NewTeeVee 2010

Published on November 30, 2010 in internet. 0 Comments Tags: .

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in November, including some conferences. Here’s some information from NewTeeVee.

I dropped into NewTeeVee because I’m doing a lot with video and television these days, but I’m not really from that world. NewTeeVee is targeted at that space where the Internet and television overlap. As a result the conference feels kind of weird when you are used to going to conferences filled with open source developers and programmers of all kinds. There was very little talk about technology, at least in a form that would be recognizable to internet people. Quite a number of the presentations involved celebrities of one form or another, which is unsurprising, and I found it interesting to hear their takes on the future of television, and of entertainment as a whole. One of the most interesting sessions in this vein was with the showrunners of Lost and Heroes, two shows which have been very successful at combining broadcast television with the internet. Despite their pioneering efforts and their success, it was discouraging to hear them talking about how hard it would be to replicate the combined new media and old media combinations of their shows.

The closest that we got to technology in a form that I recognized was a talk by Samsung, which was really about their efforts to evangelize developers to write applications for Samsung connected TV’s. Samsung has its own application platform, and I found myself wondering whether or not they would be able to get enough developer attention. I’d much prefer to see TV’s adopt Open Web based technologies for their application platforms.

I came away from the conference feeling like a visitor to a country not my own, with a better sense of the culture, but still feeling very “other”.   

Strange Loop 2010

Published on October 22, 2010 in concurrency and programming. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Last week I was in Saint Louis for Strange Loop 2010. This was the second year of Strange Loop, which is a by hackers for hackers conference. I’m used to this sort of conference when it’s organized by a single open source community – I’d put ApacheCon, PyCon, and CouchCamp in this category. At the same time, Strange Loop’s content was very diverse, and had some very high quality speakers. It’s sort of like a cross between ApacheCon and OSCON. One difference is that there isn’t a community that’s putting on Strange Loop, and the fun community feel of ApacheCon or PyCon is missing.   

One of the reasons that I was interested in attending Strange Loop was Hilary Mason’s talk on data science / machine learning. This is an area that I am starting to delve into, and I did study a little machine learning right around the time that it was starting to shift away from traditional AI and more towards the statistical approach that characterizes it now. Hilary is the chief scientist at bit.ly, and as it turns out, a Brown alumnae as well. Her talk was a good introduction to the current state of machine learning for people who didn’t have any background. She talked about some of the kinds of questions that they’ve been able to answer at bit.ly using machine learning techniques. Justin Bozonier used Twitter to ask Hilary if she would be wiling to sit down with interested people and do some data hacking, so I skipped the session block (which was painful because I missed Nathan Marz’s session on Cascalog, which was getting rave reviews). We ended up doing some simple stuff around the tweets about #strangeloop. Justin has a good summary of what happened, complete with code, and Hilary posted the resulting visualization on her blog. It was definitely useful to sit and work together as a group and get snippets of insight into how Hilary was approaching the problem.

Another area that I am looking at is changes in web application architecture due to the changing role of Javascript on both the client and the server. I went to Kyle Simpson’s talk on Strange UI architecture, as well as Ryan Dahl’s talk on node.js. Kyle has built BikechainJS, another wrapper around V8, like Node.js. There’s a lot of interest around server side javascript – the next step is to think about how to repartition the responsibilities of web applications in a world where clients are much more capable, and where some code could run on either the client or the server.

Guy Steele gave a great talk, and the number of people who can give such talk is decreasing by the day. As a prelude to talking about abstractions for parallel programming, Guy walked us through an IBM 1130 program that was written on a single punch card. He had to reverse engineer the source code from the card, which was complicated by the fact that he used self modifying code as well as some clever value punning in order to get the most out of the machine. The thrust of his comments on parallel programming was that the accumulator style of programming which pervades imperative programs is bad when it comes to exploiting parallelism. Instead, he emphasized being able to find algebraic properties such as associativity or commutativity which would allow parallelism to be exploited via the map/reduce style of programming pioneered decades ago in the functional programming community, and popularized by systems like Hadoop. Guy was proposing that mapreduce be the paradigm for regular programming problems, not just “big data” problems. For me, the most interesting comment that Guy made was about Haskell. He said that if he know what he knew now when he had started on Fortress, he would have started with Haskell and pushed it 1/10 of the way to FORTRAN instead of starting with FORTRAN and pushing it 9/10 of the way to Haskell.

