Monday, 22 July 2002

Xresource database Back to Brett. I've never done X programming - to me an xresources file was just where I chose what colour things should be, so I can't comment on its similarity with XUL. XUL is to Mozilla as Swing is to Java - it's the whole front-end. But yes, that's the problem with the book. It shows you how to lay out a GUI, how to style it and make it do things with Javascript, how to write a skin for Mozilla, even how to bind your XUL to an RDF document using XBL. But it's very light on how to use XUL to make Mozilla do interesting things. Which in one way is fair enough - you buy a Swing book to explain Swing, not to tell you how java.io works. But on the other hand, it would be different if there was no book on how java.io works that you could get instead. [The Desktop Fishbowl] I have done a touch of X coding, back before these new fangled GTK+ and qt thingies showed up. The xresources file was effectivly a configuration key:value file format that allowed merging on defaults from all over the place. It was mainly used to set colours, but some more advanced users allowed things like key bindings, and localization of text. In effect, customising the look & feel, in a primitive way. XUL takes this to it's logical conclusion, the user interface is completely configurable. So the real question becomes, what books are out there on understanding the underlying Mozilla code base? Hmmmm. (eggads, I'd have to learn c++ again. :) (Oh, and about the books xml thing. It was in jest. Honest. But it is going to happen. Sooner or later *muwahahaha* :) 11:00:01 PM

Future War Boston Globe.  In China, the gap in wealth between the top tier and the bottom tier widens considerably.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Let us take this peice of information, along with the ealier peice today about China heading towards 80% males. This is going to get messy. Think large, mobilized, martial arts trained peoples army. Think Taiwan. There is a comming war there, and it is going to happen sooner, rather than later. 10:51:48 PM

Programming language thoughts Vectors. [...] Parrot (part of perl 6) looks pretty damn cool, from what I've heard, especially the conversion between languages thing. I'd LOVE to be able to write in perl and convert it to C, or Java, or, whatever. People complain about Perl code being crufty and disorganized and things like that, but it isn't true. Perl just allows developers to do stupid things if they either want to or don't know better. A Good perl coder will make perl code that is just a clean and elegant as a good programmer in any other language. I love OOP, which is why I'm using Java lately instead of Perl. But, I've come to the conclusion that, as cool as java is, I don't love it. [weblog.masukomi.org] Perl6: Given the current state of implementation, I really would not expect to see an implementation with sane libraries this side of 2005. I remember when perl 5 was bootstrapping - that took a few years to happen properly. Perl cross compilation to C/C++/Java/...: Have a look at what B (perl's perl translation library) can generate. It's ugly. Look at what Jython generates when you compile it to java. It's ugly. Have a look at the C code almost any functional language generates when it cross compiles to C. They are all ugly. Why? the target language is being used as platform independent assembler. About the only program cross compilation that wound up with half decent code in the target language was a pascal->c converter because the target language had similar expressivity to the source language. I have a friend who passed all his c programming courses in his engineering degree that way. Not that he ever graduated. Good Perl Code: Ahhh. As someone who has maintained the output of many perl coders, I can honestly say, there is no such thing as maintainable Perl. There is more than one way to express everything in perl, and each different expression will be misunderstood by somebody. I have often been accused of writing obscure perl, because of my love affair with trying to do functional programming in Perl. New languages: The easiest way to get into designing new languages is to try a whole bunch out. Then learn one of the ML dialects, as the ML language family is populated with languages that have been built with the goal in mind of building programming languages. My preference is O'Caml, which is a cute object oriented functional programming language. Another option is trying out Stratego as that also seems to be a language oriented to implementing programming languages. Other options: Python a nice OO Scripting language. Good clean semantics. Usually only one way to do things. Also usually the best way. Jython a re-implementation of Python in Java. Very good for munging around with Java. Ruby a cute language originating out of Japan. Clean semantics, everything is an object, and generally all-round neat. 6:51:27 PM

Breaking everything into itty-bitty peices Does RSS (as used in Radio) suck?. I've added a comment to the description element of my RSS 0.92 feed to indicate that more content is available in the linked item. [More content available in the linked item] [Be Blogging] Heh, I'm doing my best to dumb down the internet! :) [Later...] Having a quick geek through my feeds, it would appear the consennsus is to have [...] at the end of your rss description element to indicate further info. Probably less visually iritataing too :) 6:29:52 PM

