An idiom for nesting anonymous functions in CoffeeScript
I have some code that is very brief, but called with a timeout. It’s tiresome to name two functions just so you can call them indirectly. Anonymous functions are quite brief in CoffeeScript:
setTimeout(
() ->
somethingThatCalls( () -> some other work here )
, 1000)
You probably don’t want to go too many levels here, but its convenient for short bits of code.
Fixing JavaScript Console in older browsers and IE
The JavaScript console as introduced by Firebug years ago has grown to a de facto standard in many web browsers. Especially the Webkit JavaScript console in Chrome/Chromium and Safari is extremely well done. Newer Firefox versions now also come with a built-in console. Even Internet Explorer comes with a basic console-like thing but unfortunately it sucks...
So far I used custom logging mechanisms or log4javascript to log messages in my JavaScript applications. Thanks to the JavaScript console this would be unnecessary if all browsers had descent support for it. But unfortunately the console implementations in some browsers are incomplete or completely absent. So even this harmless line of code in your application can prevent execution in Internet Explorer when the development panel is closed (In which case window.console is not defined at all):
console.warn("Config not found. Using defaults.");
So to be able to use all console features without worrying about missing browser-support I wrote a small library called console-shim which detects the implemented console features and tries to complete them. Some features are emulated so they fully work in all browsers while other features are silently ignored. If console logging is not supported by the browser at all then console-shim tries to use log4javascript if available or it silently ignores all logging attempts. See the README for a full list of replacement implementations for missing functionality.
“The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.”―Jonathan Haidt
DataTables (table plug-in for jQuery)
DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, which will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table.DataTables (table plug-in for jQuery)
Skrillex, Reviewed By Cute Kids - You Review #11 - YouTube
Skrillex, Reviewed By Cute Kids - You Review #11 - YouTube: ""
Fresh links for May 16th through May 17th
FreedomHEC Taipei 2012
Just heard from Regis Huang, with the good news that FreedomHEC Taipei is scheduled for June 12-13, 2012. FreedomHEC started as a Linux driver unconference in the USA, and for the past several years it's been in Taipei. Great list of speakers, as usual.
(I see Matthew Garrett will be there...maybe FreedomHEC will be the place to get to the bottom of the whole Secure Boot issue.)
Up for Auction: LinuxSi.com
A number of years back, I read yet another complaint about someone having trouble finding a computer with Linux preinstalled.
So I did something about it: I created LinuxSi.com, where it is possible to register computer stores in Italy (this was an Italian Linux mailing list) that are helpful towards people wishing to buy a Linux machine.
Fast forward past getting married, having kids and buying a house, and LinuxSi.com is not something I have much time to run any more. I still think it's a useful service, even if the site itself is a bit creaky.
In any event, I've put it up for auction with Flippa.com, and there's one week left on the auction. Right now, it's going for just $10, which even with the low amounts of adsense income it brings in, you'd make back pretty quickly.
I hope that it goes to someone who cares about promoting Linux in Italy - if nothing else, the domain name is a good one that could be employed for many things.
Syndicated 2012-05-16 21:06:02 (Updated 2012-05-16 21:14:20) from David's Computer Stuff Journal
Hate the Unity "global menu" bar at the top of the screen? Run: sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 ...
Hate the Unity "global menu" bar at the top of the screen? Run: sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt
Syndicated 2012-05-16 20:39:01 from Plus Public Activity Feed for David Barksdale
Hack English Instead
Lots of noise recently about Jeff Atwood's post about why you should not learn to code. I am here now telling you you should learn to code. But only after you learn a few other things.
You should learn to speak. You should learn to write. You should learn to listen. You should learn to read. You should learn to express yourself.
Richard Feynman once described his problem solving algorithm as follows:
Most of us cannot do that because we are not Richard Feynman and thus, sadly, cannot keep all the solution in our head in step 2, so we need to iterate a few times, thinking (not as hard as he could) and writing down a bit of the solution on each loop.
And while we who code are unusually proud of our ability to write down solutions in such a clear and unforgiving way that even a computer can follow them, it's ten, maybe a hundred times more useful to know how to write it down, or say it, in such a way that a human being can understand it.
Explanations fit for computers are bad for humans and viceversa. Humans accept much more compact, ambiguous, and expressive code. You can transfer high level concepts or design to humans much easier than to computers, but algorithms to computers much easier than to humans.
I have a distrust of people who are able to communicate to computers easier than with fellow humans, a suspicion that they simply have a hole in their skillset, which they could easily fix if they saw it as essential.
And it is an essential skill. Programmers not only run on coffee and sugar and sushi and doritos, they run on happiness. They have a finite endowment of happiness and they spend it continuously, like drunken sailors. They perform an activity where jokingly they measure productivity on curses per hour, a lonely endeavour that isolates them (us) from other humans, from family and friends.
If a developer cannot communicate he isolates. When he isolates he can't cooperate, he cannot delegate. He can't give ideas to others, he can't receive them, he can't share.
And since lots of our communication is via email, and chat, and bug reports, and blogs, it's better if he can write. A developer who cannot write is at a serious disadvantage. A developer who cannot write to express an idea cannot explain, he doesn't make his fellows better. He's a knowledge black hole, where information goes to die behind the event horizon of his skull.
So, learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to read and listen. Then learn to code.
20120516
I love reading articles that make me think and leave me with a new tool in my mental toolbox. Tha...
I love reading articles that make me think and leave me with a new tool in my mental toolbox. Thanks Rich.
Clojure/core — Anatomy of a Reducer
Last time, I blogged about Clojure's new reducers library. This time I'd like to look at the details of what constitutes a reducer, as well as some background about the library. What's a R...
Syndicated 2012-05-16 16:29:17 from Plus Public Activity Feed for David Barksdale
300M users
Ok, so here’s a little ego game. The rules are very simple: try to figure out all things I’ve written code in (to any noticeable degree) and count how many users the products that use such code might have. Then estimate the total amount of humans that may in fact use my code from time to time.
I’ve been doing software both for fun and professionally for over 20 years (my first code I made available to others was written in 1986 on the C64). But as I look back on what I’ve done at my day job for all this time, most of my labour have been hidden into some sort of devices or equipment that never really were distributed to many customers. I don’t think I’ve ever done software professionally for consumer stuff. My open source code however has found its way into all sorts of things so I decided I could limit this count to open source code I’ve done. It is also slightly easier. Or perhaps less hard. And when it comes to open source, none of my other projects is as popular and widely used as curl. Counting curl users will drown all others.
First some basic stats: the curl.haxx.se web site gets more than 12000 unique visitors every weekday. curl packages are downloaded from there at a rate of roughly 1 million times/year. The site sends over 200GB of data every month. We have no idea how large share of users who get curl from the main site, but a guess is that it is far less than half of the user base. But of course the number of downloads says nothing about how many users there are.
Mac OS X ships with curl (and libcurl?) by default. There are perhaps 86 million macs in the world.
libcurl is used in television sets and Bluray players made by at least five major brands (LG, Panasonic, Philips, Sony and Toshiba). I’m convinced they don’t use it in all models but probably just a few of their higher end internet-connected ones. 10% of the total? It seems in 2009 there were 35 million flat panel TVs sold in the US with a forecast of the sales growing slightly over the years. I figure that would mean perhaps 100 million ones sold in the US the three last years possibly made by these brands (and lets assume that includes some blu-rays too), and lets say that is half the world market for them, it would make libcurl shipping in 20 million something TVs.
curl and libcurl are installed by default in some Linux distributions but not in all. In Debian it is an optional extra and the popcon overview shows perhaps 70% of Debian users install libcurl (and 56% use libssh2). Lets assume that’s a suitable average for all desktop Linux users. How many are we? Let’s for the sake of the argument say that 3% of all computers using the internet run Linux. Some numbers say there are 2.3 billion internet users. It would make 70 million Linux computers and thus 49 million libcurl installations. Roughly.
