Too Up Close and Too Personal

John Wiseman's photos of the fire in LA near his home, including...

ASSQL

This is kind of cool, plus I just wanted to publish a post on something called ASSQL.

It's ActionScript (AS3) code for accessing MySQL.

Cement And Such

From the P.D....

It’s fascinating to note that we spend a massive amount of time focusing on making software malleable at compile/build time (Spring anyone?) but considerably less effort on ensuring similar flexibility post deployment making for brittleness in face of failure, upgrade, configuration changes, scaling etc.

Free Data

You have to be real careful when you invest in some vendor's technology. Will they help or hinder getting you where you want to go.

Microsoft I gather is *real* scared of google, and so they try emulating a bunch of googlesque capabilities. As usual I have not read a lot about them, but this one about "live data" and "data wants to be free" caught my attention.

See, calendar information seems to me to be the data that *most* wants to be free, but isn't yet as free as it should be. Is calendar information now free from Microsoft?

Or is there motto: "Data wants to be free, and will be, unless we can lock it up in a proprietary server, obfuscate it in proprietary formats, and extort you to pay for a lot of client licenses to get to it using tools of our choice"?

Maybe things have changed -- please correct me if I am wrong, or explain why you don't need fully functional calendar information to be free.

Take Five: Processes

Guido van Rossum (via Joe Gregario) (via Sean McGrath) on "threads"...

The difference is, for an OS kernel, there really isn't any other way to benefit from multiple CPUs. But for Python, there is -- run multiple processes instead of threads!

Yeah, I don't like threads one bit.

How much support does Python have (in the distribution or from other contributions) for starting and stopping processes on the same or other machines? And for communicating with them?

I am all for this approach, but little attention is being paid that I know of to programming this way, regarding "all the little things" that are needed to develop, test, and deploy concurrent, distributed systems. Not to mention "post modern" systems using various languages.

The "common language runtime folks" (clr/dlr and jvm, etc.) are salivating over using each others classes. We should be more interested in using each others processes.

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Even in the same address space it's better to pretend you're not. Java applets, etc. were aimed at the everyday developers, so why did the language designers give them such things as threads and locks? More out of habit and lack of questioning their hidden assumptions than anything else, I'd bet.

Yeah, it will be a good thing when we can do all our cross-platform, distributed process management stuff in IronicPython and/or Jython! (This might have been more interesting even five years ago. Now we know we could have been, and should be running in the *opposite* direction. Instead of running at full speed, we're still docked, with the steamliner facing the *wrong* direction.)

"Common Language Runtimes" -- phooey. Think broader. Patrick Mueller points to his investigations with Java in a comment to this post. Is Microsoft's CLR/DLR going to do a better job at cross-platform, distributed process management???

Hyperflux

Hugh Winkler says... (via Sean McGrath)

But if you're not pushing a bunch of hypertext down to my browser, you're not helping me explore the space.

I agree with this. Nothing about the server should be specific to the client. Adobe promotes FDS (Flex Data Services) and there may be a time and place to use it (or not), but that's not "on the web".

I don't think developers should slide into the mode of piece-wise assembly of a bunch of widgets and wiring them up to the automated updaters keeping objects-in-sync across networks.

But taking a more web-oriented approach doesn't preclude using client stuff that's a bit more expressive than current popular browsers. There're good ajax apps and there're bad ajax apps. Same with other "RIA" technologies.

RIAs built on something like Flex and possibly Apollo, but using the web in the right way is appealing to me. Finding more simple ways to build the RIA part *and* get the most out of the web is an interesting challenge.

Jini Panic

Fuzzy relays the state of the Jini world... great Java technology. Community is awful. Not easy to invest in that direction, when the signs of community since River started have been no better, or worse, than prior to that event.

Sad, really.

On Thursday an email went out to arrange a get together on Monday at JavaOne. I will be down in SF on Thursday and Friday, but too late to change plans for Monday.

Sigh.

chromatic on silverspoon

chromatic wonders about duplicating silverspoon on linux...