I’m not generally a fan of panel sessions, because the vast majority of them don’t really live up to their promise. Ted Neward did a really good job of moderating the panel on “Future of Programming Languages”. At the end of the panel, Ted asked the panelists which languages they though people should be learning in order to get new ideas. The list included Io (Bruce Tate), Rebol (Douglas Crockford), Forth and Factor (Alex Payne), Scheme and Assembler (Josh Bloch), and Clojure (Guy Steele). Guy’s comments on Clojure rippled across Twitter, mutating in the process, and causing some griping amongst Scala adherents. The panel appears to have done it’s job in encouraging controversy.

Also in the Clojure vein, I attended Brian Marick’s talk “Outside in TDD in Clojure“. Marick has written midje, a testing framework that is more amenable to the a bottom up style of programming that is facilitated by REPL’s. It’s an interesting approach relying on functions that provide a simple way to specify placeholders for functions that haven’t been completed yet. This also serves as a leverage point for the Emacs support that he has developed.

Doug Crockford delivered the closing keynote. I’ve heard him speak before, mostly on Javascript. His talk wasn’t about Javascript at all, but it was very engaging and entertaining. If you have the chance to see him speak in that kind of setting, you should definitely do it.

A few words on logistics. The conference was spread out across three locations. I feared the worst when I heard this, but it turned out to be fine – OSCON in San Jose was much more inconvenient. The bigger logistical issue was WiFi. None of the three venues was really prepared for the internet requirements of the Strange Loop attendees. WiFi problems are not a surprise at a conference, but the higher quality conferences do distinguish themselves on their WiFi support.

All in all, I think that Strange Loop was definitely worthwhile. The computing world is becoming “multicultural”, and it’s good to see a conference that recognizes that fact.

Haskell Workshop and CUFP 2010

Published on October 6, 2010 in programming. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

It has been many years since I attended an ACM conference, and even more years since I attended the Lisp and Functional Programming Conference, which has evolved into the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). ICFP was in the United States this year, and I’ve wanted to drop in for quite some time. There are many ideas pioneered by the functional programming community, and as much as possible I like to go to the original sources of ideas. ICFP is a long conference with many attached events, and it turns out that the best use of my time was to drop in for the Haskell workshop at the tail end of the conference, and the Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) conference.

Haskell Workshop

I’ve been around long enough to remember when Haskell first came out, and despite my stint as a database programming languages grad student, I’ve never had the chance to really give Haskell the attention that I feel it deserves. 20 year since its appearance Haskell is still barely on the radar. At the same time, I heard some very interesting talks at the workshop. Things like the Hoopl library for implementing dataflow optimzations in compilers, and the Orc DSL for concurrent scripting. The Haskell systems hackers have made great progress and doing some great work. Bryan O’ Sullivan described his work on improving GHC’s ability to handle lots of long lived open network connections. Given the recent burst of interest in event based programming models, such as Node.js, this is an interesting result. Simon Marlow presented a redesign of the Evaluation Strategies mechanism that GHC uses to control parallelism. Many of the talks that I heard have ideas that are applicable to problems that exist in modern systems. I just wish that I could see a path the involved using Haskell itself to solve those problems instead of the ideas migrating into another language/system.

Surgecon

Unbeknownst to me, my friend Theo Schlossnagle ran Surge, a conference on scalability, in Baltimore, and it overlapped the parts of ICFP that I attended. Surge seems to have flown pretty low under the radar. Google doesn’t return many relevant results for it, and the best information (other than talking to Surge attendees) I’ve been able to find on Surge is on Lanyrd. Theo told me that he was counting on this year’s attendees to be his PR for next year. I didn’t attend, but based on the tweets and dinner conversations, it sounds like it was great. I had dinner/beers with some Apache folks who were in town for Surge, as well as some Surge attendees like Bryan Cantrill. The “systems guys” gave me a good ribbing about being at a conference for “irrelevant languages”, and I had a really good conversation with Bryan about Node.js, cloud computing, and the Oracle acquisition (ok, that part wasn’t so good). Node.js is on a lot of people’s minds at the moment, and it was good to hear Bryan’s perspective on it. It was an interesting sidebar to the immersion in functional programming. I do think that in the medium term there are some interesting connections between Node and FP, but that ‘s probably an entire post of its own.

