Recent blog entries for Omnifarious

Threading vs. event-driven

A comrade in arms on the event-driven vs. threaded debate has switched sides and is now a threading advocate. He's been having doubts for awhile but was finally convinced by an article about threaded vs. event-driven approaches in Java. I'm not so sure, though it's clear that some of the long-standing reasons that threaded approaches were bad are starting to go away.

My main complaint about threads is that the concurrency model they represent is too hard for most people to use and requires way more discipline than the average programmer seems capable of.

My secondary complaint is basically that they introduce latency. Every synchronization operation represents a piece of data that has to be communicated between threads. I wrote a long pondering article about threads and latency awhile ago.

One thing I've noticed is that reads are usually much more frequent than updates. This makes things like memcached a good idea. I think of memcached as essentially being NUMA without hardware support.

I think it's clear though that some level of threading is a good idea nowadays.

One interesting thing that Java has done that I think is an overall useful concept is making some data structures immutable so that no locking operations are required to access them. Python does this too.

This is going to require some thinking.

Syndicated 2008-05-17 03:05:44 (Updated 2008-05-17 03:11:41) from Lover of Ideas

Test Open ID implementation for Python

I got it working. I have a record for TestOpenID on the Python cheese shop website. There is also a link to my own page on TestOpenID.

It should be easy_install able.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 02:29:09 from Lover of Ideas

Business plan

I have a business idea that I strongly suspect is viable. I'm looking for someone who knows how to write business plans who's willing to help me write one up.

It is both product and service based. I suspect the time from getting the money to buy some hardware and tinker to having a viable product is about 2-3 months. I can see several different avenues the business could grow from the first product.

Syndicated 2008-05-13 00:18:31 (Updated 2008-05-13 00:19:25) from Lover of Ideas

zanfur knows how to configure a network

I was poking about on Trabant's internal network and noticing a few interesting things. It is a much better configured wireless network than most I've been on. It's somewhat impressive even.

So, I go ask the staff who does it. One doesn't know and the other tells me a name that sounds familiar. Says he always wears a Utilikilt. I hunt down zanfur's LJ profile and show it to her. "Yep, that's him!".

Well... I have a few things I think could be done better about how this wireless network is set up, but not many. And the level of attention to detail is way, way higher than I've seen on any other coffee shop's wireless network, even at places like Tully's.

It's amusing to encounter people you already know, even indirectly, in random contexts.

Syndicated 2008-05-06 21:36:35 (Updated 2008-05-10 15:44:58) from Lover of Ideas

I'm off to LinuxFest Northwest

I'm off to LinuxFest Northwest 2008. I won't be speaking today, but I will be tomorrow.

Syndicated 2008-04-26 14:10:40 from Lover of Ideas

My main workstation has died

It died before, when I moved, and that was the power supply. It's died again now, and I suspect this time that it's something more serious like the video card or possibly one or both of the CPUs frying from overheating. The fans all turn on but the BIOS screen never comes up.

I want to replace it. The newer dual core AMD CPUs generate even less heat and are a lot faster. But replacing it with technology that mirrors the level of current I sprung for when I bought what I have now would run me about $3000, and I don't have that and won't have it anytime really soon. :-(

My monitor also needs replacing. It's a pretty nice LCD monitor from 2003, but it has problems. The main problem is that it gets muddy when things are moving or changing quickly because the pixel change lag is fairly high. The pixel change time is 25ms or so which means a maximum effective frame rate of 40 frames a second and anything faster is muddy. It's not even that great for watching DVDs. The secondary problem is that it is very slow (often a minute or more) to recognize that the video card is trying to bring it out of sleep mode. I usually get frustrated and push the signal select button to force it, but it's irritating.

Actually, scratch that, a pixel change rate of 25ms means an effective frame rate of 20 frames per second. This is because a pixel should be at the color it's supposed to be for at least half the time in order for it not to be muddy. 20 frames per second means a possible change in pixel color every 50ms leaving a pixel that takes 25ms to change to be at the new value for 25ms before changing again.

Syndicated 2008-04-18 18:06:35 (Updated 2008-04-21 17:28:51) from Lover of Ideas

I'm going to be a speaker at LinuxFest Northwest

I'm going to be one of the people giving talks at LinuxFest Northwest on April 27th. It's completely official now. I'm on the schedule and everything.

Now I just have to get my material together and organized. My talk is going to be about IPv6 and how ridiculously easy it is to set up a 6to4 tunnel under Linux.

Syndicated 2008-04-16 20:36:04 (Updated 2008-04-16 20:50:11) from Lover of Ideas

I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6!

I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6 and how easy it is to set up at LinuxFest Northwest 2008!

I've never done anything like that before, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to pull it off well. I've been in situations a few times in front of a whole ton of people and haven't done poorly, and this will be an exercise in high geekery and so I should be fine.

I signed up for the bus sponsored by pogo linux, but if anybody is going and feels up for giving me a ride, that would be really good.

Syndicated 2008-03-30 20:18:47 from Lover of Ideas

LJ got rid of basic accounts with no ads

I've thought about the demise of LJ for awhile. It's quite clear now from how the news wasn't mentioned in a news post, how it's being spun as 'making it easier for users to sign up' and various other things that LJ really doesn't care about it's users at all anymore. This was really quite predictable from the moment they started accepting advertising at all.

Brad Fitz, the person who started it all has a nice post in which he makes the most excellent observation that it's the users that create the whole reason people want to visit the site in the first place. This observation and a discussion of LJs legal status made me realize something.

The modern corporate structure is a wholly inadequate means of expressing the values and desires of the stakeholders in an organization where most of the value of that organization is created by what a corporation would think of as "its customers". Basically this legal framework has been shoehorned into serving a purpose it is wholly unsuited for because a corporation has only a very weak incentive to take the interests of all the people who create the stuff that enables its existence into account. Those users have made a huge investment into the site and that investment is almost completely ignored by the modern corporate structure and repeatedly leads to disaster when the corporation makes decisions at odds with its most important investors, the users of the site that it is a caretaker of.

User content sites need something other than a corporation, something where the organization is legally obligated to take the interests of those users into consideration as the most important factor in decisions made by the organization. I'm going to have to think for awhile to see if I can think of a structure that would work. It's tempting to think of some sort of trust or something quasi-governmental. I prefer structures that naturally and with very little oversight or intervention align the interests of all the participants.

Syndicated 2008-03-13 16:20:50 from Lover of Ideas