notes

Milk at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:15:36 -0500

Milk at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

Twitter

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:09:31 -0500

I give in — I’ll try using twitter. Let’s see if I can write interesting posts about what I’m working on in 140 characters or less.

http://twitter.com/landonfuller

20 days and still waiting for approval: “Your application...

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:36:00 -0500

20 days and still waiting for approval:

“Your application Peeps is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able.”

I really have no idea why the app is requiring additional review — I was fastidious in following Apple’s guidelines.

In the meantime, check out the product page. I’m a big fan of the owl, and our friends were kind enough to volunteer their photos for the screenshots.

(Click the movie to start playback. Double click to play...

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:12:00 -0400

(Click the movie to start playback. Double click to play again.)

Our CoverFlow implementation for the iPhone. Send an e-mail if you’re interested in licensing it.

Google's NSXMLDocument Replacement for iPhone

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:45:12 -0400

If you’re missing a decent Objective-C DOM-based XML library for the iPhone, Google has a NSXMLDocument replacement available under the Apache license, as part of their Objective-C GData Library:

See XMLSupport and GDataDefines.h

I’ve also had some success replacing missing classes using the Cocotron implementations — I’m using Cocotron’s NSPredicate implementation for selective receive in my message-passing actor [wikipedia] library.

Sun Approved: Merge from BSD Java to OpenJDK

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:12:00 -0400

Sun has approved merging the JRL-licensed BSD Java to the GPLv2+ClassPath OpenJDK-6. That means that all of the BSD Java changes, including the SoyLatte Mac OS X port, can now be sent to the OpenJDK project, and an official BSD porters group can be proposed:

The purpose of this letter is to confirm our understanding that you are providing to Sun under the terms of the Sun Contributor Agreement [1] the modifications that you made and are choosing to submit to code originally made available by Sun to you under the Sun Community Source License (“SCSL”) and subsequently modified by you pursuant to the Java Research License (“JRL”), where your modifications are expressed as diffs against Sun’s current OpenJDK-6 code base [2] (“Diffs”).

For the avoidance of doubt, this letter does not give you rights to distribute modifications made to code provided to you under SCSL or JRL, or the code originally provided by Sun pursuant thereto, in ways inconsistent with those licenses except specifically to provide the Diffs to Sun as stated above.

On behalf of Sun,
- Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer

Sweet!

Book: Geographic Information Systems and Science

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:49:00 -0400

This week I spent a couple days reading through Geographic Information Systems and Science (Paul Longley, Michael Goodchild, David Maguire, David Rhind).

The book is an excellent introduction to GIS — covering everything from basic principals and vocabulary to statistical analysis and project planning. In this, I’d place the book up there with Data Modeling Essentials or Applied Cryptography in giving comprehensive treatment to a complex field.

I found the section on uncertainity to be the most interesting — in measuring the physical world, uncertainity is inevitable. There is no possible perfect representation, and uncertainity can not be eliminated. In GIS, it is your responsibility to account for these uncertanties in data, avoiding misrepresenting your certainity, and manage uncertainity introduced through aggregation of imperfect data.

The book reads like a text book, and can be incredibly tedious in explaining programming topics and business planning (in this, it’s not very different from Data Modelling Essentials). While this may detract from your reading enjoyment, the book remains an excellent introduction and reference source.

Ruby the new Visual Basic?

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:06:00 -0400

Has Ruby become the new rapid application development tool for common application developers? Ruby seems to be filling the traditional roles (and seeing the same sorts of developers) as tools like VisualBasic or REALBasic, especially in terms of rapid development of web applications (as opposed to desktop applications).

Doing some Googling, I’m not the first one to ask this question: Is Ruby the New VB?

What sort of shifts will the surrounding programming communities see with the ongoing influx of application developers traditionally constrained to the Windows universe?

Free Street Map Data?

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:21:33 -0400

If you’re interested in GIS, you’ve surely come across the OpenStreetMap project — they’re working to “provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.”

Only problem is their rather unexpected choice of license for their data: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

See: OpenStreetMap License

This choice of licensing means that any data aggregated and distributed with theirs must also be licensed under the CC share-alike license — this includes any data your customers might wish to aggregate with map data. This is more or less a non-starter for any non-hobbiest project — commercial or otherwise. At what point does “aggregation” of factual data end? Does it ever?

The project has attempted to address this licensing quandry, but work in that direction is mired in a seemingly never-ending political morass: see this mailing list thread. There is a proposal to move to the “Open Database License”, which still applies the same “share-alike” restrictions to derivative databases (as opposed to, say, rendered maps). This improves the situation, but not by much — this licensing precludes the use in projects requiring aggregated data (ie, most of them) without share-alike licensing.