I’m not sure that making the life of the marketing department of a convicted monopolist which just loves to embrace, extend, and extinguish competition is the best way to spread freedom through software.

Here's my deal: the MSFT community seems to hang on every word of every potential innovation from Redmond. The same is true to some extent in the Apple community, but to a far lesser extent. In part this could be so because MacOSX is based on Unix, and so the culture and innovations can cross over much more easily.

By and large Linux, Java, and the other various language-centered communities have the tools to innovate and the culture to innovate and *do* innovate more (in my preception - not formally measured) than the MSFT community.

And so would you rather your world be based on the governed pace of innovation from one large bureaucracy? Or would you rather have more freedom to move in directions and at a pace best suited to your market?

I can count all kinds of devices running Linux in my house, from several vendors. Not so for Windows. Getting silverspoon running compatible, not getting incompatible, etc. is not a good choice when given the choice to be more innovative, whether based on Adobe Flex/Apollo or anything else.

"Anything but MSFT." seems to be the most logical choice unless your market is already so caught up in MSFT's and your interests are so closely aligned with theirs.

They will *not* give you the tools you need unless that meets their needs. You choose.

Better to ignore them or force them to play your game, than try to play theirs.

Making Us Stuck

Intel is concerned about their multicore roadmap. Chips could potentially have 32 cores within three years, but Intel may have to find other things to do with all their transistors until software can catch up and take better advantage of so many cores. This is not the first time software has failed to keep pace with hardware.

Next questions: What effects might the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have on software evolution? (As interpreted by Ken Iverson re: programming languages. (pdf))

What contraints or propels software evolution vs. hardware evolution?

What Goes Around

Is the actor model on the list of foundational topics in CS programs today?

Is the actor model about "objects"? Why or why not?

Is the actor model relevant today? Why or why not?

Are today's systems becoming more or becoming less like actor systems? Why or why not?

Why Unix?

Why ask?

Bungle

Something screwy happened with blogger. I cannot tell, but I may have lost several comments from today. If you don't see yours and you are so motivated, please try again. Sorry.

Flair

Sun gets in the game of replacing java, at least on the desktop. I would *never* make the mistake of underestimating Dan Ingalls, now a Sun Distinguished Engineer and previously the primary implementor of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, Apple, HP, and elsewhere up through and including Squeak.

"AJAX deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, cross site scripting, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model," Ingalls said.

I Love This

Adobe and MSFT going head to head, competing for the most appealing, most open, next-generation web client technology. All of a sudden the web is a lot more interesting than just tracking what ajax toolkits run in which versions of what browsers in order to get us more than green screens of zzzzzzzzzzz.

Browsers and HTML were great because they got the UI out of the widget builder era. All of a sudden there were no rules for how pleasingly creative a UI could be. But that was the 1990s.

Now the new tools are putting back good things from the structured graphics era, including those widgets, but they retain the creative flair of the HTML era.

Let the atom, json, structured graphics era begin!

Apollo May Become The Best Ajax Platform

James Robertson writes...

Microsoft is trying to create the kind of walled garden they stumbled into on the desktop out on the net. The problem is, a lot of us would rather develop/deploy on Linux (because it's easier to manage a Linux server remotely). At present, Silverlight is completely uninteresting if that's where you are, and they aren't likely to change that...

Adobe's Apollo, on the other hand - it's going to end up inside and outside. It's the game to watch, IMHO.

James on silverspoon vs. ajax...

Ajax doesn't limit you in the same ways.

And the cool thing about apollo is its support for flex *and* ajax. Apollo may become the *best* ajax platform. One, because it has all the other apollo features. Two, because it will be the *same* ajax environment on all platforms.

I think the ball is solidly in adobe's hands. It is their ball to drop. They can leverage their proprietary components and their open source directions into quite a sweet spot.

Pilgrimage to Someplace Better

Mark Pilgrim rants about something to do with Apollo, Flex, Flash, etc.

Not that Apollo is the final destination, but it is a helluva better step towards something useful than the place browsers seem to be going anytime soon.