Open Office and the recent spin-off libreoffice are both using libcurl. Open Office said they have 100 million users now in May 2012.
Games: Second Life, Warhammer 40000, Ghost Recon, Need for speed world, Game Face and “Saints Row: The third” all use libcurl. The first game alone boasts over 20 million registered users. I couldn’t find any numbers for any other game I know uses libcurl.
Other embedded uses: libcurl and libssh2 are both announced as supported packages of Wind River Linux, the perhaps most dominant provider of embedded Linux and another leading provider is Montavista which also offers curl and libcurl. How many users? I have absolutely no idea. I’d say more than just a few, but how many? Impossible to tell so let’s ignore that possibly huge install base. Spotify uses or at least used libcurl, and early 2012 they had 15 million users.
libcurl is not installed by default in neither Android nor iOS, but is in WebOS and it is used by RIM for some (to me) unknown purposes. Lots of applications on Android and iOS still build and use libcurl, c-ares and libssh2 for their apps but it is just impossible to estimate how many users they get. Millions perhaps. I’d say no more than single-digit millions. Let’s call it 5 million.
Infrastructure. libcurl is used in the Tornado web server made by Friendfeed/Facebook and it is used by significant services at Yahoo.com. How many users of said services? Surely many millions. But really, that would be users of just 2 libcurl users so let’s not rush ahead and count those as direct users!
libcurl powers the very popular PHP/CURL extension that a large amount of PHP-running sites have enabled and use. How many? In 2008, 33% of all internet sites run PHP. Let’s say the share has decreased to 30% since then and the total amount of active sites is now 200M. That makes 60M PHP sites, and if there’s 10% of them using PHP/CURL we’re talking 6 million users.
Development. git, darcs, bazaar and Mercurial are all children of the distribution version control systems (some of them very popular) and they all use libcurl. How many users do they have? Since they’re all working on multiple platforms I would estimate the number of users of them collectively to be in the tens of millions range. Let’s say 10 million.
86 + 20 + 49 + 100 + 20 + 15 + 5 + 6 + 10 = 311 million users
And yes, of course a lot of these users will be the same actual human. But I may also just have counted all the numbers completely wrong to start with. I would say I’m probably within the correct magnitude!
300 million users out of the world’d 2.3 billion internet users. 1 out of 7 are using something that runs code I wrote. Kind of cool!
Sweden has a population of less than 10 million. 300 million is slightly less than the entire USA, twice the population of Russia or almost four times the population of Germany… As a comparison to some big browsers, a recent article claims Google Chrome has 200 million users in April 2012 which may be around 25% of the browser market and showing that basically none of the individual browsers have a lot more users than 300 million…
Of course I know that every single person who reads this is a knowing or unknowing user… Can you think of any other major users?
Knitting as programming
I’ve seen a few people, over the years, compare knitting to programming. It usually goes something like this:
Wow, have you ever looked at a knitting pattern? It looks kind of like source code! Those knitters must be real geeks!
And it’s often accompanied by a snippet of a set of actual knitting instructions that look like incomprehensible gibberish to the uninitiated, but which your grandma could probably read and turn into a jumper or a scarf or an attractive toilet-paper-roll cover (my Nanna actually knitted these!)
In case you haven’t seen this kind of knitting pattern before, here’s an example:
A typical knitting pattern from the 1940s. This one is Sun-glo pattern #2616, "Country Club", a sporty cabled sweater in two colours, in case you were wondering.
There was even a post a little while ago entitled Knitters and coders: separated at birth? that talked about knitting patterns as code, and worked through some examples using regular expressions. It was a good post, but I don’t think it went far enough, so I want to riff on it a bit.
Here’s the thing. Let’s say you have a pattern that says:
row 10: k2 p3 *(c6f p6) rpt from * 8 times c6f p3 k2
(Or as the aforementioned article would put it would put it, (c6f p6){9}.)
You read those instructions and do what they say, producing a row of knitting that incorporates a number of cable twists against a purl background.
Is what you’re doing programming? Of course not! It’s the reverse of programming: you’re reading a series of low-level instructions and doing what they say. It would be more accurate to say you’re an interpreter, or possibly a compiler, since it’ll usually save you time and trouble to read a pattern right through before you begin. (Ask me how I know. Ugh.) You might even be called a human computer.
But let’s be clear: even though what you’re doing when you read a pattern is a complex technical skill, and involves code, it’s not programming.
Despite that, I very firmly believe that knitting is like programming. I just think that the common analogy drawn — of printed knitting patterns as source code — is not a very good one for describing the intellectual process of knitting as it is practiced by the current generation of geeky crafters.
To explain this I’m going to have to take a detour, so please bear with me. What follows is based on conversations I had years ago with my friend Rose White, aka @yarnivore, who studies hacker culture and presented at CCC (a hacker conference in Germany) on the subject of guerilla knitting. Watch Rose’s guerilla knitting talk on Youtube. I’m going to proceed to paraphrase Rose for the next few paragraphs here, so credit goes to her, and all blame for any errors to me.
In her presentation, Rose talks about knitting patterns as intellectual property through history. When knitting was first developed in the middle ages, it was a secret skill known only to the members of exclusive knitting guilds, who didn’t share it with anyone else. However, as Rose points out, knitting is easy to reverse engineer, so it didn’t take long for non-guild people to figure it out and start doing it. As one of the great knitters once wrote:
“Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.” — Elizabeth Zimmerman
And so, from about the 16th or 17th century onward, you start to see more people knitting for themselves and their families, or as a cottage industry. Throughout this period, a number of traditional knitting styles and patterns were developed, but the fundamental thing about them was that, for the most part, they were the sort of patterns you could pass from person to person without writing them down.
Take a sock as an example. The simplest sock is a tube of fabric knitted until it’s long enough, then closed up at one end. Of course, it’ll fit better if you find a way to make it bend at an angle around the heel, and there are a number of techniques you can use for that. Ribbing at the cuff will help it stay up better. If you want a long, shapely sock you can add more stitches around the calf and reduce them at the ankle. You’ll save yourself some discomfort and possible blisters if you find a way to graft the toe end instead of sewing a lumpy seam. And of course you’ll probably want to embellish your sock according to the local fashion: perhaps a fancy coloured band around the top, or twisted cables down the side, a repeating texture all over.
This is just the icing on the cake, though: socks are all just tubes, when you get down to it. Fundamentally, there’s nothing about knitting a sock that needs a pattern; for hundreds of years, all anyone needed was a “slightly below-average intelligence”, an already-knitted one to look at every so often for reference, and perhaps a few pointers from someone who’d done it before. Gloves, jumpers, and other knitted garments are much the same. For the most part they’re just a series of tubes. Ba-dum-tish!
Fast forward to that point in the industrial revolution when most textile production has become mass production, most working class people are pulling long hours in factories and mills, and it’s cheaper to just buy a pair of socks than to knit your own. At this point, knitting becomes a bit of a luxury activity, and you start to see this in the proliferation of Victorian-era knitting books for ladies, specialising in delicate items like lace doilies and silk purses. No longer were people knitting practical items based on traditional patterns you could figure out with “below-average intelligence”; it became hip to show off your accomplishments by knitting increasingly complex and fiddly items, the patterns for which you could find in the finest publications for the discerning gentlewoman.
And then, in the 20th century, something truly awful happened. You see, the yarn companies realised that if they started publishing patterns themselves, they could use them to sell more yarn. But they didn’t want people using just any yarn. The idea was that you’d buy, say, a Patons pattern and then buy the Patons yarn to knit it with. To make sure that consumers were locked into the Patons brand, they’d make sure that the patterns were obfuscated so you wouldn’t be able to figure out how to substitute another company’s yarn.
This is fundamentally bullshit, and it’s amazing that they ever got away with it, but by this stage people had lost touch with a lot of the traditional methods, and so they didn’t have much choice. Just so the non-knitters understand how diabolical this is, let’s pause for a moment to talk a bit more about how knitting works. If you already knit and know about gauge and yarn substitution, you can skip down to below the next image.