Desktop porn Looking up    It was past 10pm last night when the kid and I got up on the roof to look at the stars. It was late in the evening to see a satellite, but a few of the big ones with relatively high orbits can still be seen.   And sure enough, Heavens-Above.com showed a satellite with a magnitude of 2.9 moving into the sunlight out of Earth's shadow on the West wing of Aquilla, the Eagle. Its path would run between Lyra and Deneb and finally run right across the two brightest stars in Ursa Minor, one of which was Polaris, the North Star.   The Heavens-Above chart showed the satellite appearing at precisely 10:22 :45. We counted down the seconds, watching the spot marked X in the sky, and there it was.   The kid said, "It looks kind of red. I agreed. So we looked at the satellite data, and saw it was called Envisat, and was launched just this past March (most of the satellites you see in the sky are Cosmos remnants launched 10-20 years ago). What's more, it's a big fella, and quite a bit on the reddish side. Here's more, and more again.   So we took a look at some of the pictures Envisat has been taking of he Earth from its orbit nearly 800 km up. Here's a whole gallery that includes an amazing picture of Mt. Etna blowing its top in Sicily.   I'm tellin' ya, wi-fi and astronomy make a fine combination. [Doc Searls Weblog] Lovely photos for a desktop. 5:55:41 PM

Stocks over valued. Duh "There Is No Cat" [Daypop Top 40] The reason that the stock market is over valued is that the baby boomer generation stuffed money like crazy into said stock market so that they would have something to retire on. This problem is not going to resolve itself any time soon. 5:52:05 PM

Rebooting at 500 ft off the ground is gunna be fun F-22 Avionics Require Inflight Reboot [Slashdot] Weren't they designing the F-22 to be aerodynamically unstable? (Advantage of an aerodynamically unstable fighter is that it can outmanouvre aerodynamically stable ones. Disadvantage is that you need the flight computer to keep you in the air) 5:49:32 PM

Cool Feature Of The Day Award JIRA 1.3.3 - RSS aware!. [rebelutionary] So, did it wind up taking longer than an hour? *duck* 4:30:26 PM

Charles' wish is my command Charles Miller is a leading authority on naked desktop people [The Desktop Fishbowl] I don't know which is worse, the fact that Charles wants to be the leading authority, or the fact that I am more than willing to pitch in to help. 3:33:25 PM

Gimme a Clue ... Holy Sh#t! Guess Who's Tracking Your Downloads. Gimme a C! Gimme an I! Gimme an ... [Blunt Force Trauma] I suppose you can pick a terrorist by the quality of the pr0n he downloads ... 3:28:23 PM

Java sucks, pt X I wrote about my Java Peeves, Brett Morgan linked to some more issues, so I thought I'd add a few more logs to the fire and point to Jamie Zawinski's "Java Sucks" page [...] [The Desktop Fishbowl] Man that brings back some memories. Just thought I'd state that I find Java great for it's buzz word compliance, and when no one is peaking I am finding Jython an excellent way to do quick jobs in and around java code bases. It is also great for doing interactive exploratory work with java libraries whose doco is a bit up the duff. And then you can re-code it in Java if you need to hand it off to a client once you understand how your problem domain works. :) 2:39:56 PM

Stop me, before I hurt myself Oh, and Brett, the XUL book is pretty good as an introduction to XUL, but it's a bit confusing here and there, and could do with a little more depth. It's one of those books where after you've done the examples, you really feel you can... er... do the examples. [The Desktop Fishbowl] I feel the sudden need for a new xml file format that we can put our web pages which details which books are in our libraries, various meta-data, including a rating. Would make getting an instant understanding of the strengths and weeknesses of another geek fairly instantaneous. Uber-geek brain fights at book-point. ;) [Later...] Being serious for a moment (HAH!), I suspect a problem with trying to write a book just about XUL is the role XUL appears to play in Mozilla. It feels like an xml'ified and application specific .xresources file, with the addition of javascript to make things fun. So, to really go to town with XUL, my guess is that you would really have to understand what the underlying (c++) Mozilla engine can do, and where to put in extentions to carry out specific forms of magic. I would love to see a book (or more likely a Knuth style trilogy in five parts) covering Mozilla in this level of depth. Hey, something I can think about writing, now that it is looking like I am going to transmorgify back into a Uni student for a while. :) 2:35:33 PM

