Hans Muller's Blog

August 2003 Archives

Selling Snakes with Huckster

Disclaimer: I wrote most of this blog about a month ago. Before I finished, a combination of vacation and other distractions kept me from completing it. So finally, here it is.

At Sun Microsystems, we're all required to take vacation during the week of July 4th. I think it's more of an economic requirement than a patriotic one. Ofcourse some people take Independence Day pretty seriously, for example founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both managed to drop dead exactly fifty years later, right on the 4th. I'm not quite as inspired by the date however I am writing this outdoors on a beautiful Pennsylvania afternoon with four US flags fluttering within my line of sight over the top of the laptop. Pennsylvania weather is a big change from California's Bay Area, it's humid here. Sometimes it's unbearable however today it just makes the breeze more entertaining. A little bit like swimming without getting wet. Or cold.

The weather at the Castle Rock and Big Basin parks in the Santa Cruz mountains was different but just as nice. Earlier this week my older sons and I and some friends went backpacking from Castle Rock, through big Basin, and all the way out to the Ocean. The trail ends at Waddell Beach where the kite surfers zoom around above the surf like a cloud of giant butterflies. The trail itself is impressive, having been cut into the side of ridges covered with Coastal Redwoods and in other places Chaparral and rock formations that look like they were lifted from old Roger Dean album covers. The trail winds up and down, always opening up a new little vista, never boring.

In many places the trail is just a two foot wide shelf cut into a ridge. As you walk westward your right shoulder brushes up against the scalloped edge of the trail cut. Just past your left shoulder there's a good approximation of a cliff. Rattle snakes are common on the sunnier parts of the trail and on the second day we passed a baby that shook it's tiny rattle half heartedly and then slipped into the bushes. We felt very manly then, tramping past the venemous snake, even bending over for a closer look. That feeling passed later in the afternoon when we turned a corner into another sunny vista and nearly stepped on the baby's big mother. We didn't see the rattlesnake right away but we heard it angrily shaking its big maraca. The cliff on the left looked pretty dangerous at that point so the rattle snake headed to the right. Unfortunately for the snake, the trail's right shoulder was even steeper. The rattler strugged but couldn't wind it's way up, so it settled for a waist high defensive position at the base of a small tree growing out of the scalloped edge of the trail. Rattling for all it was worth the snake spring loaded its coils and pointed it's big triangular head directly at us. Left side cliff. Right side, angry rattle snake aimed directly at my shorts.

My friend Norm and I are software engineers. We were also the adult supervision for this trip, so we snapped into action and took some digital pictures of the snake. It seemed likely that someone would create a web site about us after the bodies were found and having a picture of the snake that did us in would make our epitaph more interesting. That taken care of, we tried to calcuate how far the snake could lunge and Norm decided that it was unlikely that it could hit a target perched on the far left edge of the trail. Since I wasn't carrying dinner, Norm suggested that I go first. I'd like to say that I strode fearlessly past the reptile. The truth is that if I'd had a tail, it would have been between my legs as I leapt past while the snake rattled.

If you're still reading this (and you're not Norm) then you're probably wondering where the technical content escaped to. I've been saving it and it's your reward for putting up with my travelogue.

The word "huckster" seems to have the same Dutch origins as "hawker" and both words are used to described peddlers whose pitch is mightier than their product. Like snake-oil salesmen (that's the best I can do for theme continuity). This year at JavaOne James Gosling created a simple presentation editor/player called Huckster and used it for his keynote presentation. He's also launched a Huckster open source project that you'll find on javadesktop.org in the projects section here. Huckster makes a number of simplifying assumptions that reduce the scope Huckster's design and implementation to the point where one hacker could carry off the first version without making a joke out of their day job. It probably doesn't hurt that the developer is James Gosling.

• The only elements needed for a presentation are images and text. Users who need fancy charts and diagrams can always produce those in more specialized tools.
• Fine control over slide layout is overrated. You can live without being able to insert a couple of pixels of padding between a slide's title and the first bullet and you certainly don't need to be able to control where all of the line breaks go.
• A direct manipulation WYSIWYG style GUI isn't neccessary for entering the text for titles and bullet points. You're better off working with an outline editor flanked by a slide preview window.
• Transitions are evil. I'm really sure about the thought behind this design constraint, however it's clearly stated in the docs. I'm guessing that during his formative years James was involved in some kind of bloody PowerPoint accident.

One novel Huckster feature that I haven't seen in any other presentation tool is that it dyanmically reduces the font-size for titles and bullet text. The more you type the smaller the fonts get. If you type for a long time (I tried this) the text gets really really small. I have yet to do a full one-hour presentation with Huckster however with small examples this seems like a very useful feature.

I have to admit that when I first tried Huckster on my Linux laptop I couldn't add images to the presentation - which pretty much defeated my objective of creating a slide with the picture of the great big rattlesnake. The problem was that Nautilus (the drag source) would only provide a file URL string. When I drag-and-dropped an image on Huckster it just inserted the file URL as text. So, hooray for open source, I changed Huckster so that if you drop a string that can be parsed as a URL and that produces an image, Huckster does the right thing. I also fixed some other minor problems and proudly sent them back to James to be incorporated in the next version.

Here's the snake presentation encoded as a huckster ".esl" file. It's kind of refreshing to see a simple plain text file format again.

A Big Snake
-Hans's Blog
-July/August 2003
-\I500:/export/home/hans/big-snake.jpg
Same Snake
-This time the image is used for the slide's background
-\I500b:/export/home/hans/big-snake.jpg
The End

And here's the same tiny presentation exported as HTML (just images really) so you can have a look.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.