BuffaloFeeds » Friends

Friends (100 unread)

Planet Matt

Journal: Home office away from home

Posted: July 21st, 2010, 6:43pm MDT

I've done working from home; I've done coworking; I've done the Mozilla Summit and soon I'll have my first work week. But this week I'm trying something different.

We're visiting my wife's parents in Port Townsend, WA for several days. Instead of taking vacation time, I'm working from their house this week. Since I already work remotely, my team will barely notice the difference. Meanwhile it will be a nice long visit for Sarah and her family, and I get to spend time with them in the mornings/evenings/mealtimes/weekend.

This has got me thinking about other new possibilities for nomadic working. It also seems relevant to this article on vacations and happiness research which says, "The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counterintuitive — to break it up, to interrupt it with real life."
Photos: Summit at the Summit

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:25am MDT
Photos: Mascots

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:13am MDT
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:10am MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Paul Roget giving one of his most amazing demos of open web technologies and Firefox 4 features (SVG, CSS transitions, WebSockets, video, History API, accelerated graphics, and more) at the 2010 Mozilla Summit.
Bookmarks: rust

Posted: July 7th, 2010, 7:39pm MDT

"A very preliminary work in progress" programming language from Mozilla's Graydon Hoare (with help from Brendan Eich, Andreas Gal, Dave Herman, and more).

Looks like a very attractive multi-paradigm design. Lots of safety features (memory safe, no null pointers, objects are immutable by default, actors/tasks have no shared mutable state), structural typing, tagged disjoint unions, type inference, impressive static analysis features, native compilation (direct x86 codegen in Ocaml, and prototype LLVM backend), low-overhead C function calls and easy integration with gdb, valgrind, etc.
Bookmarks: The Best Vacation Ever - vacations and happiness research

Posted: July 1st, 2010, 8:30am MDT

"Respondents were least happy about the vacation while they were taking it. Beforehand, they looked forward to it with eager anticipation, and within a few days of returning, they remembered it fondly. But while on it, they found themselves bogged down by the disappointments and logistical headaches of actually going somewhere and doing something."

"The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counterintuitive — to break it up, to interrupt it with real life."
Bookmarks: Staying on message

Posted: June 9th, 2010, 1:35pm MDT

"In Rework, we talk about how you need to be willing to let your customers outgrow you. There are more people who are not using your product than people who are; You need to make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies."
Bookmarks: The Hunt For The Worst Movie Of All Time

Posted: June 1st, 2010, 3:19pm MDT

Amusing and detailed reviews of movies the author hates.
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 10:36pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Nightly builds of Fennec for Android are available! Details and known bugs at [https:]
Bookmarks: When to Include an Exit Button in Android Apps (Hint: Never)

Posted: May 17th, 2010, 2:38pm MDT

"If you build an application that's predictable, configurable, and unambiguous your users won't ask for an exit button. The first time they see an unknown background Service that's been running for an hour, or the GPS icon unexpectedly starts flashing, or the device gets hot while in their pocket they're going to get narky."
Photos: Two-wheeler

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 1:47pm MDT
Bookmarks: m.xkcd.com

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 11:08am MDT

Mobile-optimized XKCD site, including alt-text readable by mobile browsers.
Weblog: Implementing the viewport meta tag in Mozilla Fennec

Posted: May 10th, 2010, 4:36pm MDT

The upcoming release of Mobile Firefox (Fennec) 1.1 features improved support for the <meta name="viewport"> tag. Previous version of Fennec supported the width, height, and initial-scale viewport properties, but had problems with some sites designed for iPhone and Android browsers. We now support the same properties Safari does, and we changed Fennec to render mobile sites more consistently on screens of different sizes and resolutions.

touch.facebook.com before:

touch.facebook.com after:

You can see these changes for yourself in the latest Fennec 1.1 or trunk nightly builds.
Background
Mobile browers like Fennec render pages in a virtual "window" (the viewport), usually wider than the screen, so they don't need to mangle existing layouts by squeezing them into a tiny window. Users can pan and zoom to display different areas of the viewport.

Mobile Safari introduced the "viewport meta tag" to let web developers control the viewport's size and scale. Many other mobile browsers now support this tag, although it is not part of any web standard. Apple's documentation does a great job explaining how it works for web developers, but it leaves out some information that would be useful to browser vendors. For example, it says the content attribute is a comma-separated list, but existing browsers and web pages use a mix of commas, semicolons, and spaces as separators.
A pixel is not a pixel
The iPhone and many popular Android phones have 3- to 4-inch screens with 320×480 pixels (~160 dpi). Fennec's target devices have the same physical size but 480×800 pixels (~240 dpi). Because of this, the last version of Fennec displayed many pages about one third smaller (in physical units) than iPhone or Android. This caused usability and readability problems on many touch-optimized web sites. Peter-Paul Koch wrote about this problem in A pixel is not a pixel is not a pixel.

Fennec 1.1 for Maemo will use 1.5 hardware pixels for each CSS "pixel," following the lead of the Android browser. This means a site with "initial-scale=1" will render at the same physical size in Fennec for Maemo, Mobile Safari for iPhone, and the Android Browser on both HDPI and MDPI phones. It's also consistent with the CSS 2.1 specification, which says:

If the pixel density of the output device is very different from that of a typical computer display, the user agent should rescale pixel values. It is recommended that the pixel unit refer to the whole number of device pixels that best approximates the reference pixel. It is recommended that the reference pixel be the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length.

This change only affects web pages that explicitly set the viewport size or scale. The pixel ratio is 1.5 applies only if the viewport scale is set to 1. The size of a "pixel" on any page changes with the zoom level, and the default zoom level for most pages in Fennec has not changed.

On 240-dpi screens, pages with initial-scale=1 will effectively be zoomed to 150% by both Fennec and Android WebKit. Their text will be smooth and crisp, but their bitmap images will probably not take advantage of the full screen resolution. To get sharper images on these screens, mobile web developers can create images at 150% of their final size (or 200%, to support the rumored 320-dpi iPhone) and then scale them down using HTML/CSS.

WebKit on Android supports an additional undocumented target-densityDpi property, to let web developers override the CSS-to-device pixel ratio. Fennec doesn't support this property now, but if we see a compelling need for it (or if it becomes part of a documented standard) then we might implement it too.

Right now Fennec uses the same default ratio of 1.5 on all devices. (This is a hidden preference that can be changed in about:config or by an add-on.) Later we'll need to change this – as well as many other parts of Fennec's user interface – to choose the correct size automatically, depending on the screen density.
Viewport width and screen width
Many sites set their viewport to "width=320, initial-scale=1" to fit precisely onto the iPhone display in portrait mode. As mentioned above, this caused problems when Fennec 1.0 rendered these sites, especially in landscape mode. To fix this, Fennec 1.1 will expand the viewport width if necessary to fill the screen at the requested scale. This matches the behavior of Android and Mobile Safari, and is especially useful on large-screen devices like the iPad. (Allen Pike's Choosing a viewport for iPad sites has a good explanation for web developers.)