Knitting is basically formed by repeating a single stitch (the knit stitch), which loops a length of yarn through itself in such a way as to form a stretchy fabric. To create a piece of knitting, you “cast on” a certain number of stitches, then knit, either back and forth, or round and round in circles. Each stitch looks like a “V” on one side and a sort of nubbly or wavy effect on the other side. If you want to see this, take a close look at your socks, which probably have Vs on the outside, nubbles on the inside, and alternating Vs/nubbles in the rib around the top. (A “purl” stitch is just a backwards knit stitch, with the V and nubbly sides reversed.)
Depending on the thickness of your yarn and needles, your stitches might be tight or loose. Big needles give looser stitches, and small needles give tighter ones with the same yarn. The measurement of this tightness or looseness — how many little V shapes you have per unit of distance — is called gauge or sometimes tension. For instance, worsted weight yarn on 4.5mm needles normally knits up at a gauge of 5 stitches per 2.5cm/1″, while finer yarn knit on smaller needles will have more stitches in the same distance.
As long as you know the gauge of your project and the yardage it requires, it’s fairly simple to substitute one yarn for another. However, 20th century yarn companies didn’t want you to know this, and they went out of their way to make sure you were locked in to their proprietary system.
So, this is the system that created knitting patterns like the one I linked at the top of this article, where yarn companies write the patterns and knitters interpret the code and execute it, without much input into the process, not even a choice of what yarn to use.
If being an instruction-executing machine doesn’t sound too appealling to you, you’ll be pleased to hear that there is an alternative. Modern knitters, especially those online, are increasingly returning to traditional techniques, making their own patterns, and adapting existing patterns to their own needs. One of the great leaders in this trend was the late, great Elizabeth Zimmermann, quoted above. EZ, as she is known, helped popularise, or perhaps re-popularise, traditional forms of knitwear in the United States, and along the way taught knitters to throw off the shackles of mid 20th century commercial knitting patterns and think for themselves again.
One of EZ’s best known patterns is for a sweater knitted to what she calls the Elizabeth Percentage System, or EPS. It’s so simple that almost anyone can understand it, and I often use it as an example when explaining the technical side of knitting to non-knitting geeks. It goes something like this:
Of course, you can elaborate in various ways: ribbing at hem, cuffs and collar; textured stitches across part or all of the garment; coloured designs in the yoke area; leave a gap at the front and knit back and forth to make a cardigan. The options are endless, but the fundamental design is the same.
Now, people will possibly point out that EZ’s EPS pattern is copyright, but there’s a lot of bullshit about copyright in the knitting community, so let’s be clear right now: ideas cannot be copyrighted, though the expression of them (the specific words EZ wrote in her books and newsletters) can be. The idea of EZ’s EPS sweater is simple, based on traditional techniques, easy to reverse-engineer, and in fact could be done by anyone with “below-average intelligence” as she herself points out. There’s nothing tricky about it, it’s just simple craft.
But taking this simple kind of design and elaborating on it is where knitting really becomes like programming. When I knit a sweater this way, I’m not executing instructions written by someone else. I’m creating my own code, designing and implementing my own project from the ground up.
I start out by considering my requirements: What sort of garment do I want: pullover, cardigan, long coat? What design elements do I want to incorporate: pockets, a hood, shaping to make it more fitted at the waist, a warm shawl collar, those awesome thumb-holes in the sleeves that let you pull them down and wear them as fingerless mittens? What materials and tools do I have at my disposal? Can I take the opportunity to try out a new technique or refine my skills?
I prototype my design by knitting a swatch or something small like a hat, using the same stitches and yarn as I’m thinking of using for my finished project. From this, I figure out my gauge, and using one of the many tools available I can calculate the yardage I’ll need, without ever relying on a yarn company to tell me how much of their product I ought to buy. Modern yarn sellers list the yardage of their yarn on the label, or failing that, websites like Ravelry have all the information I could need.
To implement my design, I draw on a variety of design patterns — yeah, knitting’s had them far longer than OO programming has — that I’ve learned through classic books like EZ’s or Barbara Walker’s, and through blogs like TechKnitting: short row shaping for better fit, twisted rib for extra stretch in the cuffs and collar, underarm grafting to make a seamless join, endless options for buttonholes, cast-off techniques for all occasions. Some knitting techniques even follow agile principles, like EZ’s “thumb trick” for mittens or her “afterthought pockets”, which are inserted when and where needed without requiring Big Design Up Front.
When it comes to this kind of knitting, an experienced knitter is one who takes a modular approach, mixing and matching existing patterns and individual techniques, to build a finished product. It’s someone who can look at a pattern and figure out how to knit it in a different yarn, a different gauge, and a different size, without breaking a sweat over the calculations. It’s someone who geeks out on the knot topology, the 3D spatial reasoning, and the materials science of it all… and knows how to put them to practical use. It’s the difference between being a code monkey and being an engineer.
So when we talking about how “knitting is like programming”, let’s take a minute to go beyond reading and executing code and think about how much further knitters’ technical skills really extend.
Epilogue: Since I suspect a bunch of geeky knitters will read this, I’m going to lay out my current technical challenge and see if anyone has any thoughts.
I’m knitting a triangular shawl beginning at one of the tips, started by casting on 3st and increasing at the start of every second row. It has integral i-cord borders, which I’m doing by yf, sl 3 at the end of each row, then on the next row I k3 then continue as usual.
On the straight side of the shawl this makes a nice border, firm but stretchy. But on the diagonal side (i.e. the side with the increases) the i-cord, which after all only has half as many rows as there are in the main part of the knitting, is stretched really tight. I’m worried that it’s going to limit my ability to block the shawl as vigorously as I’d like to.
My current best idea is that every second time I do the i-cord on the tightly-stretched diagonal side, I insert an extra row. That is, I would go yf sl3 at the end of the previous row, turn, k3, slip them back on the original needle, then knit the three stitches again and continue. I figure this gives me 3 i-cord rows for every 2 I had previously, which is not far from the sqrt(2):1 ratio of the side lengths. Anyone done this before?
Moving Through i3 Workspaces
The default i3 config file only has commands to move to a specific numbered workspace (e.g. mod-1, mod-2). For better or worse, I’m in the habit of “traveling” through the workspace...
(Click through for full post...)
Those Funny Funguloids
Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.
To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.
The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.
When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.
Modified version of Funguloids 1.06
Modified version of Ogre 1.7.4
stranger in these parts
My JSConf 2012 video is out! Check it out:
The talk is called "Stranger in these parts: A hired gun in the JS corral", and in it I talk about my experiences as a Schemer in the implementation world, with a focus on JavaScriptCore, the JS implementation of the WebKit project.
If you want, you can fetch the slides or the notes. If you were unable to play the video in the browser, you can download it directly (25 minutes, ~80 MB, CC-BY-SA).
Special thanks to the A/V team for the fine recording. My talk was the first one that used the wireless mics, and it turned out there was some intermittent interference. They corrected this in later talks by double-miking the speakers. In my case, it was fortunate that they recorded the room as well, and with (I would imagine) a fair amount of post-processing the sound is perfectly intelligible. Cheers!
Finally, there were a number of other interesting talks whose recordings are starting to come out. I especially liked David Nolen's funhouse of ClojureScript and logic programming. It was pleasantly strange to see him mention Peter Norvig's 1992 book, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, because I did too, and I think someone else did as well. Three people mentioning a somewhat obscure 20-year-old book, what are the odds?
I also liked Vyacheslav's amusing talk on V8's optimizing compiler. He actually showed some assembler! Folks that read this webrag might find it interesting. Dan Ingalls' talk was fun too. The ending scene was pretty surreal; be sure to watch all the way through.
Thanks again to the JSConf organizers for the invitation to speak. It was a pleasure to get to hang around the lively and energetic JS community. Happy hacking, all!
