Edward Thomson

It's been well over a month since I started talking about Eclipse's Synchronize functionality, with not a word about my supposed followup. You might just assume that I'm lazy (and you'd be correct), but as always, there's more to it than that.

While preparing this second blog entry, I started staring at a folder full of a few dozen screen captures highlighting various features of Eclipse's Synchronize View. A few dozen is a lot of screenshots to post, but because the Synchronize view's big advantage is that it's so visual, it's hard to decide which visuals to cut out. And being a rather verbose guy^[1], it's rather hard for me to edit.

So instead of unleashing a dozen screenshots on you in a long, rambling blog entry, I decided to do one better: make a screencast of Synchronize in action. This way I can still be long and rambling, but there's just one square of visual content on your screen instead of a few dozen.

If you look back through my posts, you'll notice that I don't have any screencasts online. This is because I've never made one before. In fact, I have absolutely no experience with video editing, nor audio editing, and when put in front of a microphone, I can barely manage to speak in full sentences.

Still, the entire concept seems pretty easy. I click around on a screen while I talk. I click around on a screen all day. I also talk all day. Combining these things shouldn't be too hard, right?

But pride goeth before the fall.

It started out well: I grabbed Snapz Pro to record with. It works exactly as advertised, recording your screen (or a subset thereof, in my case just my Eclipse window) as well as audio from an arbitrary source (my microphone.)

After that, all that was needed was some editing to remove my stammering, my "um"s and "duhhh"s, my false starts, etc. No problem right? My Mac came with iMovie HD, which is supposed to be "the fastest and easiest way to turn home movies into dazzling Hollywood-style hits." Surely, this amazing program will let me splice up this silly 800x600 video trivially, right?

To be fair, iMovie does seem really easy to use. Slow, but easy. After only a few clicks (and thirty minutes of it grinding away), I'd imported my screencast and split the audio and video tracks so I could see the waveforms easily and know right where I wanted to splice, which is also very easy.

Unfortunately, iMovie 6 does have a minor issue with stability. And by "minor issue," I mean it has a tendency to crash every 10 minutes. Knowing this, one might suggest I go find a new piece of software to do my video editing. But I'm the dreaded combination of lazy, cheap and stubborn, and thus came up with an ingenious workaround to continue using the free iMovie that I had already mostly learned: have a beer or two before using it (to remain calm enough to keep myself from stepping on my computer) and saving often. No problem, right?

Right.

Despite being slowed down by the constant crashes, I got about halfway through the process of making me sound like a human before iMovie - predictably - crashed for approximately the 714th time. But this time, it took my entire project file with it - somehow in that crash it had become corrupt. I googled for solutions, I tried various things to recover it, I checked permissions, I made a sacrifice to the software gods... I even rebooted. No love: iMovie continued to tell me it couldn't be read.

At that point, I just walked away, too frustrated with the process to even continue. I haven't touched it since, and given this delay, I thought I owed my one reader (who is, admittedly, probably Google's indexing bot) an apology. I will actually finish this article on Synchronize. I promise. It will probably consist of a few dozen screenshots, and I'll hate myself for doing that and curse at it every time I see it. But at least I'll be done with it.

I suppose I could attempt to finish this stupid screencast, but then I'd have to decide whether I want to suffer through using iMovie or if I should just buy Final Cut Pro. That is to say: being cheap, I need to determine if Final Cut Pro is less expensive than the quantity of oxycontin I'd need to take to be able to handle using iMovie or not[3]. (Beer just isn't going to cut it anymore.)

(If you're wondering, of course that oxycontin comment is a joke. I would never buy oxycontin. I'm way too cheap for that.)

1. Perhaps you've noticed, as even my footnotes get footnotes^[2].
2. Often very similar to this one.

Typically, I don't do the blog meme thing. But when one of your bosses tags you, it seems like a good idea to pay attention.

1. I want to go to CIA
   (The Culinary Institute of America, not the guys who assassinate world leaders.) Anymore, truffles and foie gras make me as excited as pointer arithmetic and O(n) algorithms. Some day I'd like to explore that more.