We also added support for minimum-scale, maximum-scale, and user-scalable, with defaults and limits similar to Safari's. These properties affect the initial scale and width as well as limiting zooming after the page is loaded.
Standards
<meta name="viewport"> is a good example of browsers innovating exactly how Sachin Agarwal thinks they should. It was implemented by a single browser, used by web developers, and copied by other browsers without waiting for any standards organization. It has clearly improved on earlier solutions like MobileOptimized and HandheldFriendly.

Now that viewport metadata has proved to be a useful extension to HTML, I think it is worth standardizing. According to the HTML5 spec, new names for the meta element should first be registered on the WHATWG wiki and then be ratified through the W3C standards process. If anyone at Mozilla or elsewhere is working on a standard specification for viewport metadata, please let me know.
Bookmarks: target-densityDpi in Android webkit

Posted: May 9th, 2010, 8:50pm MDT

Android-specific meta-viewport property. "If it is not specified, it uses the default, 160dpi as of today. Then the 1.0 scale factor specified in the viewport tag means 100% on G1 and 150% on Sholes. If you set 'target-densityDpi' to 'device-dpi', then the 1.0 scale factor means 100% on both G1 and Sholes."
Bookmarks: Hot zones

Posted: May 7th, 2010, 3:57pm MDT

"The iPad is always 'hot' — touch anywhere on the screen, brush off a speck of dust, or change its orientation slightly, and something changes... One reason the Kindle seems like a more 'peaceful' ebook reader... is that it has almost no hot zones."
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: May 6th, 2010, 12:36pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

I finally put up a makeshift window shade in my office's skylight. Now I can actually work between 11am and 1pm on sunny days. (Wait, is that a good thing?)

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on LLVM Bitcode vs. Protocol Buffers by Wladimir

Posted: May 5th, 2010, 2:14pm MDT by Wladimir

How does ASN.1 DER compare?
1) It has a schema
2) It is encoded bitwise, with as few wasted bits as possible (even for sequences)
3) I’m not sure about the data model; this depends on the ASN.1 compiler used, which is also the biggest problem with it IMO.

Planet Matt

Weblog: Fennec on Android: user feedback and next steps

Posted: April 30th, 2010, 1:00am MDT
Last month I joined Mozilla as a UI engineer on the Fennec (Mobile Firefox) project. Firefox is already available for Nokia's Maemo platform, and now a group of Mozilla programmers are porting it to Android. This Tuesday they asked for feedback on an early preview build.

Until now, the only people working on Firefox for Android were back-end (platform) developers. This week was the first time most other people – including me – got to try it out. We front-end developers and designers are now starting to adapt the user interface to Android. For now it uses the look and feel of Firefox for Maemo.

Because we are an open source project, we like to share our work even at this early stage of development. While I wasn't directly involved in the Android development effort, I spent some of my spare time this week talking to users via Twitter and our Android feedback group. Here's what I heard, in rough order of importance to users, plus some information on our future plans.¹
- Zoom and multi-touch: Pinch zoom gestures are coming! We are reviewing a patch for animated multi-touch (pinch) zooming on Qt-based devices, and testing similar code on Android. (Maemo devices have no multi-touch, so we use their volume buttons to zoom. That code hasn't been ported to Android, so only double-tap zoom was working in the preview build.)
  We also had some requests to fit text to the screen when zoomed in, like the Android browser. Today Brad Lassey and Ben Stover released the Easy Reading add-on that does exactly that. We might make this a built-in option in Fennec once it is fast and reliable enough.
- Menu and Back buttons: The preview build did not handle Android's standard hardware buttons, but code is now checked in to support the back button and the menu and search buttons. We'll continue to refine the way Fennec uses these buttons.
- Size: A ten megabyte download (over 30 MB installed) is not huge for a desktop browser, but it's hefty for a mobile app – especially on Android, where apps are saved to limited onboard memory.
  Shrinking Fennec is possible, but not trivial. Some of the library and toolkit code in our build is probably unused and could be removed. And we could try minifying our JavaScript source, like many websites do. Michael Wu hopes current efforts like Omnijar and Thumb-2 (bug 563751) will cut the installed size approximately in half.
  Users also reported that our Fennec build did not work with the feature in some custom Android ROMs to move apps to the SD card. Mozilla's Android devs are working on a fix for this. It will be nice someday when app storage on Android is as plentiful as it is on other mobile platforms.
- Hardware compatibility: There are a lot of different Android phones out there. Some of them won't run Fennec because they still have Android 1.5 or 1.6. We hope this will be fixed by the hardware vendors soon, since we currently rely on some Android 2.0 APIs. Other devices failed for different reasons, possibly related to insufficient RAM or incompatible OpenGL APIs. We will need to optimize Firefox's memory footprint on Android, and test on a wider selection of devices, perhaps with help from Firefox users.
  Here's a list of supported hardware.
- Keyboard problems: There were many problems with the software keyboard working intermittently or not at all, especially in landscape orientation. There were also problems with Shift and Alt keys on some hardware keyboards. I haven't heard any news about of these bugs, but we know we need to fix them quickly.
- Speed: Strangely, we had some users calling Fennec slooooooow and others calling it fast as hell (and those tweets were sent just one minute apart)!
  Once a page is loaded, Fennec is pretty speedy. It's faster than the Android browser in some areas, and slower in others. But it's definitely choppy while a page is still loading or complex scripts are running. To fix this, our next major release of Fennec will include Electrolysis. This gives Firefox a multi-process architecture much like Google Chrome, and ensures that the browser always stays responsive.
  Electrolysis requires many changes to our code, so it may be a couple of months before it appears in usable Fennec builds. In the meantime, Mozilla is working on many other performance improvements. This work will also speed up Firefox for desktop computers – I've been using the FF4 nightly builds, and they are already much snappier than the Firefox 3.5 I was using before.
  We've also checked in some simple changes to improve perceived speed, like better feedback when pages start loading.
- Crashing bugs: Users were generally forgiving of crashes and other obvious bugs, to be expected at this stage of development. We will of course fix any such bugs as fast as possible.
- Add-ons: We're just starting Fennec 1.1 beta testing, and most of our add-ons are not yet updated for version 1.1. Unfortunately, this meant that many add-ons were not available to our first Android previewers. This should be fixed over the next few weeks.
  Add-ons are easily Firefox's biggest advantage over other mobile browsers. For the first time I can easily customize my phone's browser exactly how I want. I've already written two Fennec add-ons, Read Later and Show Image Title. And there are many great add-ons from other developers to choose from.
- User interface: Feedback on our UI was generally positive. Most users said panning to reveal the toolbars felt natural and easy. I think Madhava and Sean have done a great job with the design. This will get even better as we take advantage of Android features like the hardware buttons, integration with other activities, voice input, and the notification bar.
- Flash: The Flash plugin is not yet included in our Android builds, but it will be supported eventually. Firefox for Maemo already works with Flash, although enabling it does cause performance problems on some sites. (We are working on fixing that with major changes to our graphics code.)
- Web site compatibility: Fennec renders almost all pages the same as desktop Firefox. Users did report problems entering data on some pages, and found that most sites do not have mobile versions targeted at Firefox. One of my personal goals is to make Fennec compatible with more mobile sites, and to give web developers the support they need to make sites work great in Fennec. I'll write much more about this in future articles.
We don't have a regular schedule yet for releasing new builds on Android. Once we get the code merged and automated build servers configured, we'll publish nightly builds of Firefox for Android alongside our Maemo and desktop nightlies. Later this year we will have alpha and beta versions, and with luck a stable release. Until then, you can follow @MozMobile or Vlad (@vvuk) to hear about any new previews.
1. Please remember I am still new to the project, and cannot speak for the whole team. This is a personal blog, not a Firefox roadmap! ↩
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: April 29th, 2010, 5:33pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