Open thread / Ask me anything
When I posted the comment policy the other day, it mentioned that comments on any given post close after a certain time, and if you want to leave a comment elsewhere you should do so on the most recent open thread. So, here is one for that purpose.
I’ll also make it an “ask me anything” thread, in the tradition of the AMA forum on Reddit. If you’ve got questions about sound engineering, Melbourne, leaving tech, or whatever else, bring ‘em on.
Nikola Plans
English only!
I have not stopped working on Nikola, my static site generator. Here are the plans:
After that, I will push on projects Shoreham (hosted sites) and Smiljan (planet generator) and make them more public. Shoreham will become a real web app for those who don't want to have their own server. For free, hopefully!
Once I have that, I have no further feature ideas, really. So I need more people to start using it, and that means I have to start announcing it more.
So, stay tuned for version 3.x sometime next week.
Post-Nikola, I will do a rst2pdf release, and then will get back to work on a book.
Reshared post from JP Sugarbroad It's happening.
It's happening.
World IPv6 Launch
This Time it is for Real. 6 JUNE 2012. Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IP...
Syndicated 2012-05-15 20:34:48 from Plus Public Activity Feed for David Barksdale
Learn Code The Hard Way -- Books And Courses To Learn To Code
Finally, I'd like to tell you that the best way to get good at something is to not attach your identity to the activity. I do say I am a programmer, but really I mean I'm a person who writes code (and does a bunch of other stuff). The skill of coding is not who I am, it's just one of the many things that makes me the complex interesting person I am. Who am I? I don't know, or I at least can't describe it in words.Learn Code The Hard Way -- Books And Courses To Learn To Code
Michael wants you to take action on "Let Expelled Bullied Gay Teen Return to School!"!
Michael Love has just read and signed the petition: Let Expelled Bullied Gay Teen Return to School!
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Syndicated 2012-05-15 18:53:00 (Updated 2012-05-15 18:53:35) from proclus
What Is TiddlySpace?
Syndicated 2012-05-15 18:07:13 (Updated 2012-05-15 18:08:51) from cdent
Help Win More Protections for Mountain Caribou
Syndicated 2012-05-15 17:52:00 (Updated 2012-05-15 17:52:08) from proclus
Neat TYPEP Trick
How do you test if an object is a cons that has the desired symbol in the car?
(typep x '(cons (eql :foo)))
Sure,
(and (consp x) (eq :foo (car x)))
is essentially just as short...
I still find cons types neat, even if they're a nightmare when it comes to type derivation, but that's a different matter. Some nightmares aren't all bad.
TiddlySpace 1.0.99
404 pages.Syndicated 2012-05-15 16:42:46 (Updated 2012-05-15 16:42:54) from cdent
One Meter
If I learned one important thing in college (and I like to think I do because otherwise I wasted a lot of time there) that important thing is how to measure things.
You may think that you don't need to go to college to learn that, and you are right, but the interesting bit, if I may sound like a social studies major for a few seconds, is how arbitrary measurements are. They are the one bit where all that "reality is a social construct" insanity is kinda true.
Consider the distance between two places. ¿How far is my house from my mother's?
Well, google says it's 447km away. But you already know that's not true! If I were to go by, say, helicopter, or unstoppable tank, I may be able to take a somewhat shorter path. Were I to use the Underminer's tunneling machine, I could take an even shorter path.
The Underminer follows the shorter, red line.
But all that is mostly changing paths, so you may still feel some confidence that you know how far my mom's house really is, except that we just may not be able to take a specific path, but the distance is a "real" thing.
But geographical, geometrical distance is only one way to measure. There are other metrics, and they may be more or less valid. For example, my mother's house is 6 hours away by bus.
It's also U$S 60 away by bus, U$S 30 by car. Unless I take my son with me, in which case it' U$S 120 by bus, but still U$S 30 by car.
And if I really really want to go there, it's an impulsive decision away, and i I don't really want to, there is a whole lot of convincing between here and there.
And if I were as poor as I once was, then maybe it's infinitely far away because there is no way to get there from here.
When someone says "the world is smaller now" that's not metaphor, that's maths.
20120515
Syndicated 2012-05-15 14:16:20 (Updated 2012-05-15 18:04:18) from cdent
Meeting up at LinuxTag 2012
Like every year, I am driving to Berlin this week to attend LinuxTag 2012 to attend the excellent program. If you want to meet up and chat about projects, technologies, Free Software or other things, send me an email or leave a comment with this post and we will arrange for it.
Getting dnsmasq, virtual machines (libvirt), and vpn to inter-operate
Fixing Dnsmasq to Work With Libvirt There’s a bug written in the Ubuntu tracker (and in Fedora too, I think) about running dnsmasq and libvirt at the same time. Basically, libvirt runs an...
(Click through for full post...)
درایورهای گرافیکی جدید در کرنل ۳.۴
کرنل ۳.۴ شامل داریورهای تراشههای ایامدی، انویدیا و اینتل خواهد بود.
به گزارش اچ کرنل جدید که قرار است اواخر همین ماه منتشر شود همچنین شامل درایورهای جدید یواسبی DisplayLink و بهبودهایی برای تراشههای ترکیبی اوپتیموس شرکت انویدیا باشد.
Syndicated 2012-05-15 11:15:29 from وب سایت مصطفی دانشور » linux
Coding Horror: Please Don't Learn to Code
It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not. Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already.Coding Horror: Please Don't Learn to Code
Trolled
(set-macro-character #\{ (lambda (s c) (read-delimited-list #\} s t)) nil)
(set-macro-character #\} (get-macro-character #\)) nil)CERN, OpenStack Keep Resonance Cascades at Bay
|
| Tim Bell preparing to get his OpenStack on |
"When we're running a complex fabric of apps on over 5,000 servers across three data centers, we need a lean and nimble approach to software development and operational implementation. Without a DevOps approach, we wouldn't be able to push code into production as fast or as efficiently as we do, and our customers would not be happy! Today's developers demand up-to-the-hour security and performance updates to Internet infrastructure, so we aim to deliver just that with DevOps."Though expressed in the context of our work, the import of DevOps that Simon's comment generally highlights is going to be increasingly important for nearly anyone running cloud services.
"The CERN Agile Infrastructure project aims to develop CERN's computing resources and processes to support the expanding needs of LHC physicists and the CERN organisation."
 |
| One artist's conception of what success will look like for OpenStack at CERN |
 |
| Alyx, explaining to her dad why she loves DreamHost |
Syndicated 2012-05-15 06:00:00 (Updated 2012-05-15 19:05:32) from Duncan McGreggor
Fresh links for May 14th through May 15th
Seems like it's better than death... maybe.
Seems like it's better than death... maybe.
Syndicated 2012-05-14 23:40:35 from Plus Public Activity Feed for David Barksdale
Breakpoints Live Show 6/13 in SF! Save the date! « Crucial Tangent
Breakpoints Live Show 6/13 in SF! Save the date! « Crucial Tangent: "Will you be in San Francisco the week of WWDC?
Join me in telling the IL National Guard not to deploy against peaceful NATO protesters
Syndicated 2012-05-14 20:50:00 (Updated 2012-05-14 20:50:47) from proclus
Black Hat USA 2012: Owning Firefox's Heap
Continuing our work on jemalloc exploitation, myself and Chariton Karamitas (intern at Census, Inc) are presenting “Owning Firefox’s Heap” at Black Hat USA 2012. This presentation extends our recently published Phrack paper by focusing specifically on the most widely used jemalloc application, namely the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The abstract of our talk will give you a good preview of the content:
jemalloc is a userland memory allocator that is being increasingly adopted by software projects as a high performance heap manager. It is used in Mozilla Firefox for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms, and as the default system allocator on the FreeBSD and NetBSD operating systems. Facebook also uses jemalloc in various components to handle the load of its web services. However, despite such widespread use, there is no work on the exploitation of jemalloc.Our research addresses this. We will begin by examining the architecture of the jemalloc heap manager and its internal concepts, while focusing on identifying possible attack vectors. jemalloc does not utilize concepts such as ‘unlinking’ or ‘frontlinking’ that have been used extensively in the past to undermine the security of other allocators. Therefore, we will develop novel exploitation approaches and primitives that can be used to attack jemalloc heap corruption vulnerabilities. As a case study, we will investigate Mozilla Firefox and demonstrate the impact of our developed exploitation primitives on the browser’s heap. In order to aid the researchers willing to continue our work, we will also release our jemalloc debugging tool belt.
