Why am I surprised when things work?

I recently purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. This isn't interesting, its a scanner. You plug it into your computer, and its supposed to make picture files from paper. Yay. We've had scanners for ages. Its not blog worthy.

What shocked me was, the damn thing does exactly what it says on the tin.

Load its sheet feeder up with paper, plug it into the computer's USB port. Push the only "Scan" button on the front. Next thing you know, there is a folder full of sequentially numbered JPEG files. It automatically detects the length of the paper. It scans double-sided at the same speed it scans single-sided. It automatically drops back sides which are completely blank. Pages narrower than 8.5" are correctly detected and scanned with a narrower image width. It goes through 20 pages per minute. That's fast enough that its done before you realize its started.

I realized after scanning several hundred pages in just a few minutes that very few things I purchase these days "just work". Most products still require a lot of tinkering from the user, or are still so complex that you need an advanced degree to operate them. This scanner, well, anyone's cat could use it. Just tap that scan button.

Most products require you to purchase additional stuff, e.g. cables, to get them to work. Fujitsu actually included a USB cable in the box. Just unpack, plug in, and go. Its hard to argue with that. Even my HD TiVo was harder to get setup and going.

To organize that directory of image files, I started using Brad Fitzpatrick's scanningcabinet application. Though I did make a few changes in my own scanningcabinet fork on GitHub. Now if only Google AppEngine supported full text search better...

Gerrit Code Review on FLOSS Weekly

On Wednesday I recorded a netcast for FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper about Gerrit Code Review, JGit, EGit, and Git in general. The video and audio versions of the netcast are now available.

It was fun recording the show. I don't usually do these sorts of things, I find talking to a laptop somewhat challenging conceptually. Its just a thing sitting there, and it doesn't talk back. You can't see your audience's reactions to your words. I guess that's why I never got into radio, I couldn't sit and talk to a wall for four hours a day, every day. I definitely prefer getting up on stage and giving a talk in person.

Pre-testing commits with Git

The awesome folks who work on Hudson CI have finally brought us pre-tested commits with Gerrit Code Review. Their solution of watching everything under refs/changes/ is a bit brute-force, but its an amazing first start, because Hudson can "vote" on the change and prevent it from being submitted if the build failed.

A few years ago I started a similar sort of thing for Git. Its carried in the contrib/continuous directory of the git.git source code distribution. But this whole Hudson-Gerrit integration is way better, because it lets you catch the failure before its submitted to your development branches.

Git is moving...

Cedric recently wrote an interesting post on his blog, Git for the nervous developer. Unlike a lot of the other blogs out there, he approached Git from the kicking and screaming angle, where he was already comfortable with another VCS and was forced to switch to Git for his day-job. Its an interesting perspective that he has, how he has found some sort of happiness with the tool he didn't choose to use.

Today I also gave a talk on Git, JGit, EGit and Gerrit Code Review at the Sonatype Maven Meetup in Philadelphia. The talk was really well attended, according to Jason van Zyl, everyone chose my talk during the first time slot of the day. Most of the audience is apparently from the financial services sector, so they are a bit behind the bleeding edge of the open source VCS curve, but they were aware of Git and asking some really great questions about its capabilities. I'm glad I went, maybe we'll see some wider adoption of Git outside of the more usual open source communities.