My latest Fennec (mobile Firefox) extension, Show Image Title. Great for XKCD fans: [bitbucket.org]
Bookmarks: TouchScroll, a scrolling layer for WebKit mobile

Posted: April 28th, 2010, 2:19pm MDT

"It is JavaScript/CSS 3 based and allows for fixed elements like headers and toolbars on web pages when viewed on the iPhone or on Android. It works on the iPad, too."
Asides: My N900 arrived. Fennec is running nicely on it!

Posted: April 24th, 2010, 2:22pm MDT

My N900 arrived. Fennec is running nicely on it!
Asides: Sure, you can use an accelerometer to detect screen orientation for most people. But what about the poor astronauts on the ISS?

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 11:03am MDT

Sure, you can use an accelerometer to detect screen orientation for most people. But what about the poor astronauts on the ISS?
Asides: You know, I once found an iPhone too: http://mbrubeck.livejournal.com/30410.html

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 9:14am MDT

You know, I once found an iPhone too: http://mbrubeck.livejournal.com/30410.html
Weblog: Headless Web Workers: Does the web need background apps?

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 1:00am MDT
At my last job, I created several web applications designed to replace built-in apps on mobile phones. While modern browsers and HTML5 made this incredibly easy in many ways, we still ended up writing native (i.e. non-web) code for most of our applications. There were a few different areas where the browser alone didn't meet our needs, but one that I found suprisingly common was background processing.

Consider the following mobile applications:
- Calendar or clock with alarms.
- E-book reader that syncs content from a server.
- IM or email client that notifies the user of new messages.
- Shopping list that pops up whenever you are near the store.
Ideally, each of these apps will perform some actions even when the user does not have it open. (Background processing is not strictly necessary for the e-reader, but it would be useful to ensure the library is up-to-date even when opened in a place with no network connection.)

You can't do this with a web app. Web Workers don't solve the problem, because they run only while the web page is open. What we need are headless web workers.¹

Update (2010-04-26): Gordon Anderson points out in comments that members of Google's Chromium/Chrome OS projects have made a very similar proposal they call Persistent SharedWorkers.
The API
Headless workers could use almost the same API as Web Workers. Instead of responding to messages from a web page, they would listen to events from the host system (browser or OS). These events might include time intervals, power-on/resume, changes in network connection, geographic locations, or "push" notifications from a remote server.

The event-driven architecture of JavaScript in the browser allows the host system a high level of discretion over resource consumption. There's no special code needed to suspend processes and later restore their state, because JavaScript workers are naturally inactive between events. The host can provide limits on CPU or memory usage per event, with a separate message to notify processes whose handlers were aborted. And it can limit the number of concurrent processes by choosing when to dispatch events to listeners. Some listeners could even be disabled completely at times (like if the device is busy or the battery is low), and notified later of the events they missed.

This is almost a return to the old days of cooperative multitasking. Mobile computing is definitely driving everyone towards higher-level process control in the OS, and different assumptions for applications. It's not surprising that my whole proposal resembles Android and iPhone 4.0 multitasking in several ways, since I've been doing development on Android for the last 18 months and encountering many of the same issues.
The UI
Headless workers do need some way to interact with the user. They could display standard system notifications (via Growl on the Mac, libnotify on Ubuntu, the status bar in Android, etc.) using W3C Web Notifications, which already have an experimental implementation in Chrome.

Users also needs to know which sites have background tasks installed. Headless workers could be represented by icons in a standard location (perhaps a toolbar in desktop browsers, or the home screen on a mobile device). The icons could display ambient status; clicking one would reveal a menu with options to configure or remove it.
Questions
This proposal might be hard to standardize, especially where it's tied to specific OS capabilities. For now I'm just curious: would it be useful? You can write a native app or a browser extension to solve this problem today. But would it be worthwhile to have a standard, cross-platform way to do it? Has anyone else run into problems that this approach could solve?
1. Because all web standards should have names that sound like Harry Potter creatures. ↩
Asides: It's StartPad day again. You can just assume I'll be downtown on Mondays from now on unless I say otherwise.

Posted: April 19th, 2010, 7:34am MDT

It's StartPad day again. You can just assume I'll be downtown on Mondays from now on unless I say otherwise.
Weblog: Read Later: a Mobile Firefox extension

Posted: April 18th, 2010, 1:00am MDT

Hello, Planet Mozilla! I'm Matt Brubeck, the newest member of the Mobile Firefox (Fennec) front-end team. I'm working remotely from Seattle, but you can find me in #mobile during the North American day, or follow me on Buzz/Twitter/etc.

Fennec is a new browser built on the Mozilla platform and sharing much of Firefox's code and features, but with a UI designed from the ground up for touchscreen devices. It's shipping now for Nokia Maemo, and builds should be available very soon (weeks rather than months, I hope) for Android 2.x.

To help myself learn Fennec and XUL, I wrote a simple extension called Read Later. Like Marco Arment's Instapaper service it stores a list of web pages so you can return to them later. Unlike Instapaper, my extension does not save pages to a remote server. Instead, it uses your mobile device's storage, so you can view saved pages offline. I use code from Arc90's Readability bookmarklet to extract the main content from the page, save it, and present it in a simple mobile-friendly layout.

One thing the extension can't do (which Instapaper and other services can) is synchronize saved pages between computers. This would be a great feature for a Mobile Firefox add-on, but writing my own sync service is more work than I want to put into this little side project. A future version may use Weave to sync saved pages, if the size of the data is not a problem.