For updates on this talk, information on my research and my work at Census, Inc in general you can follow me on Twitter.
TiddlySpace 1.0.98
Huh! OSM on iOS
Somehow I missed this back in March (see also: not being very functional online lately), but it seems like Apple is ditching Google Maps in favour of OpenStreetMap. They’ve already started using it in iPhoto and word is it’ll replace GMaps throughout iOS in the not-too-distant future. Official announcement, more commentary and analysis from searchenginewatch.
This is great, because it saves me from trying to figure out how to do it myself. I’ve tried a couple of OSM apps for iOS but haven’t found a particularly good one. They tend to be slow, ugly, and of course not integrated with other apps. So, I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple delivers.
I’ve been trying to get away from using too many Google apps since they showed their true colours last year. Opting out of the Google monoculture only to buy into an Apple one wouldn’t seem like a win, except that the underlying data is open licensed, which makes a big difference as far as I’m concerned. In some ways this reminds me of a project I worked on at Monash University, lo these many years ago, where the policy was, “use whatever proprietary crapware you want, as long as it supports open standards.” At the time we used it to choose Netscape SuiteSpot (pause to laugh — but it supported POP, LDAP, iCalendar and the like) over Microsoft Exchange.
Like the open standards that underpin the Internet, OSM’s open license means a variety of apps and platforms can be built on it, and users can choose between them. And, with any luck, corporations like Apple will contribute back (with money or staff or just a vague aura of legitimacy) bring OSM the same sort of respectability that Linux and other open technologies have gained over the last decade or so.
So anyway, once I can cut over to OSM on my phone, the most important Google apps I have remaining are mail and docs. With regard to mail, does anyone have an alternative which is:
I rely heavily on those features, and would find them pretty hard to live without. I’ve tried IMAP with Thunderbird and Mail.app in the past, and am not particularly happy with them, so let’s assume those are off the table for now. I’m actually almost tempted to go back to a command-line based solution, perhaps offlineimap and mutt with some heavy indexing.
doing it wrong: cse in guile
Greetings, readers! It's been a little while, but not because I haven't been doing anything, or nothing worth writing about. No, the reason I haven't written recently is because the perceived range of my ignorance has been growing faster than the domain of my expertise.
Knowledge may well be something one can dominate, but ignorance must forever be a range, stretching off to a hazy horizon. Climbing the hill of JavaScript implementations has let me see farther out on that plain. I think it's only the existence of the unknown unknowns that can let one muster up the arrogance to write at all.
But back to domains and dominators later. To begin, I note that there is very little in the way of correct, current, and universal folk wisdom as to how to implement a programming language. Compiler hackers are priests of their languages, yes, but their temples are in reality more or less isolated cults, in which the values of one's Gods may be unknown or abhorrent to those of others. Witness the attention paid to loop optimizations in some languages, compared to garbage collection in others, or closures in still others.
In my ecumenical capacity as abbot of Guile and adjuct deacon of JavaScriptCore, sometimes I'm tempted to mix rites: to sprinkle the holy water of lexical scope optimizations on JS, and, apropos of this article, to exorcise common subexpressions in Scheme.
As one might well imagine, the rites of one cult must be adapted to circumstances. I implemented CSE for Guile, but I don't know if it was actually a win. In this article I'll go into what CSE is, how it works in Guile, why it probably won't survive in its present form.
cse: common subexpression elimination
I implemented a source-to-source optimization pass in Guile that eliminates common subexpressions. It actually does both more and less than that: it propagates predicates and eliminates effect-free statements as well, and these latter optimizations are why I implemented the pass in the first place.
Let me give an example. Let's imagine we implement a binary tree in Guile, using the records facility.
(use-modules (srfi srfi-9))
(define-record-type btree
(make-btree elt left right)
btree?
(elt btree-elt)
(left btree-left)
(right btree-right))
(define *btree-null* #f)
(define (btree-cons head tail)
(if (btree? tail)
(let ((elt (btree-elt tail)))
(if (< elt head)
(make-btree elt
(btree-left tail)
(btree-cons head (btree-right tail)))
(make-btree elt
(btree-cons head (btree-left tail))
(btree-right tail))))
(make-btree head
*btree-null*
*btree-null*)))
That's enough to illustrate my point, I think. We have the data type, the base case, and a constructor. Of course in Haskell or something with better data types it would be much cleaner, but hey, let's roll with this.
If you look at btree-cons, it doesn't seem to be amenable in its current form to classic common subexpression elimination. People don't tend to write duplicated code. You see that I bound the temporary elt instead of typing (btree-head btree) each time, and that was partly because of typing, and partly out of some inner efficiency puritan, telling me I shouldn't write duplicate expressions. (Cult behavior, again!)
But, note that all of these record abstractions will probably inline, instead of calling out to procedures. (They are implemented as inlinable procedures. Yes, it would be better to have cross-module inlining, but we don't, so this is what we do.) In general, syntactic abstraction in Scheme can lead to duplicate code. Apologies in advance for this eyeball-rending torrent, but here's a listing of what btree-cons reduces to, after expansion and partial evaluation:
(define (btree-cons head tail)
(if (and (struct? tail)
(eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree))
(let ((elt (if (eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree)
(struct-ref tail 0)
(throw 'wrong-type-arg
'btree-elt
"Wrong type argument: ~S"
(list tail)
(list tail)))))
(if (< elt head)
(let ((left (if (eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree)
(struct-ref tail 1)
(throw 'wrong-type-arg
'btree-left
"Wrong type argument: ~S"
(list tail)
(list tail))))
(right (btree-cons
head
(if (eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree)
(struct-ref tail 2)
(throw 'wrong-type-arg
'btree-right
"Wrong type argument: ~S"
(list tail)
(list tail))))))
(make-struct/no-tail btree elt left right))
(let ((left (btree-cons
head
(if (eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree)
(struct-ref tail 1)
(throw 'wrong-type-arg
'btree-left
"Wrong type argument: ~S"
(list tail)
(list tail)))))
(right (if (eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree)
(struct-ref tail 2)
(throw 'wrong-type-arg
'btree-right
"Wrong type argument: ~S"
(list tail)
(list tail)))))
(make-struct/no-tail btree elt left right))))
(let ((left *btree-null*) (right *btree-null*))
(make-struct/no-tail btree head left right))))
Again, I'm really sorry about that, and it's not just for your eyes: it's also because that's a crapload of code for what should be a simple operation. It's also redundant! There are 6 checks that btree is in fact a btree, when only one is needed semantically. (Note that the null case is not a btree, of course.)
Furthermore, all of the checks in the first arm of the if are redundant. The code above is what the optimizer produces -- which is, you know, turrible.
So, I thought, we could run a pass over the source that tries to propagate predicates, and then tries to fold predicates whose boolean value we already know.
And that's what I did. Here's what Guile's optimizer does with the function, including the CSE pass:
(define (btree-cons head tail)
(if (and (struct? tail)
(eq? (struct-vtable tail) btree))
(let ((elt (struct-ref tail 0)))
(if (< elt head)
(let ((left (struct-ref tail 1))
(right (btree-cons head (struct-ref tail 2))))
(make-struct/no-tail btree elt left right))
(let ((left (btree-cons head (struct-ref tail 1)))
(right (struct-ref tail 2)))
(make-struct/no-tail btree elt left right))))
(let ((left *btree-null*) (right *btree-null*))
(make-struct/no-tail btree head left right))))
This is much better. It's quite close to the source program, except the symbolic references like btree-head have been replaced with indexed references. The type check in the predicate of the if expression propagated to all the other type checks, causing those nested if expressions to fold.