CUFP

There was a lot of F# related content at CUFP, and I think that Microsoft deserves kudos for the work that they are doing. I think it’s pretty clear that shipping F# in the box with Visual Studio 2010 is not a huge money maker for Microsoft at this point, and I’m impressed with their willingness to take a long term view of the future of programming. Unfortunately I’m not a Windows ecosystem person, so as attractive as F# and Visual Studio are, I doubt that I’ll be playing with this anytime soon.

Marius Eriksen‘s talk on Scala at Twitter was interesting because of the way that he described the conceptualization of Rockdove operations as folds, taking clear advantage of the benefits offered by a functional style. He also had some thought provoking comments about giving applications access to the behavior of the garbage collector. There are some interesting possibilities if you start to give developers control of the behavior of various parts of the runtime system.

Michael Fogus talked about his company’s experience using Scala. His talk was pretty entertaining, and there were some interesting comparisons between Scala features that they thought would be useful and Scala features that actually turned out to be useful. My only issue with his talk was the size of the sample, which isn’t something that he could do anything about. This was also true of the talk by the Intel compiler folks.

I’ve seen a number of talks on the Microsoft Reactive Extensions, mostly with respect to JavaScript. I continue to believe that RxJS could be a great help to Javascript programmers, particularly as things like Node.js take hold. Matt Podwysocki’s Node.js file server example shows how.

Warren Harris from Metaweb talked about his use of monads, arrows, and OCaml to build a more efficient query processor for Freebase’s MQL query language. This was a really interesting talk, because query optimization was the topic of my graduate school research, and at the time the connections between query languages and functional programming were a relatively new topic.

Final thoughts

It doesn’t take much to fan the flames of functional love in me. There are lots of smart people working on beautiful and interesting solutions. I wish that I could see a better path for those ideas to make it into mainstream practice.

It’s all about the workflow

Published on September 15, 2010 in programming. 0 Comments Tags: .

In the last few months I’ve been running into the same issue over and over again. At OSCON I was out to dinner with some Apache/Subversion friends. In recent years, conversations with these friends turn to the subject of Subversion versus one of the distributed version control systems, usually, but not always git. And as often happens, the conversation was focused on particular features of the systems. Distribution, obscurity of command sets, the workings of various individual features. For me, the important thing about the DVCS’s is not the various features, it is about supporting a particular kind of development model, a workflow of using the tools.   Vincent Driessen’s excellent post on the git branching model, outlines the kind of scenario that I want to be able to support. That workflow is important to me, not the particulars of git. I’d be happy if more than one tool could provide good support for such a workflow. To my relief, that’s what at least some of the Subversion committers want to be able to do, and I’m looking forward to seeing their work. On the git side of the house, Vincent has written git flow, some extensions to git that make the workflow easier to manage when using git. Github’s recently enhanced pull request mechanism is another example of great git related workflow management.

Software that focuses on workflows is much more valuable to me (assuming it supports a workflow that I use – not a foregone conclusion). Each piece of software that I use on a regular basis has been selected because it supports a workflow that works for me, or because I can mould it into supporting a workflow that is comfortable for me. So today, that means NetNewsWire for Mac’s combined view and OmniFocus on Mac/iPad/iPhone for review mode on the desktop and iPad, and forecast view on the iPad. I also have use Python to make some Macintosh desktop apps provide a workflow that ‘s more suitable for me: For mail, that means Mail.app plus Mail-Act-On plus Python scripts plus Keyboard Maestro. For meeting notes that means Evernote plus Entourage plus Python scripts on the Desktop and iPad

One domain where I still haven’t found a great fit yet is the activity/life stream space. Right now I’m using Echofon on the Mac, Twitter for iPad, and Twitter for iPhone. I also have Flipboard on the iPad. Each of them works relatively well, but none of them really solve the problems that I have as a high volume Twitter reader. I really haven’t seen anything that works in a way that will really help me deal with the firehose of information from various online sources of various kinds. Here lies an opportunity.

App developers of all kinds, giving me neat features is good. Streamlining my workflow is better.

