Caffeine Lab

In Play’s Eclipse plugin, I just added a simple integration with the test framework. Currently, all it does is opening the test page directly within Eclipse.

Play Tests in Eclipse

The obvious next step would be that, in case of a failure typically, links from the page brings you directly to your code at the correct line. That would be also very useful for error pages, just like Guillaume did in his Textmate integration. So I did some research, what is it possible to do with Eclipse?

I found a very old bug, opened in 2001, to support opening files directly from the command line. After nearly 10 years the bug is finally fixed: it’s in the not-yet-released 3.6 version of Eclipse. It’s such a basic feature it’s surprising they couldn’t do it earlier, but at least they eventually did it. So with a nightly build of Eclipse, you can open files like this:

eclipse -name Eclipse --launcher.openFile <qualified file name>

That’s the most important piece already in place, so it’s good news. But that’s not enough. To jump right to the error, you need to be able to open the file at a given line number. You don’t want to have to search in your code for the line responsible for the error. So I opened bug 305336. Looking at the patch for bug 4922, adding the line number seems trivial to do. I’ll probably submit a patch and cross my fingers to have it in 3.6 before it’s released.

The last piece we would need is Eclipse registering itself as a protocol handler. That would allow us to insert URLs such as:

eclipse://open?url=file://<qualified file name>

Again, I opened a bug (#305345). It’s not as critical as the other items because this one can be created manually. For Windows there’s a key to add to the registry, for Gnome it’s a key in gconf and for OSX I’m sure there is something similar. Of course, it would be better if it Eclipse registered itself so the user won’t have to mess with his registry.

I will be at FOSDEM in Bruxelles on Saturday 6 February. I will make a talk about the Play framework in the Free Java session, at 17:15.

I recently learned that Kiyoshiro Imawano died last May, from a cancer at age 58. Most people outside Japan don’t know him, but he was a very famous and very controversial pop singer. He was unique, talented, funny and sometimes engaged.

He is famous for his punk version of the Japanese National anthem Kimi ga Yo, that became banned and can no longer be aired on Japanese media. That reminded me of Gainsbourg’s reggae version of La Marseillaise, very controversial too.

What I want to share today is a song about North Korea. To a US audience the part about world peace may sound a bit cheesy, but you have to understand that how Japanese people hate North Korea. For most Japanese thinking about friendship with North Korea is just insanity, and this is truly a courageous song.

Homies from California

All my homies were come from a vending machine in Fry’s, some in Palo Alto and others in Sunnyvale. If you really are into homies, you can also play one of the worst Nintendo DS game ever: Homies Rollerz.

I’ve recently been interviewed by French blogger Philippe Scoffoni. We talk about Open Source, Flock, Yoono, and software engineering.

Read the interview (in French).

I am now well in my first month at Yoono, and you can already play with my work by installing the last version from AMO. I have been working mostly on the Facebook integration in the friends widget.

Here are some of the features I added:

• Online presence and chat: no chat in the sidebar yet, but you can already see who is online from the sidebar and initiate a chat from there.
• Contact sorting: at least for Facebook and Twitter, contacts are now sorted by last updated first

Online status for Facebook friends in the Yoono sidebar

• New activity types, from the new Facebook API: you are now notified when your friends post new notes or share links. With the thumbnail:

Shared Links

There is much more coming for Yoono’s friends widget in the next version. I can’t tell anything for now (Yoono’s development is not open), but stay tuned for the 5.5.0!

I made the jump to Wordpress 2.7, and everything went smooth. I did have some issues with a Gravatar plugin, and the theme I was using didn’t include Gravatar by default so I thought it was a good opportunity to try a new one. So here we go, I now have a new theme for my blog. I really like the way it look, the 404 page was the only issue – it didn’t include the usual title and sidebar, and there was a huge link to the theme author! I fixed that, but the 404 is still ugly so I will have to improve it more. Something I really like in this new theme is that comments from visitors and from me are shown in a different way, so it’s easy for everyone to distinguish comments from the author (i.e. me) from comments from visitors.

So far, Wordpress 2.7 has a neat completely rewritten admin panel but I can’t see any major new feature. Anyway, the strength of Wordpress is really the plugin/theme ecosystem.

It works now!

About a week ago I wrote about Japanese input on S60 in general, and on my Nokia E71 in particular. Well, I’ve finally found a solution that satisfies me. That’s in 2 steps, and it involves a little bit more that installing packages. But the only “system modification” is done on the MicroSD card, so I feel like it’s pretty safe. If things go wrong, you can just pull the MicroSD card and boot without it. Anyway, if things go really wrong (it was fine for me but I don’t know what can happen for you) don’t blame me. Everything you do is your own responsibility, so don’t follow my advice if you’re not comfortable in tweaking your phone. Also, please don’t ask me for help to setup your phone. All I know is written here, if it works for you it’s great but if it doesn’t I can’t help more.

Important note: that should work on most Nokia phones, but there is no guarantee that it will work with other brands. A reader reported that it doesn’t work well on a Samsung i550.

In short: you can read Japanese for free, and you can write Japanese for ¥5,000 (roughly $50 depending on the rate).

Reading Japanese

The first step is making sure you can read Japanese on your phone. If it’s like mine, out of the box you see squares if you visit Japanese websites, or view emails in Japanese.