Of course, CSE can also propagate bound lexicals:
(let ((y (car x)))
(car x))
=> (let ((y (car x)))
y)
This is the classic definition of CSE.
but is it a win?
I should be quite pleased with the results, except that CSE makes Guile's compiler approximately twice as slow. Granted, in the long run, this should be acceptable: code is usually run many more times than it is compiled. But this is a fairly expensive pass, and yet at the same time it's not as good as it could be.
In order to get to the heart of the matter, I need to explain a little about the implementation. CSE is a post-pass, that runs after partial evaluation (peval). I tried to make it a part of peval, as the two optimizations are synergistic -- oh yes, let's revel in that word -- are you feeling it? -- but it was too complicated in the end. The reason is that in functions like this:
(define (explode btree)
(unless (btree? btree)
(error "not a btree" btree))
(values (btree-head btree)
(btree-left btree)
(btree-right btree)))
Here we have a sequence of two expressions. Since the first one bails out if the predicate is false, we should propagate a true predicate past the first expression. This means that running CSE on an expression returns two values: the rewritten expression, given the predicates already seen; and a new set of predicates that the expression asserts. We should be able to use these new assertions to elide the type checks in the second expression. And indeed, Guile can do this.
Perhaps you can see the size of the problem now. CSE is a pass that runs over all code, building up an ordered set of expressions that were evaluated, and in what context. When it sees a new expression in a test context -- as the predicate in an if -- it checks to see if the set contains that expression (or its negation) already, in test context, and if so tries to fold the expression to true or false. Already doing this set lookup and traversal is expensive -- at least N log N in the total size of the program, with some quadratic components in the case an expression is found, and also with high constant factors due to the need for custom hash and equality predicates.
The quadratic factor comes in when walking the set to see if the elimination is valid. Consider:
(if (car x)
(if (car x) 10 20)
30)
Here, we should be able to eliminate the second (car x), folding to (if (car x) 10 30). However, in this one:
(if (car x)
(begin
(y)
(if (car x) 10 20))
30)
If we don't know what (y) does, then we can't fold the second test, because perhaps (y) will change the contents of the pair, x. The information that allows us to make these decisions is effects analysis. For the purposes of Guile's optimizer, (car x) has two dependencies and can cause two effects: it depends on the contents of a mutable value, and on the value of a toplevel (x), and can cause the effect of an unbound variable error when resolving the toplevel, or a type error when accessing its car. Two expressions commute if neither depends on effects that the other causes.
I stole the idea of doing a coarse effects analysis, and representing it as bits in a small integer, from V8. Guile's version is here: effects.scm. The ordered set is a form of global value numbering. See the CSE pass here: cse.scm.
The commute test is fairly cheap, but the set traversal is currently a bit expensive.
and for what?
As I have indicated, the pass does do something useful on real programs, as in the binary tree example. But it does not do all it could, and it's difficult to fix that, for a few reasons.
Unlike traditional CSE, Guile's version of it is interprocedural. Instead of operating on just one basic block or one function, it operates across nested functions as well. However, only some dependencies can commute across a function boundary. For example:
(lambda (x)
(if (pair? x)
(let ((y (car x)))
(lambda ()
(and (pair? x) (car x))))))
Can the first pair? test propagate to the second expression? It can, because pair? does not depend on the values of mutable data, or indeed on any effect. If it's true once, it will always be true.
But can we replace the second (car x) with y? No, because (car x) has a dependency on mutable data, and because we don't do escape analysis on the closure, we don't let those dependencies commute across a procedure boundary. (In this case, even if we did escape analysis, we'd have the same conclusion.)
However, not all lambda abstractions are closures. Some of them might end up being compiled to labels in the function. Scheme uses syntactically recursive procedures to implement loops, after all. But Guile's CSE does poorly for lambda expressions that are actually labels. The reason is that lexical scope is not a dominator tree.
MLton hacker Stephen Weeks says it better than I do:
Thinking of it another way, both CPS and SSA require that variable definitions dominate uses. The difference is that using CPS as an IL requires that all transformations provide a proof of dominance in the form of the nesting, while SSA doesn't. Now, if a CPS transformation doesn't do too much rewriting, then the partial dominance information that it had from the input tree is sufficient for the output tree. Hence tree splicing works fine. However, sometimes it is not sufficient.
As a concrete example, consider common-subexpression elimination. Suppose we have a common subexpression x = e that dominates an expression y = e in a function. In CPS, if y = e happens to be within the scope of x = e, then we are fine and can rewrite it to y = x. If however, y = e is not within the scope of x, then either we have to do massive tree rewriting (essentially making the syntax tree closer to the dominator tree) or skip the optimization. Another way out is to simply use the syntax tree as an approximation to the dominator tree for common-subexpression elimination, but then you miss some optimization opportunities. On the other hand, with SSA, you simply compute the dominator tree, and can always replace y = e with y = x, without having to worry about providing a proof in the output that x dominates y. (i.e. without putting y in the scope of x)
See my article on SSA and CPS for more context.
So that's one large source of lost CSE opportunities, especially in loops.
Another large source of lost opportunities is that the Tree-IL language, which is basically a macro-expanded Scheme, has the same property that Scheme does, that the order of evaluation of operands is unspecified.
Consider the base-case clause of my btree-cons above:
(let ((left *btree-null*) (right *btree-null*)) (make-struct/no-tail btree head left right))
Now, *btree-null* is a toplevel lookup, that might have an unbound-variable effect. We should be able to eliminate one of them, though. Why doesn't the CSE pass do it? Because in Tree-IL, the order of evaluation of the right-hand-sides of left and right is unspecified. This gives Guile some useful freedoms, but little information for CSE.
This is an instance of a more general problem, that Tree-IL might be too high-level to be useful for CSE. For example, at runtime, not all lexical references are the same -- some are local, and some reference free variables. For mutated free variables, the variable is itself in a box, so to reference it you would load the box into a local and then dereference the box. CSE should allow you to eliminate duplicate loads of the box, even in the case that it can't eliminate duplicate references into the box.
conclusion
It is nice to be able to eliminate the duplicate checks, but not at any price. Currently the bootstrapping time cost is a bit irritating. I have other ideas on how to fix that, but ultimately we probably need to re-implement CSE at some lower level. More on that in a future post. Until then, happy hacking.
20120514
Syndicated 2012-05-14 16:51:51 (Updated 2012-05-14 18:07:52) from cdent
This Site May Harm Your Computer
Reported Attack Page!
This web page at killerbees.co.uk has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
Of the 50 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2012-05-05, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.That's right, "Zero pages", and "suspicious content was never found on this site"
Syndicated 2012-05-14 16:55:00 (Updated 2012-05-14 17:01:28) from Danny Angus
help
lang="en">
Help for TiddlySpace is spread around several different spaces, listed below. If you need help with something and can't find what you need from here, please visit the TiddlySpace Google Group.
blog provides latest news and updates about TiddlySpace.
docs provides an overview of many of the technical features of TiddlySpace.
glossary defines terms used in the TiddlySpace world.
faq has frequently asked questions (with answers).
tiddlywiki.org and tiddlywiki.com provide information about TiddlyWiki, one of the interfaces for using TiddlySpace.
Syndicated 2012-05-14 15:59:01 (Updated 2012-05-14 16:21:07) from cdent
Steam indefinite update paused
So recently I had an issue with Steam where the Witcher 2 update got stuck at 99% and the status “Update Paused”. No matter what I tried with the pause/resume button, I couldn’t get it to budge from this status and actually update.