2. My girlfriend and I raised money for the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina
   After Katrina, we (and another friend) did fundraising for the Red Cross with businesses in our neighborhood. We setup donation boxes, convinced many generous businesses to give a portion of their sales to the Red Cross, and setup events to collect donations. It was heartwarming to walk down the street and see a sign in every window collecting donations, and likely what cemented my girlfriends and my relationship (aside, of course, from her being wholly badass.)

3. I will someday manage a cemetery
   My great great grandfather was a pastor in a small church outside a small town in Southern IL. At some point in the middle of the depression, he acquired a small plot of land that became our family cemetery. He carved the stones there by hand, up until the point he was buried there himself. My grandfather managed the cemetery until he passed away, and he decreed that at some point I will.

4. I was terrified of flying until a few years ago
   Like panic attack, make-out-a-will sort of fear. I got over it mostly due to Patrick Smith's Ask the Pilot. Now I obsess over the technical details and get an adreneline rush instead of heart palpitations.

5. I used to break up fights for fun (and slight profit)
   I took a break from software and computing a few years ago and ended up working at a bar to relax(!?). This ended my software industry burnout, and also taught me new skills like how to spot a fake ID, how to clean up really disgusting things without getting any on you, and how to throw someone out of your bar without opening yourself to legal liability.

And I suppose I should tag somebody. So it'll be Ben Pryor, my coworker, and Troy Stanger, my former coworker.

It's been quiet on this little blog lately, which might upset the one guy in Turkmenistan who actually reads this. I've been loathe to update this, since I've been busy with work that we haven't officially announced yet^[1], and I've been rather busy in my personal life making some pretty big changes.

See, I've left the safe confines of Champaign, IL and relocated to a different college town - Lansing, MI. My girlfriend's working on her PhD at Michigan State and I wanted to join her here. My boss was generous enough to allow me to continue working at Teamprise while mostly working remotely. I say "mostly" because I'm travelling a lot lately, and back in the office relatively frequently, but primarily I'm in Michigan right now.

It's only been about two weeks, so I'm still getting the hang of it. It's tough working out of the office -- while our team has gotten very good about communicating online^[2], I still miss the conversations that occur when you just wander into somebody's office. Some of the best meetings happen unplanned - the unexpected convergence of a few people's random thoughts occasionally coalescing into a useful new feature or a brilliant fix for a nasty bug. (Not to mention the fact that I miss out on the office gossip^[3].)

It's not all negative, though. The network speed, for instance, is a mixed blessing. When you're 18 hops away from your server on a cable modem, with compression and crypto steps in between, you notice every little byte and round-trip to the server. This certainly helps make you squeeze everything you can out of your I/O routines^[4].

I'm also surprised by how focused I feel while working^[5]. I was expecting working from home to be very distracting, but I actually feel more focused than I often do in the office, and more capable of multitasking. If this is actually true, I suspect it's related to the lack of coworkers. Interesting trade off, that one, a little bit of productivity for a little bit more dynamic work environment.

It also makes me - gasp - network with other developers. I'm used to being able to walk down the hallway and get into a discussion comparing the relative merits of the ext3 and XFS filesystems, but no more. So I'm seeking out User Groups, going to conferences[6] and chatting up other developers. Sort of a shy kid, I've always resisted "networking" and the like until now. People say this is good for Professional Development. I'm not sure about that, but at least it's helping me keep my sanity.

In any case - I suspect it's going to be interesting. I have a lot to learn yet about working remotely, but I'm glad to have this opportunity to learn it. And now that I'm finally getting settled back in, I'll start writing in here again.

1. But we will be soon, so check back at the Teamprise site.
2. Thanks mostly to the fact that our coworker Martin works 6 timezones away.
3. For example, what's Eric thinking about the fact that Borland just spun off their development group into a remarkably similarly named company called "CodeGear"? Previously, I would have just wandered down the hall to ask, now I have to read it on his blog the same time everybody else does.
4. Instead of slowing the I/O down. No, I'm not joking, I lazily added an unnecessary query to our label manipulation code that's killing me. It's the first thing that I'm going to fix as soon as we branch for 2.0.
5. But note that I said that I feel productive. Whether this is real or simply cognitive dissonance is still unclear.
6. In fact, I just returned from No Fluff Just Stuff Great Lakes. But that's another entry.