If you are using a recent Fennec 1.1 build, try out Read Later and let me know what you think. And if you're a developer, you can look at the source code to see how a simple Fennec extension works.
Asides: My first mobile Firefox addon: Save pages to read offline (like Instapaper). http://bitbucket.org/mbrubeck/readlater/wiki

Posted: April 14th, 2010, 2:21pm MDT

My first mobile Firefox addon: Save pages to read offline (like Instapaper). http://bitbucket.org/mbrubeck/readlater/wiki
Asides: OH: High school kids at my bus stop complaining that AT&T's Backflip uses Yahoo search, "which sucks."

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 6:03pm MDT

OH: High school kids at my bus stop complaining that AT&T's Backflip uses Yahoo search, "which sucks."
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 10:38am MDT

Working at Startpad again. Want to join me for lunch at Planet Java?
Asides: Working at Startpad again. Want to join me for lunch at Planet Java?

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 10:07am MDT

Working at Startpad again. Want to join me for lunch at Planet Java?
Asides: Ha! Mozilla's JavaScript team has a status dashboard called http://arewefastyet.com/

Posted: April 9th, 2010, 11:01am MDT

Ha! Mozilla's JavaScript team has a status dashboard called http://arewefastyet.com/
Asides: RT @stechz: Spent some time playing with Fennec and Google Reader on my N1. I think I already prefer it to the stock browser (way more r ...

Posted: April 7th, 2010, 5:39pm MDT

RT @stechz: Spent some time playing with Fennec and Google Reader on my N1. I think I already prefer it to the stock browser (way more r ...
Bookmarks: Small is Beautiful: the design of Lua | Lambda the Ultimate

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 4:15pm MDT

Bookmarks: Small is Beautiful: the design of Lua | Lambda the Ultimate
Asides: Working at StartPad today: http://mbrubeck.livejournal.com/34880.html

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 10:12am MDT

Working at StartPad today: http://mbrubeck.livejournal.com/34880.html
Journal: Coworking

Posted: April 4th, 2010, 7:22pm MDT

I've just returned from a busy week-long trip visiting family on the East coast. Now I'm ready to start my second week of work for Mozilla.

I stayed home for all my first week, to minimize potential hassles or distractions. It sure is nice and productive working alone in a quiet office for long periods, and going downstairs for meals and snacks with my family. But tomorrow for a change of scene I will be at StartPad at 1st & Columbia downtown (near Pioneer Square). If you're in the area and want to share lunch or coffee, email/IM/call/text me.

In the future I'll post to Twitter (which auto-updates Buzz and Facebook) on the days I'm downtown. You can follow me on any of those sites (or subscribe to Planet Matt) if you want to know when I'll be around.
Bookmarks: Dynamic Programming Practice Problems

Posted: April 4th, 2010, 12:02pm MDT

"This site contains a collection of practice dynamic programming problems and their solutions."
Asides: Accidentally retweeted thanks to clumsy fingers on mobile.twitter.com.

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 8:55am MDT

Accidentally retweeted thanks to clumsy fingers on mobile.twitter.com.
Asides: RT @beltzner: I suppose I should also welcome back the farcical bumblings of an 80's era "uh, we got nothin' but tax cuts" Conservative ...

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 4:59am MDT

RT @beltzner: I suppose I should also welcome back the farcical bumblings of an 80's era "uh, we got nothin' but tax cuts" Conservative ...
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 8:44pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Since I know some of you are MBTI fans: check out my friend Nolan's simplified Myers-Briggs personality test for Android. Use your phone to test people you meet at parties. :)
Photos: Scratch

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

Playing with a "game" we designed in Scratch.
Photos: Office

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

My home office, after getting it all set up this weekend.
Asides: Jumping into Mercurial after 3 years of heavy Git usage. Now I know how my ex-colleagues felt learning Git while accustomed to Subversion.

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 2:18pm MDT

Jumping into Mercurial after 3 years of heavy Git usage. Now I know how my ex-colleagues felt learning Git while accustomed to Subversion.
Journal: Daylight Saving Time

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:44pm MDT

Eleanor (after bed time): Why is the sky not dark? Me: Now that it's spring, the days are longer. The sun is just starting to set. Eleanor (cheerfully): Daddy, can't sleep when the sky's not dark!
Sigh...
Asides: Mozilla says goodbye to Firefox for Windows Mobile. Hello, Android and Maemo/MeeGo! http://bit.ly/bJ3QUP

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:00pm MDT

Mozilla says goodbye to Firefox for Windows Mobile. Hello, Android and Maemo/MeeGo! http://bit.ly/bJ3QUP
Bookmarks: Health Insurance | Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner

Posted: March 21st, 2010, 7:21pm MDT

Includes a list of rates and providers of individual health plans by WA county.
Bookmarks: Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 9:22am MDT

"A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni... An alumni relationship is positive; something that people can take pride in; and one that keeps the door open for further opportunities on both ends."
Asides: It's nice how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid can wake from sleep and connect to wifi in 5 seconds on my ThinkPad (at least twice as fast as Karmic).

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 8:17am MDT

It's nice how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid can wake from sleep and connect to wifi in 5 seconds on my ThinkPad (at least twice as fast as Karmic).
Journal: Freelance tips?

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 5:15am MDT
I'm starting my new job at Mozilla as a contractor. The last time I was an independent contractor was eight years ago, in Canada. I've got some decent advice from web sites like FreelanceSwitch and Seattle's Poplar, but I'd like to know if anyone here has consulting experience and can answer some questions:
1. How do you track time and expenses, and send invoices? What do you consider billable vs. non-billable?
2. I know health insurance is important, but do you have dental insurance or any other personal insurance?
3. Do you have a separate bank account for your contracting business?
4. Fellow Washingtonians, what business licenses and taxes do you file, aside from federal income and self-employment tax?
5. Do you have a lawyer or accountant? If so, can you recommend one in the Seattle area?
6. Anything else I might not have thought of?
Bookmarks: Android: On Context Buttons

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:37pm MDT

"So, while the first three of these buttons are indeed useful (and I do honest to goodness use them all the time), I would argue that they shouldn’t exist."
Bookmarks: Confessions of a home-schooler - Salon.com

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:28pm MDT

"For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it's like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert." (via tvancort)
Asides: @koush Walk into a bar and ask to handle someone's Tattoo or Liquid. Then you'll get to test your recovery.