After a while I grabbed Process Explorer from the Microsoft website and checked the files that were being opened when I toggled this state. I noticed a reference to Steam\steamapps\downloading\20920\CookedPC\pack0.dzip. Then I also noticed a file reference to Steam\steamapp\logs\content.log. Upon checking that file I found a notice that it was trying to preallocate about 11 GB for this pack0.dzip. Checking my drive status, I saw that this particular drive letter only had about 9 GB left. Freeing up some space allowed the update process to actually start and finish, after which I got even more space back, since it seems Steam downloads these files and then replaces them, deleting the temporary one. So I guess the lesson learnt is that you should always have enough disk space free as the single largest file in any of your games.
Syndicated 2012-05-14 08:12:32 from In Nomine - The Lotus Land
My mostly-mobile Internet workflow
One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.
These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.
Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.
The key parts are:
So, I’ve now set myself up with these three bookmarklets everywhere, including on my mobile devices:
Installing bookmarklets on mobile browsers is a bit fiddly. Instapaper has a setup wizard that takes you through the steps, but most other bookmarklets don’t. Luckily, as you may have seen in a recent link post, there’s this bookmarklet viewer which makes it easy to grab the Javascript for any bookmarklet and add it as a bookmark on your iPhone or iPad (and probably on other mobile devices, though I’m not quite sure how their bookmarking works).
I use Instapaper for things I want to read later (obviously). I can add webpages to Instapaper via the bookmarklet, via the Instapaper link that’s native to my Twitter client, via the integration with Longreads (whose app I’ve recently installed), or, through the magic of ifttt, by bookmarking something on Pinboard and tagging it “instapaper”. (You’d think that Pinboard’s “read later” checkbox would do this, but it doesn’t; the Pinboard/Instapaper integration, from Pinboard’s point of view, consists only of automatically adding items from an Instapaper folder to your bookmarks. Anyone got any other insight on this?)
Instapaper, of course, has apps for my phone and tablet, as well as the website when I’m at my computer. I always have something interesting to read. The question is what I do with it after that.
From my experiences over at GF I’ve found that most links I want to do something with come down to either “this is interesting, and I want to point it out to people” or “this is fascinating and/or enraging and I want to respond in detail”. So, I have workflows for both of those.
For the first category, I bookmark them on Pinboard and tag them “rec” (short for “recommended”). Through ifttt, these get posted immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. But on WordPress, I’m using the Postalicious plugin, which supports Pinboard and lets you collate a number of links into one post. I post this under the user “autoposter” and in the category “Autoposted”, which makes it easy for people who don’t want to see them to skip them through clever RSS feed selection or whatever other filtering means appeal to them. (I use this myself later, as you’ll see.)
For something that’s fascinating or enraging enough that it deserves its own blog post, I’ve got a “Press This” bookmarklet in all my browsers, including the mobile ones. While it doesn’t actually do much — just opens WordPress’s posting interface with a little bit of pre-filled text — the fact that it saves me several clicks and some copy-pasting (especially tedious on mobile) is enough, I hope, to get me at least starting a rough draft or placeholder for things I mean to write about.
Normally I’d write on my laptop, not on my mobile devices, because of the keyboard crappiness. I learnt to touch type for a reason, dammit! But I’ve got the iOS WordPress app installed (it’s really slick, by the way) and once I’ve saved a placeholder draft via Press This, I can open it in the app and write, if I am so inclined. (Whether I will or not remains to be seen, but I can see it being workable for short posts at least.)
The WordPress app is also great for comment moderation and other admin tasks, and since I really want to encourage commenting/discussion here going forward, this is going to be pretty handy for staying on top of things.
I’ve recently realised that I really ought to make a bit more of an effort with Facebook since most people outside the tech industry don’t use Twitter, but I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t want it to be a central point in my online life or the primary host for my updates/writing. So, my plan is to push out updates to Facebook when I post here on my blog, and I’ll also post links on Twitter and Tumblr at the same time. I do all this via ifttt. (I previously used Twitterfeed, but it’s far more limited, so I’ve shut that down and standardised on ifttt for now.)
ifttt supports triggers from WordPress (either wordpress.com, or self-hosted if you use version 3-point-mumble or above) and also from RSS feeds. However, the WordPress triggers are limited to “any new post” or “any new post with tag or category”. If you want more flexibility, WordPress’s wide selection of RSS feeds can be handy. For instance, I’m using my author RSS feed to catch everything that I personally write here and post it to various places. This skips things posted by “autoposter” which generally aren’t content original to this blog and which I don’t want to propagate from here (I’d rather propagate them from their original source). Of course, I could have done this using the “Everything Else” category, which currently includes all non-autoposted material; either would be fine, really, except that I can foresee myself messing with categories in future and breaking stuff by accident.
The other important bit of workflow’s going to be actually doing it. My schedule’s full of classes, lately, and they’re pretty mind-numbing. Apart from that, I spend a lot of time at gigs and in the studio. I’ve taken up bike commuting again, so I don’t have much time on public transport. None of this is particularly good for engaging with the Interwebs. I’m hoping, though, that all this stuff I’ve set up will help me snatch moments for it in between other things, rather than feeling that I can’t possibly do anything now I’m not sitting at a desk for eight or more hours a day.
Date Arithmetic
When I set an alarm, my clock, now running on the computer in my pocket, is smart enough to tell me how much time will pass until the alarm is scheduled to sound. This has eliminated the old problem of sleeping past meetings before being surprised by an alarm precisely half a day after I had originally planned to wake.
The price has been having to know exactly how little I will sleep: a usually depressing fact that had previously been obscured by my difficulty doing time arithmetic in my most somnolent moments.
Superbios is a opensource firmware being developed for intel chip sets
you can go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/superbios for more info.
A whole lotta hoot, and just a little bit of nanny
I’ve recently had the misfortune of having had to sit through a series of classes on Western Music History that managed to make just about every form of music prior to 1900 seem deathly dull, irrelevant, and inaccessible. It amazes me how they can do this. I mean, it’s not hard to find some truly amazing stuff even within the confines of “Western Art Music”, and present it in a way that’s engaging. So why don’t they? Do they not know? Are they just teaching it out of a sense of obligation? Did they sit through dull music history classes back in the day and figure that we have to suck it up just like they did?
The Medieval period. What we learnt in class: there was Gregorian chant, which was basically monophonic vocals without much rhythm or melody to speak of, and then mumble mumble something happened and there was polyphony, SURPRISE! RENAISSANCE!
Yeah right. As if that’s all that was going on musically in the middle ages. We’re talking about an era that gave you St Vitus’ Dance, an uncontrollable urge to dance all over the place as if possessed by the devil. You think they did that to Gregorian chant? Of course not.
Here’s Corvus Corax with a little something to show you how it’s done:
Yeah, those dudes have a lightshow and moshpit. Their interpretive choices for this Saltarello (a 13th century number, if I recall correctly) are, ahem, somewhat non-standard, but no more ridiculous than the early music ensembles that play medieval dance tunes as if they were lullabies and dirges. No self-respecting medieval musician would’ve been able to earn his or her living unless they could get the village green jumping.
Corvus Corax use a range of medieval instruments including medieval-style bagpipes, ear-shattering shawms (clocked at 98dB!), and of course a buttload of percussion. But if you really want to appreciate the full ridiculous awesomeness of medieval instruments, you need to check out some of these Youtube videos:
What I REALLY Want from the NBN
Generally I haven’t had a positive attitude towards the NBN. It doesn’t seem likely to fulfill the claims of commercial success and would be a really bad thing to privatise anyway. Also it hasn’t seemed to offer any great benefits either. The claim that it will enable lots of new technical developments which we can’t even imagine yet that aren’t possible with 25Mb/s ADSL but which also don’t require more than the 100Mb/s speed of the NBN never convinced me.
But one thing it could really do well is to give better Internet access in remote areas. Ideally with static or near-static IPv6 addresses (because we have already run out of IPv4 addresses). Currently 3G networks do all sorts of nasty NAT things to deal with the lack of IPv4 addresses which causes a lot of needless pain if you have a server connected via 3G. One of the NBN plans is for wireless net access to remote homes, with some sanity among the people designing the network such NBN connections would all have static IPv6 subnets as long as they don’t move.
