Slashdot Mirror

Facebook is slowly turning into the WalMart equivalent for the internet. Sure, you could go to flickr for the photos, twitter for the updates, upcoming for the events, youtube/hulu for videos, gtalk/yahoo for IM, gmail to send messages - or you could go to facebook and have all of it half-assed.

Basically a huge walled garden which is only available to those inside the wall. The trick of course, is to make it nice so that people can bring in their data easily and fb's success is because they make it damn convenient to put your data in there.

Now, do I use facebook? Damn right, I do ... because as much bitching as I do about the effect it's having on the entire internet, I gotta move with my friends or end up falling out of touch, with everybody who already knows what everybody else is doing. And in some selfish way, my friends are more important to me than the internet.

Sad, but true.

Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally. In a more selfish angle, poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere ... but it should come as no surprise that a low standard of living has a lower carbon footprint, but a reversal into the medieval dark ages, into a world of filth and disease is not where I thought progress would take me.

The hint of "noble savage" that this particular article seems to dig up almost horrifies me. The illusion that somehow all of us should aspire to simple living goes against two centuries of human culture. Even they aspire for me, as the article clearly spells out "Discomfort is an investment". These people aren't comfortable, the population explosion and the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone. Fewer hands to till and more mouths to feed.

Because I live in urban India, I see slums day in & day out. I walk by them, I occasionally grab a cup of chai from the roadside vendor (hey, I got an immune system, don't I?). I end up people-watching, the drunkard husband, the garbage picker kids, the housemaid wife, the precocious teenager dreaming of a gangster life. Vivid, poignant & stark at the same time. But very rarely do I click a picture or write about what I see (maybe I'm in middle-class denial, I don't know). Though occasionally rant about the representation of it in popular culture. This is the bombay I love to visit, not the slums or the bombed hotels.

I want progress, not just for me ... but for everyone. Not a green planet that's So-so-Soylent. Let me have my dream, at least ... don't glorify my nightmares :(

Ugh, I think I've spent all the optimism I'd had for the day.

The fundamental issue with the new RIA standards is the lack the of authoring tools. I have got a number of graphically-inclined friends who are never going to write something with HTML5 mainly because there are no tools out there (yet) which come even close what the Adobe authoring tools can do.

Recently, I sat with one of my friends (who's a decent artist) and played around with Processing 1.0. After several minutes of hard work, it just became abundantly clear that visual thinkers have a lot of trouble expressing what they want algorithmically. The experience was repeated the next time, when he was playing around with chucK (yeah, he's a music dude too).

The graphic artist folks will have a lot of trouble using the HTML 5 authoring tools currently available, especially if they're confined to use HTML Canvas programmatically. I've easily gotten upto speed with canvas, but I'm a programmer with no artistic pretensions.

Real adoption of HTML5 - canvas and video & all, will need easy ways to author media ... not write code.

Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF. Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).

And looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that - quoted from Jdub's email to gnome-lists.

> [9] What is your positioning with respect to the issue of OOXML?

An exasperating waste of time -- on both sides of the debate -- that will
ultimately harm international technology standards more than it will ever
help Microsoft's bottom line or harm the absolutely inevitable success of
Software Freedom.

I've already shouted down MooXML, but I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).

As much as the No DRM makes sense from a political & ethical point of view, the fact that people are recognizing DRM as a bad thing is starting to dawn on people. When Apple iTunes wanted DRM out of the way (for audio, though not for video), I thought of it as a win-win-win situation for everyone including the artists, APPL and the users (screw the RIAA).

Now Y! is doing the same thing and very intelligent of them too. Yahoo! music engine is not something I would use (or *could* use) despite getting a promotional offer (*disclaimer* as an employee) and tying down people to such idiotic client lockins (*cough* jukebox) is not working out well for it at all. If it would work well with Amarok or even the less popular Songbird, I'd happily use it over Last.fm (which streams directly into amarok happily).

Finally, it is a good thing that Y! is realizing that Convenience is a Feature++ - one way or the other.