Posted: March 13th, 2010, 3:40pm MST

@koush Walk into a bar and ask to handle someone's Tattoo or Liquid. Then you'll get to test your recovery.
Weblog: Discovering Urbit: Functional programming from scratch

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:00am MST

C. Guy Yarvin is a “good friend” of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger known for iconoclastic novella-length essays on politics and history (and occasionally computer science). Guy recently published, under his own name, a project in language and systems design. His own writing about his work is entertaining but verbose (as Moldbug's readers might expect), so I will attempt to summarize it here.
Nock, Urbit, Watt
First there is Nock, “a tool for defining higher-level languages – comparable to the lambda calculus, but meant as foundational system software rather than foundational metamathematics.” Its primitives include positive integers with equality and increment operators, cons cells with car/cdr/cadr/etc., and a macro for convenient branching. Nock uses trees of integers to represent both code and data. Nock is aggressively tiny; the spec linked above is just 33 terse lines.

Next, Guy provides the rationale for Nock. In short, he asks how a planet-wide computing infrastructure (OS, networking, and languages) would look if designed from first priniciples for robustness and interoperability. The answer he proposes is Urbit: a URI-like namespace distributed globally via content-centric networking, with a feudal structure for top-level names and cryptographic identities. Urbit is a static functional namespace: it is both referentially transparent and monotonic (a name, once bound to a value, cannot be un- or re-bound).

Why does this require a new formal logic and a new programming language? In Urbit, all data and code are distributed via the global namespace. For interoperability, the code must have a standard format. Nock's minimal spec is meant to be an unambiguous, unchanging, totally standardized basis for computation in Urbit. Above it will be Watt, a self-hosting language that compiles to Nock. Urbit itself will be implemented in Watt, so Nock and Watt are designed to treat data as code using metacircular evaluation.
The code
A prototype implementation of Watt is on GitHub. It is not yet self-hosting; the current compiler is written in C. Watt is a functional language with static types called “molds” and a mechanism for explicit lazy evaluation. (I was suprised to find I had accidentally created an incompatible lazy dialect of Nock – despite its goal of unambiguous semantics – just by implementing it in Haskell.)

The code is not fully documented, but the repository contains draft specs for both Watt and Urbit. Beware: the syntax and terminology are a bit unconventional. Guy has offered a few exercises to help get started with Nock and Watt:
The Nock challenge: Write a decrement operator in Nock, and an interpreter that can evaluate it. Basic Watt: Write an integer square root function in Watt. Advanced Watt: How would you write a function that tests whether molds A and B are orthogonal (no noun is in both A and B)? Or compatible (any noun in A is also in B)? Are these functions NP-complete? If so, how might one work around this in practice?
If you want to learn more, start with these problems. You can email your solutions to Guy.
Will it work?
I find Urbit intellectually appealing; it is a simple and clean architecture that could potentially replace a lot of complex system software. But can we get there from here?

Guy imagines Urbit as the product of an ages-old Martian civilization:

Since Earth code is fifty years old, and Martian code is fifty million years old, Martian code has been evolving into a big ball of mud for a million times longer than Earth software. (And two million times longer than Windows.) …

Therefore, at some point in Martian history, some abject fsck of a Martian code-monkey must have said: fsck this entire fscking ball of mud. For lo, its defects cannot be summarized; for they exceed the global supply of bullet points; for numerous as the fishes in the sea, like the fishes in the sea they fsck, making more little fscking fishes. For lo, it is fscked, and a big ball of mud. And there is only one thing to do with it: obliterate the trunk, fire the developers, and hire a whole new fscking army of Martian code-monkeys to rewrite the entire fscking thing.

… This is the crucial inference we can draw about Mars: since the Martians had 50 million years to try, in the end they must have succeeded. The result: Martian code, as we know it today. Not enormous and horrible – tiny and diamond-perfect. Moreover, because it is tiny and diamond-perfect, it is perfectly stable and never changes or decays. It neither is a big ball of mud, nor tends to become one. It has achieved its final, permanent and excellent state.

Do Earthlings have the will to throw out the whole ball of mud and start from scratch? I doubt it. We can build Urbit but no one will come, unless it solves some problem radically better than current software. Moldbug thinks feudalism will produce better online reputation, but feudal reputation does not require feudal identity; it is not that much harder to build Moldbug's reputation system on Earth than on Mars. I still have not figured out the killer app that will get early adopters to switch to Urbit.
Bookmarks: Official Google Blog: Biking directions added to Google Maps

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:26am MST

Google Maps adds bike maps and bike routes, thanks to Seattle-based Googlers. It knows to avoid hills and prefer bike trails and bike lanes.
Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

Posted: March 6th, 2010, 4:25pm MST

Enclosure: [download]

But "Ender Wiggins" doesn't have the same initials...
Bookmarks: The School Issue - Preschool - Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? - NYTimes.com

Posted: March 6th, 2010, 9:22am MST

"If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea." Profile of a school using the Tools of the Mind method.
Journal: Mozilla

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 11:57am MST

Later this month I am starting a new job with the Mobile Firefox team at the Mozilla Corporation. I'll be staying in Seattle, with occasional trips to the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. I'll work mostly at home but I plan to come downtown about once a week to work at the library, coffee shops, StartPad, or friends' offices. Let me know if you are in Seattle or the Bay Area and want to get together sometime. After I start working from home I should be eager for company.
Kiha is still doing good things and I'll be watching their progress eagerly. I learned a lot there and I like the direction Kiha is taking, but Mozilla's offer was too good to pass up: working on free software, open standards, new platforms, and with many hackers whose work I know and admire.
Trivia: I've now had more non-student jobs in eight years than my dad has in thirty-eight.
Asides: How did I miss @dkpan's 24-hour Haruki Murakami reading last summer, one block from my office? http://occidentalpark.wordpress.com/events/

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:41pm MST

How did I miss @dkpan's 24-hour Haruki Murakami reading last summer, one block from my office? http://occidentalpark.wordpress.com/events/
Asides: Found the banknotes' owner, @dkpan. Due to his name's shortness, it was unabridged on the library's hold slip. We got in touch on Facebook.

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:32pm MST

Found the banknotes' owner, @dkpan. Due to his name's shortness, it was unabridged on the library's hold slip. We got in touch on Facebook.
Asides: Tonight I found one Soviet- and one Iranian banknote in my library book ("Girl with Curious Hair").

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:13pm MST

Tonight I found one Soviet- and one Iranian banknote in my library book ("Girl with Curious Hair").
Asides: @mhewner Ringdroid was written Audacity author Dominic Mazzoni, who first introduced me to Josh Haberman (and thus indirectly to you)!

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 12:12pm MST

@mhewner Ringdroid was written Audacity author Dominic Mazzoni, who first introduced me to Josh Haberman (and thus indirectly to you)!
Bookmarks: Correct way to handle mobile browsers

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:27pm MST

Redirect mobile users to the mobile site automatically, or require them to choose explicitly? Pro and con.
Weblog: The network is the human being

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 1:00am MST

Nathanael Boehm wrote a nice essay last month called The Future of Employment?, about a disconnect between workers' and employers' views of social networks. (This post is based partly on the ensuing Hacker News thread.) Boehm wrote:

When I need help with a challenge at work or need to run some ideas past people I don’t turn to my co-workers, I look to my network of colleagues beyond the walls of my workplace. Whilst my co-workers might be competent at their job they can’t hope to compete with the hundreds of people I have access to through my social networks.