These things *are* becoming more open and they are "on the web". And they are a helluva lot more programmable than browsers.

How long as SVG been around? And it can do what, again? With how much complexity?

Have fun. Fuzzy explains it.

HTTP Is Pushy

There's a lot of rest-related stuff about push vs. pull, and how pull is just fine. I really like Sean McGrath's recent explanation of rest. I am wondering about this one thing, though...

Is there a dramatically simpler solution to the push-centric, transactional, reliable once-and-only-once one that human language has a way of veering us towards?

Just a thought: rest emphasizes that "push" does not have to go hand-in-hand with "enterprisey". Looking at the Atom Publishing Protocol, isn't the big point of APP that it *is* about "push"?

We pretty much all *get* GET, hmm? It's the other stuff we don't really *get* yet, like "A and B pushing changes into the URI space" as Sean puts it. That's good stuff.

The Do What I Say Dept.

(Via Steve Dekorte), comes this...

George W. Bush, 4/9/99, Houston Chronicle:

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

George W. Bush, 6/5/99, Scripps Howard/Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"I think it's also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn."

Cross Platform Development -- Is Java The Loser?

From an article on silverspoon...

The outstanding question is whether Microsoft plans to offer Silverlight support for Linux. Although support for Flash for Linux lags behind Windows and Mac, Warriner noted that his company can still count on Flash Web applications running on Linux.

Yeah, but here's the other thing about cross platform internets...

I want to *develop* on other platforms than Windows. Not just deliver. (Moot point for silverspoon -- it neither delivers nor develops on Linux, apparently.)

The difference between using Windows and Linux for software development tools, etc. is *immense*. (Well, maybe *you* like futzing with cygwin to achieve a fairly lame ersatz unix.)

Although a Flex Builder tool for Eclipse on Linux would be worth trying, I sure don't miss it now. I use the SDK and a command line very well inside Emacs.

The one thing I noticed today though, is a co-worker is using Flex Builder's "suggest" capabilities and found a method on DisplayObject I was looking for. Good command line tools would help, but such is the way of the IDE these days -- use it or lose it. In lieu of really good search tools, using "suggest" only as a search tool is an option - my co-worker had his second screen set up for this.

Apollo is *clearly* the internet platform to beat at this point. Given that Adobe has also donated Flex and the Actionscript VM to open source, esp. Mozilla/Firefox, I wonder how long before Firefox becomes an open source, cross platform browser with built-in Flash/Flex and oh by the way has Apollo-ish desktop capabilities right there, USB access, OS, User Profile access, and so on. And apparently SQL in the not too distant future.

Cross platform. Virtual machine. Development tool. The works. -- Peter Fisk has interpreters running in Flash, but the Flash VM will give people access to the byte codes so they can run all kinds of languages directly ultimately.

Microsoft is not about to take their WPF-lite into the cross platform desktop domain. Competition is good - Adobe and MSFT can push each other on into the future -- fine with me.

With all this MSFT Silerspoon vs. Adobe Flex/Apollo the real loser on the desktop is *java*. Adobe is heavily into Java on the server, but Flex/Apollo works at least as well with all kinds of servers. (Flex Data Services notwithstanding -- that's not a huge enticement to me even for server-side Java.)

No Thanks Netflix

I use Linux. I've been thinking about Netflix, but also considering other services such as the one from Tivo and Amazon, since I already have Tivo. But I also have iTunes and a video-capable iPod, which I love dearly, so I am kind of watching where Apple TV is going. I would have to buy a Mac *and* Apple TV. I got rid of my last old Mac a while back. But that's a net positive. I almost have Windows out of the house entirely and do not want to build any more dependencies on the one my wife still uses.

But now that Netflix has declared my business to be unimportant...

Netflix plans to adopt Silverlight as the foundation for its instant-viewing feature; a demo showed off high-quality streaming video overlaid with DVD-like menus and controls.

My decisions just got one step easier. Maybe next time, Netflix, when you decide not to rule me out of your internets.