Look at the original Ximian. I mean, writing Evolution was the core USP of whatever Ximian became into. But somewhere on the way into building an open source email client/PIM/Outlook-killer, the Evolution codebase filled up with what I can only call "employee code" (i.e This fixes the bug now, we'll see what it breaks in QA).

I've tried hacking around there, but eventually ended up back in thunderbird land. But on that side of the fence, some of the problems are purely due to over-engineered modularity (yes ... yes, we all love XPCOM [*cough* bonobo], but not that much). And considering I've weaned most of my relatives off Outlook Express with thunderbird, migrating them to Kmail was kinda too hard to have a point.

In short, "do it well" with hackers and don't just hack it up with code written by employees to meet deadlines. Because I sure as hell would love a email client that I could sic my sister/cousins on (she runs linux now, without any clue beyond "clicky clicky") and hack on when I get a brilliant idea once in a while (for example, a pluggable addressbook api - ala kmail's hooks)

My first impression of the book review was - "Oh gawd, a math book went 'OMG Ponies !!111'".

But I've sort of realized that form follows emotion and in a world where Math is not consider cool (not in India though), something like this which stands away from the boring beige world of mathematics would get more eyeballs into the basic subject. Not that I'd consider some of it boring, by any stretch of imagination. And who hasn't rewritten math problems into "real" problems ? (xkcd has become lame of late - I suspect after his visit to MIT).

But such wedges into the insular cracks of things could be nice - to let people burn through the "Thou Suckest" phase of learning anything new. Especially when the field is full of elitist fifty year olds ("elite" is good, "elitist" is bad).

So if it makes a bunch of girls pick up math, good - just the same way Asterix&Obelix makes me want to learn French ... we all just need a reason, to make whatever we're doing cool (ah, the tyranny of cool).

Dexter's laboratory, Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls are enough to establish his genius. But he managed to turn around my opinion about Star Wars (as someone born in the eighties and having got a TV in the nineties) - while reinforcing my low opinion of George Lucas's later work. Samurai Jack is really another example of a long epic saga, minimalistically drawn, yet full of life, twists and curve balls.

Hopefully, they borrow the good parts from his work and not go all CG centric over the story telling part.

Dexter's laboratory, Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls are enough to establish his genius. But he managed to turn around my opinion about Star Wars (as someone born in the eighties and having got a TV in the nineties) - while reinforcing my low opinion of George Lucas's later work. Samurai Jack is really another example of a long epic saga, minimalistically drawn, yet full of life, twists and curve balls.

Hopefully, they borrow the good parts from his work and not go all CG centric over the story telling part.

A lot of people are replacing client-server apps with browser based apps, with zero install hassles - which this particular example doesn't really have. But learning to build html apps in CGI mode is easier than re-learning event loops for GTK land (even in perl).

Of course, debugging in-browser apps is getting easier with firebug and other developer oriented firefox bits. Now, whether the app is built using perl-CGI, mod_perl, php, ruby on rails, even servlets doesn't matter - the UI can actually work very well. For instance my sudoku, in fact looks better in HTML than if I (let me repeat, if *I*) had done it with GTK or MFC.

And CGI still hasn't lost its edge totally. There are places when you *have* to use CGI to do what you want. I ran into one case when I couldn't use php when I wanted to server pushes on a live connection. Instead of firing multiple requests to the server, I hold the connection and push data when it comes available - sort of stateful connections reinvented for HTTP. Which has definite promise when you're building mashups, which fetch data from elsewhere without cross-user leakage (heh, if he can hijack TCP, I don't know what...) - flockr for instance uses such a script in the backend to feed it data (except I'll be an idiot to post a live CGI script to slashdot).

CGI ain't quite dead yet ...

A lot of people are replacing client-server apps with browser based apps, with zero install hassles - which this particular example doesn't really have. But learning to build html apps in CGI mode is easier than re-learning event loops for GTK land (even in perl).

Of course, debugging in-browser apps is getting easier with firebug and other developer oriented firefox bits. Now, whether the app is built using perl-CGI, mod_perl, php, ruby on rails, even servlets doesn't matter - the UI can actually work very well. For instance my sudoku, in fact looks better in HTML than if I (let me repeat, if *I*) had done it with GTK or MFC.