The late Sun Microsystems taught us that the network is the computer. It's true: we still use non-networked computers for specialized tasks, but nobody wants one on their desk – it's just so useless compared to one that talks to the entire world. Boehm could have titled his essay The Network is the Employee. There are still tasks that people do in isolation, but the ability to contact a network of peers and experts makes the difference in my job, and many others.
Alone together
The lone computer programmer in a small business has thousands of colleagues on Stack Overflow, Reddit, and so on. It's a messy way to find answers, but it's sure better than the days when your only choice was to call tech support – or smack the box with your fist, whichever seemed more useful. I can't begin to list all the problems I've solved and things I've learned by Googling for others with experience, and getting help from a different expert for every problem.

Decades before the web, computer geeks had virtual communities on mailing lists, Usenet, and IRC. Now every job in the world has its corresponding forum. Even the night clerk at the gas station has Not Always Right.

Teaching has long been a solitary profession. Despite working in a crowded classroom, teachers are isolated; they rarely have colleagues observing or participating directly in their work. This has such an impact that teachers are sometimes trained in meditation or reflection techniques, to make up for the lack of external feedback. So I'm curious what happens when teachers start to work together remotely the way programmers do.
You will be assimilated
Boehm's essay also reminded me of a vague sci-fi idea I've been kicking around: the first group minds will evolve from the intersection of Mechanical Turk, virtual assistants, social networking, and augmented reality.

Starting around the 1990s, it was possible to instantly "know" any fact that was published online. Since then, we've increased the amount of content online, our tools for searching it, and ways of connecting to the network. Today we have instant access to almost any published knowledge, anywhere.

There are more people on the net too, and more ways to find and talk to them. Most of us can contact dozens of friends at any given moment, plus friends-of-friends, co-workers, fellow members of communites like Hacker News or MetaFilter, and also complete strangers. Along with raw facts, we have access to vast amounts of human judgement, experience, and skill.

One product of this is the "virtual assistant," who provides a service that was once exclusive to high-powered executives. Now personal assistants can work remotely (often overseas), spread costs by serving many masters, and leverage the internet superpowers listed above. Their services are mostly targeted at small business owners and the Tim Ferriss crowd, but I'm sure someone soon will market virtual assistance to all sorts of other creative workers, teachers, even stay-at-home parents.

So, how long before I can touch a button to let a remote assistant see what I'm seeing in real-time and help me make transportation plans, translate foreign signs and speech, look up emails related to whatever I'm doing or thinking, or even advise me on what to say? Some of these queries will go to my circle of friends, others to the general public, and some to a personal assistant who is paid well to keep up with my specific needs. And that assistant of course will subcontract portions of each job to computer programs, legions of cheap anonymous Turkers, or his or her own network of helpers. At that point, I'm augmenting my own perception, memory, and judgement with a whole network of brains that I carry around, ready to engage with any situation I meet.

If nothing else, I hope someone writes a good sci-fi thriller story in which a rogue virtual assistant manipulates the actions of unsuspecting clients, leading them to some unseen end.
Bookmarks: New Moon Girls Online - New Moon Magazine

Posted: February 27th, 2010, 9:51pm MST

"Our bi-monthly magazine is 100% advertising-free, highest-quality content for girls age 8 and up! You won't find diet advice or popularity contests here." The copy I saw in the library had some good science and engineering articles, among other things.
Journal: Back-formation

Posted: February 25th, 2010, 9:47am MST

A conversation from a few months ago: Me: Hi, Eleanor! I see you put your clothes on by yourself. Eleanor (in a dress): Oh, it's only one clo.
Bookmarks: Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 11:59am MST

"In this user-friendly, six-part tutorial, Joel Spolsky teaches you the key concepts."

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on Torn over the C++ question by Anonymous

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 4:33pm MST by Anonymous

It’s trivial to wrap your C implementation so that it can be called directly from C++. So translating your implementation from C to C++ provides no real benefit, it’s more like busy work. Plus C++ is such an ugly language that its hard to imagine that it won’t die out over the next decade, replaced by C#/Objective C/Java etc. C, on the other hand, has virtues of simplicity, clarity, portability, and performance that other programming languages have yet to supplant.

Planet Matt

Code: mbrubeck started watching jinzhu/vrome

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 4:54pm MST

vrome's description:
Vim keybindings extension for Chrome, based on vimlike-smooziee, but much more features.
Bookmarks: Vimium - Google Chrome extension

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 4:35pm MST

"Vimium provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of Vim."
Bookmarks: creationix's Do

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 1:25pm MST

A JavaScript concurrency library (similar to Oni or Arrowlets) for Node.js.
Code: mbrubeck forked cgyarvin/urbit

Posted: February 12th, 2010, 9:08pm MST

Forked repository is at mbrubeck/urbit
Bookmarks: GF - Grammatical Framework

Posted: February 12th, 2010, 5:25pm MST

A functional programming language for parsing and transforming both programming languages and natural (human) languages.
Asides: Google Buzz now asks you to choose and preview your privacy settings before your first post is published: http://bit.ly/bngqpP

Posted: February 12th, 2010, 9:32am MST

Google Buzz now asks you to choose and preview your privacy settings before your first post is published: http://bit.ly/bngqpP
Asides: Bought plane tickets to go to Baltimore/DC next month. I hope it's thawed out by then.

Posted: February 11th, 2010, 11:53am MST

Bought plane tickets to go to Baltimore/DC next month. I hope it's thawed out by then.
About me: Google profile

Posted: February 10th, 2010, 12:05pm MST

Follow me on Google Buzz, Chat, Reader, etc.
Bookmarks: Worse Is Better

Posted: February 9th, 2010, 9:41am MST

Richard Gabriel recounts the history of the classic papers by himself and "Nickieben Bourbaki."
Code: mbrubeck started watching cgyarvin/urbit

Posted: January 30th, 2010, 9:20pm MST

urbit's description:
Urbit: an operating function
Bookmarks: Prezi - The zooming presentation editor

Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 9:28am MST

Instead of "slideshows," uses a single canvas with slick zooming and panning.
Code: mbrubeck created repository mynock

Posted: January 19th, 2010, 10:21pm MST

New repository is at mbrubeck/mynock
Asides: @bernard_ben Got an Android phone? I like SeattleBusBot (by co-worker @joulespersecond), Google Sky Map, Google Voice, and Toddler Lock.

