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NetBeans, and probably Eclipse, is increasingly talking about integrated or plugin collaboration tools that allow developers to work together cohesively and in realtime with each other.

Some discussion on the MyJXTA2 list prompts me to suggest that high speed Morse code can be used to help make developer team members aware of project events of interest. Network CVS check-ins, CVS check-outs, build broken, etc, are all events developers may want to know about, but don’t want to have to look at their screen to find out — ears sense omnidirectionally, while eyes are, well, line of sight. Using audible Morse code as an always open audio channel, as IM is an always open text channel [1], can help. NetBeans messages of interest, which are generally of network origin, are parsed and coded to PCM then played to the developer’s machine speaker.

Here a few examples

Listen to the wav files in a tight loop, such as

$ while : ; do play co.wav; done

so that you begin to hear it as a single “word”, rather than a discrete “c” followed by “o”. These files are encoded at about 35 words per minute, which is a pretty good clip, but necessary to get the message executed in a second or two.

Morse code is not difficult to learn, and intially only a few patterns would be needed.

Morse is superior to playing specific tones encoded as wav files to indicate events, such as are used to signal user entering and exiting a chat room, because real messages are encoded. Those simple tones resemble pictographs compared to letters or symbols in the Morse code set. It takes a new pictograph to express a new thought, whereas only a new arrangement of existing symbols to express a new thought in Morse code.

In this case Morse is also superior to text to speech, because human speech is a richer and more distracting vehicle than the messages need. Instant messaging has already replaced the telephone or shout down the hall as a rapid method of communication, and has gone even further by eschewing proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in the name of brevity and efficiency. We don’t always want to resort to heavyweight human speech or business letters to communicate. Morse would be perfect for developers to message each other without having to turn the head and read, but is still antiseptic enough just to get the message across without speech accents or intonations. Morse is “just the facts, ma’am”.

This idea is not as outlandish as it may at first seem. After all, we learned to type so we could hack code, right?

References

• Morse code table
• Learning Morse code
• C code to generated wav files
• Pierpont’s Art and Skill of RadioTelegraphy

[1]
Discussion of the value of always open video channels, which could also be put to good use in NetBeans or other IDE collaboration tools. Always open describes a channel where the answerer’s communication device can deliver a message from the caller without action on the answerer’s part. IM is essentially always open, email is basically always on, as is push to talk voice (walkie talkie). Telephones traditionally are not: the answerer has to take the receiver off-hook, or otherwise push an “answer” button.