And CGI still hasn't lost its edge totally. There are places when you *have* to use CGI to do what you want. I ran into one case when I couldn't use php when I wanted to server pushes on a live connection. Instead of firing multiple requests to the server, I hold the connection and push data when it comes available - sort of stateful connections reinvented for HTTP. Which has definite promise when you're building mashups, which fetch data from elsewhere without cross-user leakage (heh, if he can hijack TCP, I don't know what...) - flockr for instance uses such a script in the backend to feed it data (except I'll be an idiot to post a live CGI script to slashdot).

CGI ain't quite dead yet ...

A lot of people are replacing client-server apps with browser based apps, with zero install hassles - which this particular example doesn't really have. But learning to build html apps in CGI mode is easier than re-learning event loops for GTK land (even in perl).

Of course, debugging in-browser apps is getting easier with firebug and other developer oriented firefox bits. Now, whether the app is built using perl-CGI, mod_perl, php, ruby on rails, even servlets doesn't matter - the UI can actually work very well. For instance my sudoku, in fact looks better in HTML than if I (let me repeat, if *I*) had done it with GTK or MFC.

And CGI still hasn't lost its edge totally. There are places when you *have* to use CGI to do what you want. I ran into one case when I couldn't use php when I wanted to server pushes on a live connection. Instead of firing multiple requests to the server, I hold the connection and push data when it comes available - sort of stateful connections reinvented for HTTP. Which has definite promise when you're building mashups, which fetch data from elsewhere without cross-user leakage (heh, if he can hijack TCP, I don't know what...) - flockr for instance uses such a script in the backend to feed it data (except I'll be an idiot to post a live CGI script to slashdot).

CGI ain't quite dead yet ...

Kerala was the first state to do this - slashdot story (and the oblig. dupe).

But those stories paint Kerala as some hippie commune full of comrades - I've been following the developments in Kerala for a while and in general all that makes sense.

Of course, most of these states are picking F/OSS for economic reasons - but not exactly about freedom and stuff. I've heard whispers from the gubment that it is the support contracts which are deal killers for F/OSS in general, but of late the government has started taking a socialist approach of doing it in-house rather than contracting it out to vendors (well, it doesn't sound socialist when a company does I.T, right).

I've done some benchmarks and measurements in the past which will never be made public (I work for Yahoo!). And the most important bits in those have been CSS and Scripts. A lot of performance has been squeezed out of the HTTP layers (akamai, Expires headers), but not enough attention has been paid to the render section of the experience. You could possibly reproduce the benchmarks with a php script which does a sleep() for a few seconds to introduce delays at various points and with a weekend to waste.

The page does not start rendering till the last CSS stream is completed, which means if your css has @import url() entries, the delay before render increases (until that file is pulled & parsed too). It really pays to have the quickest load for the css data over anything else - because without it, all you'll get it a blank page for a while.

Scripts marked defer do not always defer and a lot of inline code in <script> tags depend on such scripts that a lot of browsers just pull the scripts as and when they find it. There seems to be just two threads downloading data in parallel (from one hostname), which means a couple of large (but rarely used) scripts in the code will block the rest of the css/image fetches. See flickr's organizr for an example of that in action.

You should understand that these resources have different priorities in the render land and you should really only venture here after you've optimized the other bits (server and application).

All said and done, good tutorial by Aaron Hopkins - a lot of us have had to rediscover all that (& more) by ourselves.

Over the past six years I've been playing with gimp, people have written off the project as totally bass-ackwards enough times. But no matter what, the project seems to come back with a few surprises once in a while to prove those critics wrong (though it is debatable whether that would happen sans critics).

I'm not a graphics artist and in the rare occasions when I do have to draw something, these days I prefer Inkscape - there are days when I want the Macromedia Fireworks modes of bitmap-vector middle land, but not too many. But, I've been using gimp to post-process most of my photos and I've found that it is actually a really really powerful tool . So the part that really made sense for me in the GEGL docs is the following paragraph.

PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW and other image sources.
Arithmetic operations, porter duff compositing operations, SVG blend modes, other blend modes, apply mask.
Basic color correction tools.
Most processing done with High Dynamic Range routines.