Posted: January 19th, 2010, 8:16am MST

@bernard_ben Got an Android phone? I like SeattleBusBot (by co-worker @joulespersecond), Google Sky Map, Google Voice, and Toddler Lock.
Code: mbrubeck opened issue 52 on ry/node

Posted: January 18th, 2010, 10:59am MST

[patch] dns API docs are out of date
Bookmarks: Khan Academy

Posted: January 17th, 2010, 10:22am MST

Short educational videos "covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance."
Asides: Atomic Robo is a must-read for anyone who likes Girl Genius or Penny Arcade (I'm looking at you, @bernard_ben): http://doiop.com/atomic

Posted: January 16th, 2010, 9:04pm MST

Atomic Robo is a must-read for anyone who likes Girl Genius or Penny Arcade (I'm looking at you, @bernard_ben): http://doiop.com/atomic
Bookmarks: Pausing JavaScript with async.js - Elijah Grey

Posted: January 13th, 2010, 3:27pm MST

"async.js is a library that aims to make it so you don’t have to mess with callbacks when making applications in JavaScript 1.7 or higher by using the yield statement to pause function execution."
Code: mbrubeck forked ry/node

Posted: January 13th, 2010, 10:37am MST

Forked repository is at mbrubeck/node
Weblog: Finding SI unit domain names with Node.js

Posted: January 13th, 2010, 1:00am MST
I'm working on some ideas for finance or news software that deliberately updates infrequently, so it doesn't reward me for reloading it constantly. I came up with the name "microhertz" to describe the idea. (1 microhertz ≈ once every eleven and a half days.)

As usual when I think of a project name, I did some DNS searches. Unfortunately "microhertz.com" is not available (but "microhertz.org" is). Then I went off on a tangent and got curious about which other SI units are available as domain names.

This was the perfect opportunity to try node.js so I could use its asynchronous DNS library to run dozens of lookups in parallel. I grabbed a list of units and prefixes from NIST and wrote the following script:
```
var dns = require("dns"), sys = require('sys');

var prefixes = ["yotta", "zetta", "exa", "peta", "tera", "giga", "mega",
  "kilo", "hecto", "deka", "deci", "centi", "milli", "micro", "nano",
  "pico", "femto", "atto", "zepto", "yocto"];

var units = ["meter", "gram", "second", "ampere", "kelvin", "mole",
  "candela", "radian", "steradian", "hertz", "newton", "pascal", "joule",
  "watt", "colomb", "volt", "farad", "ohm", "siemens", "weber", "henry",
  "lumen", "lux", "becquerel", "gray", "sievert", "katal"];

for (var i=0; i<prefixes.length; i++) {
  for (var j=0; j<units.length; j++) {
    checkAvailable(prefixes[i] + units[j] + ".com", sys.puts);
  }
}

function checkAvailable(name, callback) {
  dns.resolve4(name).addErrback(function(e) {
    if (e.errno == dns.NXDOMAIN) callback(name);
  })
}
```
Out of 540 possible .com names, I found 376 that are available (and 10 more that produced temporary DNS errors, which I haven't investigated). Here are a few interesting ones, with some commentary:
- exasecond.com – 32 billion years
- petasecond.com – 32 million years
- petawatt.com – can be produced for femtoseconds by powerful lasers
- terapascal.com
- gigakelvin.com – possible temperature of picosecond flashes in sonoluminescence
- giganewton.com – 225 million pounds force
- gigafarad.com
- kilosecond.com – 16 minutes 40 seconds
- kilokelvin.com – 1340 degrees Fahrenheit
- centiohm.com
- millifarad.com
- microkelvin.com
- picohertz.com – once every 31,689 years
- picojoule.com
- femtogram.com – mass of a single virus
- yoctogram.com – a hydrogen atom weighs 1.66 yoctograms
- zeptomole.com – 602 molecules
To get the complete list, just copy the script above to a file, and run it like this: node listnames.js

Along the way I discovered that the API documentation for Node's dns module was out-of-date. This is fixed in my GitHub fork, and I've sent a pull request to the author Ryan Dahl.
Code: mbrubeck created repository outline-grep

Posted: January 12th, 2010, 9:34pm MST

New repository is at mbrubeck/outline-grep
Weblog: Weekend hack: outline grep

Posted: January 12th, 2010, 1:00am MST
I keep almost all of my notes and to-do lists in plain text files, so I can edit and search them with Vim, grep, and other standard Unix tools. I often indent lines in these files to create a simple outline structure, and use the autoindent and foldmethod=indent options to make Vim into a simple outliner.

To get useful output when searching through these outline-structured files, I wrote a simple grep replacement. Given a text file with a Python-style indentation structure, ogrep searches the file for a regular expression. It prints matching lines, with their "parent" lines as context. For example, if input.txt looks like this:
```
2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
    Visit with family.
2009-01-02
  Grocery store and library.
2009-01-03
  Stay home.
2009-01-04
  Back to work.
    Remember to set an alarm.
```
then ogrep work input.txt will produce the following output:
```
2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
2009-01-04
  Back to work.
```
You can download ogrep from the outline-grep repository on GitHub, or just read the literate Haskell file. The code is almost trivial (40 lines of code, plus imports and comments); I'm publishing it just in case anyone else has a use for it, and because some of my friends were curious about how I'm using Haskell. I've now written a few "real-world" Haskell programs (compleat was the first). I'm finding Haskell very well suited to such programs, though this particular one would be equally easy in a language like Perl, Python, or Ruby.

This is a one-off tool to fill a gap in my workflow; there are no configuration options or useful error messages. It would be fairly easy to extend it, though. For example, an option to include children (as well as parents) of matching lines might be handy. I recently realized that ogrep often works for searching through source code too, which may generate some more unexpected use cases.

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on Torn over the C++ question by Kate

Posted: January 6th, 2010, 12:01pm MST by Kate

Hi. Don’t forget to check the return value of malloc(). You might also enjoy this:
[iq0.com]
Comment on Gazelle/upb status and plans (aka: On Releasing) by Dennis

Posted: December 31st, 2009, 9:03am MST by Dennis

You should name it “Gazelle Forever”.

I kid
Comment on Torn over the C++ question by blankthemuffin

Posted: December 27th, 2009, 4:04pm MST by blankthemuffin

I vote to stick with C for another reason, integration with other languages. If your project is a nice C library, it’s vastly easier for people using other languages, C, Python, whatever, to interface with your library rather than having to re-implement it.

C++ is imo an awful choice for a library because it ends up restricting this to other things written in C++ (unless of course you wrap it up in a C abi but that is messy).

I’d prefer a base in C with a C++ wrapper as required.

Planet Matt

Bookmarks: Overtime by Charles Stross

Posted: December 23rd, 2009, 8:27am MST

A new Laundry story, free from Tor.com.
Code: mbrubeck started watching snoyberg/yesod

Posted: December 21st, 2009, 1:08pm MST

yesod's description:
A Restful front controller built on Hack.
Code: mbrubeck started watching cpennington/compleat

Posted: December 21st, 2009, 10:17am MST

compleat's description:
Generate command-line completions from simple usage descriptions.