What amuses me the most is OpenStreetMap’s heavy reliance on public domain data — They’re happy to repackage it under more restrictive terms than it arrived.

Seems like there’s room for an ActuallyOpenStreetMaps project.

Lighting up Municiple Internet Access

Sun, 04 May 2008 18:39:40 -0400

Lighting up Municiple Internet Access:

This is the right way to bring about municiple networking — displace the cable and telephone duopoly through open access to municiple fiber.

Virtual Machine, SQL Database ... or Both?

Thu, 01 May 2008 02:10:00 -0400

Spending today working with Jonathan on some iPhone/Mac Objective-C libraries for SQLite (managing data/schema migrations, etc), I stumbled across this bit of documentation:

After the parser assembles tokens into complete SQL statements, it calls the code generator to produce virtual machine code that will do the work that the SQL statements request.

Cool! SQLite’s Virtual Database Engine (VDBE) is documented in this tutorial, and the vm opcode reference. You can peruse the code generated for your own queries using explain (first using .explain to enable more readable output):

sqlite> .explain
sqlite> EXPLAIN INSERT INTO "testtable" VALUES ("testing");
addr  opcode          p1          p2          p3                               
----  --------------  ----------  ----------  --------------------
0     Goto            0           10                                           
1     Integer         0           0                                            
2     OpenWrite       0           2                                            
3     SetNumColumns   0           1                                            
4     NewRowid        0           0                                            
5     String8         0           0           testing                          
6     MakeRecord      1           0           a                                
7     Insert          0           11          testtable                        
8     Close           0           0                                            
9     Halt            0           0                                            
10    Transaction     0           1                                            
11    VerifyCookie    0           1                                            
12    Goto            0           1                                            
13    Noop            0           0

Research in Software Development

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:19:03 -0400

In programming, I find that the purpose of research isn’t to find the solution, but to find the problem. If I find the solution too, that’s a happy bonus.

Moving past CGI: HTTP correctly abstracted as asynchronous...

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:39:00 -0400

Moving past CGI: HTTP correctly abstracted as asynchronous message delivery. Supports scaling of long-blocking HTTP requests — see Comet as an example.

Explanation of the Apache MINA architecture for implementing...

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:16:00 -0400

Explanation of the Apache MINA architecture for implementing non-blocking, actor-based network I/O. Used to scale an event processor written in Java.

A 1995 Objective-C Toolkit for Building Interactive World Wide Web Applications

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:40:00 -0400

A 1995 Objective-C Toolkit for Building Interactive World Wide Web Applications:

W3Kit implements a component-based architecture that bears many similarities to Seaside’s WAComponent.

User interactions with the application are implemented using a message passing abstraction, and application state is actually maintained across CGI-invocations. The state is saved client-side, through the use of object serialization (no, really) and hidden form fields.

The tenacity of the CGI interface is amazing, and this illustrates the requirements driving implementation of stateful, persistent application servers.

New Java HotSpot Internals Wiki

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:56:00 -0400

New Java HotSpot Internals Wiki:

This is pretty handy — HotSpot documentation can be scarce outside of Sun. Also see John Rose’s Announcement on hotspot-dev.

Temporary Fixes

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:03:00 -0400

An externality is an impact (positive or negative) on any party not involved in a given economic transaction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I talk about “externalities” a lot; humans excel at rationalizing short-sighted decisions if they believe that the long-term costs are external to themselves. This is usually an unconcious decision, but no less costly to a community.

Given a technical problem, many engineers will naturally gravitate towards the easiest fix possible. If this fix has long term cost implications, they may even call the fix “temporary”. However, if the cost of this temporary fix is externalized — not levied against the party making the decision — then the temporary fix will become permanent.

This approach to problem solving incurs a long-term organizational cost. Whereas an initial investment of a few hours may have provided a permanent fix, the temporary fix may result in emense aggregate cost over time.

If I ever find myself creating a “temporary fix”, I always try to ensure that I will be the one paying for any long-term costs. This provides additional perspective to my decision making, and encouragement to provide a better solution.

Hardware isn't Cheap

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:49:00 -0400

I’ve spent the weekend researching libraries, frameworks, and languages intended to improve the web development experience. Many of these frameworks impose classic fork() concurrency model, holding the mantra that “Hardware is cheap”.

When developers say “Hardware is cheap” in response to poor architectural choices, what they’re really saying is that “Our hardware costs are externalized”. These web developers are rarely responsible for the direct increases in operational costs due to terminally inefficient use of server capacity.

This position presents a false dichotomy: a choice between achieving passable performance through good design, versus optimizing for developer effeciency. Effecient use of resources and ease of development are not mutually exclusive, though they may require different approaches to familiar problems.