Geometric Algebra Usage of Geometric Algebra as a representational tool. [kuro5hin.org] Trust Kuro5hin to keep me amused with pure math. Funfunfun. 1:47:40 PM

More books the Nerd Bookcase From Hell For a much better popular book on the deep relationship between computer science and physics, try Fire In The Mind. For something meatier, I like Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information: The Proceedings of the 1988 Workshop on Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. [Larry O'Brien's Radio Weblog] [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] Adding to the to-read list. 1:45:45 PM

100 albums to jettison. [...] I had to fire up IE to learn the great wisdom that "all live albums suck." How about this wisdom: all articles that don't render properly in Mozilla suck. [Blogging Roller] The sad thing here is that I am about to create a bunch of pages that won't render in Mozilla. Why? Because Adobe's SVG Viewer currently doesn't work with Mozilla. Ugh. I hope the Mozilla-guys and the Adobe-guys can fix this soon. Begs 1:36:27 PM

Internet programmers vs Business System programmers I had an interesting spat with my project manager this morning. I had just spent all weekend, unpaid of course, trying to get a proposed pipeline together for generating graphs for a ROI reporting webapp. It broke. Nothing surprising for me - I am quite used to software not doing what I hoped it might. That's what comes of always having some software in the mix that I haven't used before. It's what makes working in the internet sphere fun. So he bawled me out for not knowing if my proposed solution was going to work before I proposed it. I suggested a pair of possible approaches, and suggested a less-moving-parts solution as the preferred path. His response? Take the easy one, but confirm that it will work before proceeding. Like, huh? Then it hit me. His previous life was writing business information systems in Gupta. In that world, once you have desk checked that your proposed reports can be generated from the information in the database, and that the information that has to be feed into the database is coming from some data input system somewhere, there is nothing else than can break. Thus, once a business information system is designed, implementation using something like Gupta is highly predictable. Boring even. Thus, my project manager's total inability to deal with the fact that I could design a system, and then two weeks into impementation state that my design was flawed, and I would need to re-design a component. Funny, sad, true. 1:06:15 PM

Introducing worth into the file sharing economy [insert something witty here]. Publish your hashes while you can. A number of P2P systems are being developed that key off of the SHA1... [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog] Anyone have any pointers to said p2p systems? I am curious as to whether the systems in question are keying off only the sha1, or whether they are keying off of a (sha1, filelength) tuple. I hope they use (sha1, md5, filesize) tuple like rsync does. The really cool thing would be if the p2p systems start swapping lists of song meta data (track name, artists, encoding, bitrate, md5, sha1, filesize, ...) signed with user certificates. Then when you have downloaded songs that match some song meta data, and you have verified the validity of said meta data, you can record such information as a trust metric against said certificate. Then you can really warp out and start issuing your own signed referrals listing (certificate, worthiness rating) tuples. And people could then get a feeling for how much to trust your signed meta data packets depending on how much their worthiness ratings agrees with your worthiness ratings. This is probably starting to feel like the introduction of a barter system into the p2p free-for-all. Which is realistically what has to happen - otherwise there is no incentive for the people with lots of files on offer to stay in the file sharing economy. 12:51:41 PM

Ghosting Ghost In The Shell TV Series. Wow, a They've made a Ghost In The Shell TV Series If you haven't seen the movie I highly recommend it. It's a great anime. The quality of the TV series looks great. [weblog.masukomi.org] Ohhh baby. I can see a well worn dvd in the making. 11:38:17 AM

Thanks Ugo We all know Cocoon is a complex beast. Brett, read my content please ;-) [Be Blogging] Heh. One day I am going to start using cocoon early in a project life cycle such that I can learn it. And one day soon I am going to find a way of reading blogs that doesn't hide 3/4 of the content from me. blah. :) 9:46:28 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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