I’m currently working on a project that involves servers on 3G links. I don’t have a lot of options on implementation due to hardware and software constraints. So if the ISPs using the NBN and the NBN itself (for the wireless part) could just give us all IPv6 static ranges then lots of problems would be solved.
Of course I don’t have high hopes for this. One of the many ways that the NBN has been messed up is in allowing the provision of lower speed connections. As having an ADSL2+ speed NBN connection is the cheapest option a lot of people will choose it. Therefore the organisations providing services will have to do so with the expectation that most NBN customers have ADSL2+ speed and thus they won’t provide services to take advantage of higher speeds.
Related posts:
Syndicated 2012-05-13 08:13:22 from etbe - Russell Cokeretbe - Russell Coker
A new comment policy
This is a copy of the comments policy which I’ve just posted under the “About” section of the site. That one is the official version, and may be updated from time to time; this one is included here just so everyone sees it up-front and can comment on it (ah, recursion.)
And so, without further ado:
Contribute positively
The golden rule of this blog, as far as comments are concerned, is that every comment should contribute positively to the discussion.
Here are a list of things that contribute positively to the conversation:
- Kindness
- Humour
- Novelty
- Creativity
- Helpfulness
- Cleverness
- Insight
And some things that don’t:
- Bigotry
- Small-mindedness
- Creepiness
- Repetition
- Repetition
- Wilful bloody-mindedness
- Spam
Comments that do not contribute positively to the conversation may be deleted on the whim of the moderator (i.e. me, Skud).
Unacceptable comments, safer space, and trigger warnings
I try to maintain a space that’s as safe as I can manage for all my friends and friends-to-be. Bigotry and *isms, including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sizeism, etc. are not welcome here, and may result in your comment being deleted or edited. This includes both outright slurs and comments which tend to support *isms, even if expressed in apparently inoffensive terms.
That said, things occasionally slip through moderation. I’d like to ask everyone here to call out bigoted or otherwise problematic behaviour if they see it. You’re especially encouraged to act as an ally when it comes to comments that don’t directly relate to you. That is to say, let’s have each other’s backs.
If you are discussing or linking to something which may be upsetting to some readers (for instance discussion of sexual assault, graphic violence or hate crimes, suicide and self harm, death or harm to children) please provide a “Trigger warning” alongside the link. If you don’t, I may add one for you.
Anonymity and pseudonymity
Anonymous comments are not permitted here. You must use a name of some sort (a pseudonym is fine) and provide a real email address (visible only to me and any other moderators I appoint). Please use the same name and email address each time you comment, to build continuity and reputation.
(On occasion, anonymous comments may be permitted, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.)
Time limits
Posts are set to turn off comments after a certain time. If you want to comment on something after its time limit has elapsed, please post on the latest Open Thread.
My blog, my rules
At the end of the day, I’m responsible for what goes on here, and will do what I think is necessary to keep the comment threads ticking along smoothly.
Thoughts? Comments? Am I missing anything?
Shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone…
Shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone…
Kaspersky: Mac security is '10 years behind Microsoft'
In an interview, the security firm's CEO says Apple has a lot more malware coming its way, and that it's not putting enough resources into protecting users. Read this blog post by Josh Lowensohn on Ap…
Fresh links for May 12th through May 13th
Back to where we began
I just realised the other day that it’s been very nearly a whole year since I announced what I called “The Plan”: leaving Google and the tech industry, returning to Australia, and taking up sound engineering as a profession.
I’ve spent a lot of the last year offline, sometimes in an intentional effort to get away from it all, and sometimes through happenstance, when other interests and activities have limited me to the small peephole to the Internet provided by my phone. In many ways it’s been good to disconnect, if only because it saves this happening every night:
On the other hand, I’ve felt pretty disconnected from what’s going on in the world, and it’s definitely been hard on many of the (primarily online) friendships I’ve built over the last two decades. (More on that shortly, I think.)
The other day, as I was sitting around on the sofa clicking refresh on half a dozen browser windows, I found myself thinking (as I so often have over this last year) that I should get up and do something offline, since the Internet was so dull. I’ve been telling myself this a lot over the last year. Then I caught myself and said, “Wait a minute…” See, there was a time when I actually enjoyed being online, talking to people, sharing ideas, being creative, being inspired, connecting with strangers and broadening my horizons. It’s been one of the best things in my adult life. I didn’t always have this feeling of exhausted passivity, of feeling like I ought to keep up, but not really being interested in the stuff that’s being shovelled through the intertubes to my bleary, sandpapery eyeballs.
So, fuck it, it’s time to be active on the Internet again, participate, create, do stuff rather than just consuming. To give myself a bit of focus in my renewed Internet life, I’m relaunching this blog. A new leaf — hopefully a series of new leaves — and with any luck I’ll be able to write something interesting on each one.
The mechanics of it:
I think that’s about it. I hope this’ll help me reconnect with at least some of my Internet peeps, and meet a bunch of new ones. Let me know what you think, and in the meantime, feel free to tell me what you’ve been up to in the last year.
Twisted SSH: Rendering a Log-in Banner/MOTD in Conch
.png){kind=logo}
Syndicated 2012-05-13 00:50:00 (Updated 2012-05-14 15:39:09) from Duncan McGreggor
popcon graphs for tasks
Last year I was able to switch tasksel to using metapackages, instead of the weird non-package task things that had been used before Debian supported Recommends fields well.
An unanticipated result of the new task packages is that I have this nice popcon data available for them, so can get graphs like these.
For new installs of testing, KDE and Xfce are neck and neck. With Gnome being the default, it's hard to say which desktop users really prefer. My feeling is that it's probably nearly evenly split now.
(I installed Xfce on my sister's laptop last week, and anticipate moving all my family to it, rather than Gnome 3.)
The above graph also shows a surprisingly large number of ssh server task installs. In fact, it's the most often manually installed task. Probably many of those are server machines, and so I'm considering having tasksel automatically select ssh on systems where it doesn't automatically select a desktop.
Language data is also available. Taskel uses language tasks internally, without exposing an interface, so this will be almost entirely users who did an install of testing localised to their language.
Interesting data can be teased out of this too. For example there seem more installs in Catalan than Chinese ... and at least 10 Esperanto users. (As with any popcon number, this is a lower bound, to be multiplied by the scaling guesstimate of your choice.)
By the way, I've got a new vanity domain for my blog and wiki: http://joeyh.name/
The old http://kitenet.net/~joey/ will continue to work, like it has since 1997. But the new is easier to type. And it let me move my site to Branchable, at last.
shorter HTTP requests for curl
Starting in curl 7.26.0 (due to be released at the end of May 2012), we will shrink the User-agent: header that curl sends by default in HTTP(S) requests to something much shorter! I suspect that this will raise some eyebrows out there so even though I’ve emailed about it to the curl-users list before I thought I’d better write it up and elaborate.
A default ‘curl localhost’ on Debian Linux makes 170 bytes get sent in that single request:
GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.0g zlib/1.2.6 libidn/1.23 libssh2/1.2.8 librtmp/2.3 Host: localhost Accept: */*
As you can see, the user-agent description takes up a large portion of that request, and this for really no good reason at all. Without sacrificing any functionality I shrunk the same request down to 71 bytes:
GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 Host: localhost Accept: */*
That means we shrunk it down to 41% of the original size. I’ll admit the example is a bit extreme and most other normal use cases will use longer host names and longer paths, but even for a URL like “http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html” we’re down to 50% of the original request size (100 vs 199).
Can we shrink it even more? Sure, we could leave out the version number too. I left it in there now only to allow some kind of statistics to get extracted. We can’t remote the entire header, we need to include a user-agent in requests since there are too many servers who won’t function properly otherwise.
And before anyone asks: this change is only for the curl command line tool and not for libcurl, the library. libcurl does in fact not send any user-agent at all by default…
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
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