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on Torn over the C++ question by nobody

Posted: December 14th, 2009, 4:09pm MST by nobody

GCC 4.5 should get link-time optimization which will hopefully help binary size a lot. ultimately though, i still find myself reaching for C, for the ease of binding to other languages and the smaller size. i still like to keep my code C++ compatible and run it through the C++ compiler occasionally though, just because it’s much stricter on typing.

Planet Matt

Bookmarks: The Origins of Pattern Theory, The Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World

Posted: December 9th, 2009, 10:40am MST

"I'm addressing a room full of people, a whole football field full of people. I don't know hardly anything about what all of you do. So – please be nice to me." Christopher Alexander's OOPSLA keynote.

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on Torn over the C++ question by George P.

Posted: December 8th, 2009, 7:59pm MST by George P.

I have a hard time accepting the comment that C++ compilers aren’t very good at keeping things small. Which compiler have you used? I would agree that C++ nuances are complicated and that you need to read volumes of books to better grasp the details of optimization.

Planet Matt

Bookmarks: Does every startup need a Steve Jobs?

Posted: December 7th, 2009, 10:52am MST

"All products ultimately come from an epic struggle between three perspectives: Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability."

Comments for Josh the Outspoken

Comment on Porting upb to C++? by Rehno Lindeque

Posted: December 6th, 2009, 4:50am MST by Rehno Lindeque

I’ve also been lazily contemplating upb for use in my projects. Since I tend to write my code in strange languages like D and Haskell, I’ll second the other’s comments! I would not mind having a thin C++ wrapper though.
Comment on Torn over the C++ question by Alejandro M.

Posted: December 3rd, 2009, 7:47am MST by Alejandro M.

great choice!

2 Star

Torn over the C++ question

Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 1:17pm MST by Josh
I am having a very difficult time deciding whether to go through with the C++ port of upb or to stay in C.

I’ve ported about one third of upb to C++, on a branch, to see how it would turn out. It was a ton of work. Here are my current observations:
- The C++ is cleaner, more readable, less error-prone code. It’s just a fact. Compare for yourself (C: upb_def.h, upb_def.c; C++: upb_def.h, upb_def.cc). This is due to numerous factors:
  - type-safe containers means fewer casts.
  - “public” and “private” keywords make it easy to separate the private parts of your interface, without having to specify in comments which is which.
  - namespaces and class scope mean that I don’t have to write out my identifiers like upb_fielddef_dothis(), I can just write DoThis().
  - real inheritance and member classes mean I don’t have to explicitly call all the right constructors/destructors, or write explicit casts for upcasts
  - destructors that are guaranteed to run on scope exit mean I can use RAII patterns like mutexes that automatically unlock when the scope is exited
- The source got shorter; the portion I ported went from 1483 lines to 1133, or a ~30% reduction.
- The binary got a LOT bigger. I had one function get literally 5x as big. I haven’t figured out why this happened yet. I used templates to make the table generic, but I was extremely careful to make sure that the template only generated a small amount of code — basically just the hash lookup routine, which is small (note: the hash function for strings was not templated or inlined). But another issue is that the C++ compiler appears to emit multiple copies of the same function in the same object file! For example, I found some virtual destructors emitted literally three times in the same file. Why is this?
- I just heard back from a security guru from the Google security team, who said that C is often easier to audit than C++ because it’s easier to figure out what is actually going on, without having to dig through layers of abstraction. This surprised me (maybe it shouldn’t have, since Sam Quigley said the same thing in a comment on my last entry), but I was also a little bit relieved.
I’m leaning towards sticking with C, for the following reasons:
- C++ compilers aren’t very good at keeping things small, even when you are juducious with your use of templates.
- C++ compilers are much more complicated that C compilers, and therefore not as ubiquitous or as easy to trust generally.
- C isn’t harder to audit for security than C++, and may actually be easier.
I’ll try to take some of the lessons I learned from my partial C++ port to make the C more readable.

Build →

BuffaloFeeds » Friends

Feeds

Friends (100 unread)

Posted: July 21st, 2010, 6:43pm MDT

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:25am MDT

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:13am MDT

Posted: July 10th, 2010, 12:10am MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: July 7th, 2010, 7:39pm MDT

Posted: July 1st, 2010, 8:30am MDT

Posted: June 9th, 2010, 1:35pm MDT

Posted: June 1st, 2010, 3:19pm MDT

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 10:36pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: May 17th, 2010, 2:38pm MDT

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 1:47pm MDT

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 11:08am MDT

Posted: May 10th, 2010, 4:36pm MDT

Posted: May 9th, 2010, 8:50pm MDT

Posted: May 7th, 2010, 3:57pm MDT

Posted: May 6th, 2010, 12:36pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: May 5th, 2010, 2:14pm MDT by Wladimir

Posted: April 30th, 2010, 1:00am MDT

Posted: April 29th, 2010, 5:33pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: April 28th, 2010, 2:19pm MDT

Posted: April 24th, 2010, 2:22pm MDT

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 11:03am MDT

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 9:14am MDT

Posted: April 22nd, 2010, 1:00am MDT

Posted: April 19th, 2010, 7:34am MDT

Posted: April 18th, 2010, 1:00am MDT

Posted: April 14th, 2010, 2:21pm MDT

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 6:03pm MDT

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 10:38am MDT

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 10:07am MDT

Posted: April 9th, 2010, 11:01am MDT

Posted: April 7th, 2010, 5:39pm MDT

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 4:15pm MDT

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 10:12am MDT

Posted: April 4th, 2010, 7:22pm MDT

Posted: April 4th, 2010, 12:02pm MDT

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 8:55am MDT

Posted: April 1st, 2010, 4:59am MDT

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 8:44pm MDT

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 2:18pm MDT

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:44pm MDT

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:00pm MDT

Posted: March 21st, 2010, 7:21pm MDT

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 9:22am MDT

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 8:17am MDT

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 5:15am MDT

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:37pm MDT

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:28pm MDT

Posted: March 13th, 2010, 3:40pm MST

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:00am MST

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:26am MST

Posted: March 6th, 2010, 4:25pm MST

Enclosure: [download]

Posted: March 6th, 2010, 9:22am MST

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 11:57am MST

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:41pm MST

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:32pm MST

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:13pm MST

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 12:12pm MST

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:27pm MST

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 1:00am MST

Posted: February 27th, 2010, 9:51pm MST

Posted: February 25th, 2010, 9:47am MST

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 11:59am MST

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 4:33pm MST by Anonymous

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 4:54pm MST

Posted: February 17th, 2010, 4:35pm MST