And the concept really scores some points because it stores transformation pipelines instead of the result bitmaps, from the looks of it. That should really revolutionize Undo for graphics.

I've heard enough photoshop graphics gurus say that Gimp is very accurately named. And probably for print media it still is - but for a hobbyist, it has started to really really kick ass.

TFA clearly says

"is working on new chipsets for the small form-factor notebook ...Validation work on server processors 5300 and 7100"

As much as I'd love India to lose the cheap indian labour tag and actually find its place in the R&D world - this could be summed up as premature ejaculation. Validation work (aka quality assurance) is not really what I'd consider worthy of mention, but chipsets are indeed a step forward - if indeed they are being designed here, not merely run through QA.

People here are comparitively cheap, but that does not automatically mean that "You get what you pay for", unless you do shop around for a bargain.

Somehow the fact that Yahoo! has had Yahoo! Widgets for months, seems to shine down on the Google Gadgets. Recently, I did up a Spidermonkey+ZZiplib hack to get Y!'s widgets running on my linux box - it is not impossible for Konfabulator to work elsewhere either. But in general, I didn't expect Google to much of a follower into a market, but it seems that recently they've been doing that ?

Gmail was innovation ... *shrug*

alias loud='dcop kmix Mixer0 setMute 1 0'
alias silent='dcop kmix Mixer0 setMute 1 1'

But I guess, it is a good thing KDE and gnome are converging ... for the linux desktop, at least in the short term.

static int zero_fd = -1;
void * addr;
if(zero_fd == -1)
{
/* thread safety is not easy */
zero_fd = open("/dev/zero", O_RDWR, 0);
}
addr = mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC,
MAP_SHARED | MAP_ANON, zero_fd, 0);
return addr;

Of course, you could read about why I wrote this particular bit instead of malloc in the first place - on my blog (when macros aren't enough).

Also you never truly appreciate C & Unix, till you've dissected malloc(), free(), fprintf() and fork(). The memory management, I/O buffering (different if you pipe to a file vs tty) and how the same pointer value can point to different memory (pages) in forked parent and child.

I code for this API and the sources end up being source compatible. But then there are library paths and stuff, which is why even something as homogenous as Linux is forced to create LSB standard. The API standard OTOH, is crystal clear - look at the API tables in terms of availability. And yeah, my project is called Portable.net, so I've put in my time writing portable code for various platforms (even BeOS and SkyOS). Wish the threading models worked the same, that's all :)

Morover, Y! has been using these for the past 6 months on different browsers before they open sourced. That part is really what most people look at.

Some people do constructive things for that, others do very destructive things.

Once you're into adult hood, being a puppet master online starts to lose it's charm and you want more bragging rights - which is one of the thing that drives some h4x0rs back into the straight and narrow path of goodness.

All in all, without tigert's demos - I'd have relegated gimp to being a glorified paint application instead of the cool tool for web-desginer it has recently become (and I'm not a professional web-dev, but I still like to muck around with gimp). Jimmac is good, but Tigert was and is the gimp wizard I shall worship for ever.

It also seems that they run a virtual host setup. The same server hosts http://wiki2.dotgnu.info/, which appears to be fine. It was probably some web-app 'sploit, localized to dotgnu.org; nothing too special.

Or is your site that pathetic...

Pot, meet kettle.

I mean your site is truly pathetic.

Seriously speaking my desktop right now looks like a Full screen X0rg-cygwin + Fluxbox running - like this. With lots of Xterms and ssh logins :)

That some people here think it is important that Java has had two of these features already, albeit in a far less efficient form for generics, is neither here nor there. I do not use Java. I'd have to pay for a decent IDE for it, while Visual Studio .NET includes all the languages I need for serious windows development. Eclipse, in case you were going to mention it, doesnt function usably on two monitors.

However, since I used to be a compiled-code snob (i.e. ASM,C or C++ but no byte code!), C# has opened my mind to Java, and I'm looking forward to gnu's own byte code implementation. C# will remove many barriers in peoples minds to using Java. Personally, I find C# easier to use, and I look forward to nice, fast generics.