching to my status feed, as it were.

Because Twitter has a looser coupling, I feel more able to put more status updates out when I want, tweet when I’m drunk (although that’s seldom a good idea), etc.

Facebook was my social networking app of 2007, Twitter of 2008. It’s likely by the end of 2009 I’ll have something else going on.

You can find my twitter feed at http://twitter.com/mikebroberts

eXtreme Tuesday Club NYC starts up again this week

Mike Roberts — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:23:44 +0000

After a hiatus for a few months, I’m kicking off XTC NYC again this week, on inauguration night. Details on the website.

2008 Gadgets Review – #3 – Dots gloves

Mike Roberts — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:59:59 +0000

This one wasn’t going to get a mention originally, but after how cold it is here in NYC this morning I changed my mind.

I love my iPhone. 18 months in and I still think it’s a device from the future. The problem comes this time of year when it’s cold outside, I’m wearing my gloves, and I get a call – the touchscreen doesn’t work and the call ends up going to voicemail.

Enter Dots gloves – gloves with little, well, dots, on the tips of the thumbs and index fingers that play nice with the iPhone screen. Simple and effective. And only $20 for the thicker wool gloves.

2008 Gadgets Review – #2 – Logitech Harmony 880 Universal Remote Control

Mike Roberts — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:00:35 +0000

For part 2 of my 2008 gadget round-up I’m going to talk about Logitech’s Harmony 880 universal remote control.

Being a geek, my lounge is full of stuff with remote controls, all hooked to each other. At last count, my media setup included:

A TV
Mini system (used for sound and playing CDs)
2 game / media consoles (XBox 360 & Playstation 3)
DVD player
Squeezebox Music player
Cable TV DVR
HDMI switch
Mac Mini

This equals a lot of remote controls, confusing the heck out of my girlfriend (and me early on a Saturday morning) and it’s a big mess on my coffee table. A couple of my friends had been bugging me about getting a universal remote control, a remote which could control all of my devices, but I was sceptical about them after bad experiences in the past.

Eventually though I decided to do some research and looked into the options. Logitech seemed to have the best reviewed range for non-ludicrous prices, and of their selection the Harmony 880 model seemed a good middle-ground option for a reasonable price and it had many decent reviews. I decided to go for it and a few days later found myself unpacking my remote.

The first step to setting up the remote was to install software on my Mac, and plug the remote in to a USB socket. Setting up the remote is done solely through the computer, which is useful since there are a whole range of options available. The next step was to tell the software what devices I had, and how they connected to each other (e.g. through which inputs to the TV.) Much to my surprise the software knew about both my UK Pioneer mini system system and my fairly obscure HDMI switch.

After the device and connections setup, I needed to decide which ‘activities’ I wanted the remote to know about. Most of the time when using the remote your usage is activity-based (‘watch DVD’) rather than device-based (‘turn on DVD player’). This is a wonderful scheme, it brings the concept of remote control macros (controlling multiple devices in one user action) to a level anyone can use and setup.

After programming the remote, it was time to try it out. Tentatively I pointed at my Stack Of Stuff and chose to ‘Watch TV’. The cable box turned on, the TV turned on and switched to the correct HDMI input, my HDMI switch moved to the correct input, and my mini system turned on switching to the right input also. I was shocked – it worked!

I wanted to watch a recent episode of the Daily Show, for which I needed the DVR controls of my cable box. As if by magic, a ‘list’ option had appeared on the screen of my remote, which I could select by using the general purpose button next to it. The menu buttons on the remote controlled the selection, and play, pause etc. all did the right. Even better, the volume control on the remote automatically changed the volume on my mini system, since during the setup process the software has asked me what device I used for controlling volume when watching TV.

Anyone who has used universal remotes knows that sometimes things don’t quite work. Many devices have power toggles (‘change the power setting’) rather than absolute commands (‘turn power off’) and so workflow-based remotes are sometimes out-of-sync with the current state of your devices. The Harmony remote’s approach to problems like this is a ‘help’ button at the top of the remote, which launches a very simple step-by-step process guided through the remote’s screen to get everything going properly.

The other concern I had was what happened for the occasional use of something that wasn’t in an activity (e.g. changing the surround setup of my mini system.) For this the remote allows you to switch to a ‘device’ mode rather than ‘activity’ mode, giving you full control of your devices. For buttons which aren’t represented directly on the remote, the screen on the remote, and associated general purpose buttons, can have multiple pages offering pretty much everything available on my actual remotes.

Of course, the real test was would my not-quite-as-nerdy-as-me girlfriend be able to use this remote. The answer was an emphatic yes, even being able to navigate the ‘help’ workflow.

I have almost nothing bad to say about the Harmony 880. Higher end models allow for more devices, and allow for ‘out-of-sight’ control, but that’s beyond what I need. My Playstation 3 can’t be controlled with the remote, but that’s Sony’s fault for not providing an infra red sensor. There are 3rd party IR-to-bluetooth adapters available for this purpose but I’ve been having trouble getting hold of one.

In summary, the 880 has been an absolutely superb purchase, and I thoroughly recommend it.

2008 Gadgets Review – #1 – Mobile Me

Mike Roberts — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:43:33 +0000

2008 was a good year for gadgets for me. It was probably something to do with making up for not coding for most of it. I’m including in gadgets software and services nothing to do with computer programming.

First up on my list is Apple’s Mobile Me. Mobile Me is nominally a replacement and upgrade of Apple’s .Mac internet application service, offering web-based and IMAP email, a calendar and address book syncing service for Mac’s running OS X, internet based file storage, etc.

The biggest update I was interested in of Mobile Me over .Mac however was it’s iPhone integration, and more specifically the over-the-cellphone-network syncing of address book, calendar and ‘push’ IMAP email. Before Mobile Me I used to hook up my iPhone to my home iMac every day to make sure any contact or calendar changes were backed from my iPhone, and any changes I’d made elsewhere were synced to my iPhone. I also used Plaxo to sync address books between various computers and Spanning Sync with Google calendar to sync calendars across computers.

This setup worked, but has now been completely replaced by a totally automatic process in Mobile Me. Without using any other services, calendars and address books are now kept in sync across all my work and personal Macs, and my iPhone, without any work on my part apart from the initial setup. These days I plug my iPhone into the computer every few weeks rather than every day.

This setup does everything important that I wanted 6 years ago.

Mobile Me has not all been smooth sailing, however. The launch in July for some very strange reason was consecutive with the launch of the major iPhone version 2 software update, and the cutover from .Mac to Mobile Me was a hard-change, rather than gradual crossover. Unsurprisingly this didn’t go so well, with services being inaccessible to some extent for a few weeks. Luckily I wasn’t already dependent on .Mac, but if I had been and thus not had email access for several days I would have been most definitely cheesed off.

Also, the Mobile Me web applications (allowing you to access your mail, contacts, calendar from a browser) aren’t all that great. They look lovely and shiny, trying their best to look like their desktop counterparts, however they just end up being slower than Google-style equivalents, and don’t work on some browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 6 on my dad’s home computer when I visited in September.) This isn’t a particularly big deal since I only need to use this feature when abroad, but even so I think Apple have something to learn about running web application services.

Griping aside, Mobile Me is a real time and brain saver for me. Well worth the subscription cost.