All you have to do, is visit this page and follow instructions:

http://japanesefont.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-install-japanese-fonts-on-non.html

In short, that will involve:

• Downloading the Nokia SDK that contains the Japanese font
• Copy the font to your MicroSD, in the right folder with a name that mirrors your existing fonts (so you don’t have to override your fonts; you just add fonts that take priority)
• Reboot, and you’re done

Now, if you do it you will notice that the whole font is changed, i.e. even English text looks different than before. The font is “thiner”. That was my grip with +J, I really didn’t like the font they were recommending. In this case it’s different: the font looks really good. This is the font that Nokia uses in the phone they sell in Japan.

(Alternatively, you could spend €30 on a solution full of DRM that I don’t even feel the need to cite… Who would want that? Additionally, I don’t even know if it’s compatible with +J.)

Here you go, you can visit Japanese websites! If that’s all you want, if you don’t care much about input, you can stop here. But if you want to be able to input Japanese, read on.

Writing Japanese

Now you need an input method. I said in my previous post that +J was a great, complete solution that rivals what you get on Japanese phone and even computers. However, the font they offer didn’t look good to me.

At that point we have a phone capable to read Japanese with a good-looking font so we don’t need to install the ugly one they propose. You do need a fairly good Japanese level to install and use +J because all doc and menus are in Japanese.

Before you install +J, make sure it works for your device. Read the supported devices list. It should work on a S60 3rd edition, 3rd edition FP1 and some FP2 devices. It has only been tested with Nokia devices.

Here are the steps:

• Go to the +J page
• Download “+J for S60本体” (do NOT download the font)
• Follow the instructions to install +J from the PDF documentation (SKIP the “install the font” part)

…And now you have full working Japanese input on your phone! But for 30 days only, that’s the duration of the test version. You will need to spend ¥5,000 for the full version – but believe me, it’s worth it and there’s no DRM.

Or, for more money (€60 – no joke) you can have a solution that doesn’t work very well, is full of DRM and clutters your context menu with input-related entries. That’s the product that I cited in my older post, but I don’t recommend it.

Conclusion

Some comments:

• My only grip (but it’s minor) is that switching from English input to Japanese input on a E71 is done with a three keys combination. Not very convenient.
• French accents still work. I mean for display, because my phone is a qwerty one, English OS, and I couldn’t input accents before anyway. Not sure what would happen on a French phone, maybe you lose the ability to input accents? Maybe you need to input in qwerty even if your keys are labeled azerty?
• By default, +J will be in 9-keys mode (for phones with just a phone pad). You need to switch that to romaji for the E71.
• By default, all applications will start in hiragana input mode (to input Japanese as opposed to English). Unless you live in Japan, you’ll want to change that setting too.

The Bad

There are a lot of services out there (SNS like Facebook) that offer you to import your email contacts to see if some of your existing friends are already on the service. Then you can connect to them. You’re happy because you don’t have to hunt for your friends, your friends are happy to connect to you and the service is happy because it makes you more likely to come back. Additionnally, they offer you an option to spam your friends not already on the service, but they usually do it in a respectful way (i.e. they make sure you do want to spam your friends, and which friends).

However, 90% of the time – and even for high-profile, tech-savy companies like Facebook – they do it wrong. But really, really wrong. They ask you for your username and password and use it on your behalf to login to your webmail and retrieve your address book. This is bad. This is pretty much as bad as lending you credit card and PIN number to a stranger so he can do some shopping for you.

When you do that, you’re pretty much giving away the keys of your home. During that time, the service can make a copy and pay a visit to your home any time your want. And I don’t know for you, but my gmail account is my single most sensible password (except for my banking password). The reason is that any service have a “reset my password” option that emails you a link. Therefore, get access to my primary email account and you get access to my whole online world. Heck, you can even kick me out by changing the password.

Some may argue that Facebook or other website are nice people and won’t do that. Well, I have no guarantee that they will not store the password. I have no guarantee that one of there thousands of employees won’t have access to it. Furthermore, this practice is teaching users that it’s OK to give credentials for a service to another, and they’re making scammers work much easier.

The Good

So, what’s the solution? That’s simple, for GMail Google now offers an API for third party to retrieve contacts of a user. The process for the user is simple:

• Third party redirects to a page on Google asking “Do you want to grant access to your contacts for this service?” If the user is already logged in to Google, he doesn’t even need to input his login and password.
• User says “yes”, and gets redirected back to the third party service.

Voilà! Now, the service can access the contacts – and only the contacts. They can’t read your email. They can’t change your password. And at any time, you can revoke the access from a page on Google.

That’s what GooSync does (a service to synchronize your Google contacts and calendar to your mobile phone) and that’s what everyone should do. It really feels good to see a service using this API, so I can give them access to my contacts (and getting a real benefit from it) without giving them full access to my mailbox.

Users: Don’t give away your login info to third party! You’re giving away the keys of your home and taking a big risk.

Web Developers: Don’t ask your users for their gmail/yahoo/hotmail credentials! You’re teaching them it’s OK to do so, and making them more vulnerable to scammers.

Preparing my order of French books from Amazon.fr, I noticed that they don’t ship to Cuba (in French), among other countries on an US embargo. Note that there is no French embargo in Cuba, and French companies are perfectly allowed to do business with Cuba.

Not that I need my order to be shipped there (California will be fine), but I’m a bit surprised. This is the French branch of Amazon making business from France. Does the fact that it’s part of an American group forces them to respect US embargoes? Would Amazon get in trouble with the Federal Government if their French branch does business with Cuba?