CouchCamp 2010

Published on September 14, 2010 in apache, community, open source and programming. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I spent a few days last week at CouchCamp, the first mass in-person gathering of the community around CouchDB. There were around 80 people from all over the world, which is pretty good turnout. The conference was largely in unconference format although there were some invited speakers, including myself.

I think it says a lot about the CouchDB community that they invited both Josh Berkus and Selena Deckelmann from Postgres to be speakers. The “NoSQL” space has become quite combative recently, so it is great to see that the CouchDB has connections to the Postgres community, and respect for the history and lessons that the Postgres folks have learned over the year. Josh’s talk on not reinventing the wheel was well received, and his discussion of Joins vs Mapreduce took me back to my days as a graduate student in databases. His talk made a great lead in for Selena’s talk on the nitty gritty details of MultiVersion Concurrency Control

There were lots of good discussions on issues related to security and CouchApps, but the discussion that got my attention the most was Max Ogden’s discussion on the work that he is doing to open up access to government data, particularly around the use of location information. He’s been using GeoCouch as the platform for this work. In the past I’ve written about the importance of a good platform for location apps, particularly in the context of GeoDjango. GeoCouch looks to be a very nice platform for location based applications. This is a very nice plus for the CouchDB community.

These days, it’s impossible to be at a conference that involves Javascript and not hear some buzz about Node.js. As expected, there was quite a bit of it, but it was interesting to talk to people about what they are doing with Node. Everything that I heard reinforces my gut feel that Node.js is going to be important.

I was one of the mentors for the CouchDB project when it came to the Apache Software Foundation, and I was asked to speak about community. The CouchDB community has accomplished a lot in the last few years, and is doing really well. I prepared a slide deck, but didn’t project it because my talk was the last talk of the conference, and we wanted to do it in the outside amphitheater. I also wanted to tune some of the sections of the talk to include things that I observed or was asked about during the conference. The biggest reason that I prepared slides was to show excerpts of Noah Slater’s CouchDB 1.0 retrospective e-mail. A lot of what I think about community is summarized well in Noah’s message, and the note summarizes the state of the community better than I could have done it myself. I hope that we’ll be hearing more testimonials like Noah’s in the years to come.

iPhone 4 and iPad update

Published on August 30, 2010 in internet and iPhone. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been using my iPhone 4 and iPad for several months now, so I thought I would give a hard real use experience report.

iPhone 4
I love the phone. I do see the much written about antenna attenuation problem, but day to day it doesn’t affect me as much as AT&T’s network does. One of the prime times for me to use my phone is while standing in line waiting for the ferry. The worst time is during the afternoon, because there are several hundred people all packed into the ferry terminal, all trying to pull data on their iPhones. The antenna has nothing to do with this.

In every other way, the phone is fantastic. My iPhone 3G would frequently hit the red line on the battery indicator by the time I hit the afternoon ferry, and that was after I had carefully managed my use of the device during the day. With the iPhone 4, I don’t have to worry about managing the battery. That alone has made the upgrade worth it for me.

The upgraded camera has been a huge success for me. I attribute this to a single factor – startup time. I was always reluctant to pull out my iPhone 3G for use as a camera, because quite frequently I would miss the moment by the time the camera came up. I’ve been using Tap Tap’s excellent Camera+ and I like it quite a bit. Unfortunately, you can’t get it on the app store right now, because the developer inserted an easter egg that would allow you to use one of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. Apple then pulled the app from the store. This is the first time that App Store policy has affected an app that I care about, and I’m obviously not happy about it. It seems to me that Camera+ could have a preference that controlled this feature, and that users would have to turn it on. Since the user would have turned on that feature, they would’t be confused about the takeover of the volume button. It seems simple to me. I really like Camera+’s light table feature, but I really hate the way that it starts up trying to imitate the look of a DSLR rangefinder. The other area where Camera+ could use improvement is in the processing / filters area. It has lots of options, but most of them don’t work for me. I have better luck with Chase Jarvis’ Best Camera on this front. In any case, I’m very happy with the camera as ” the camera that is always always with me”. The resolution is also very good, and I’ve been using it to photograph whiteboards into Evernote quite successfully.

iPad

I’ve been carrying my iPad on a daily basis. I’m using it enough that when I forgot it one day, it made a difference. One thing that I’ve learned is that the iPad really needs a case. I got much more relaxed about carrying mine once it was inside a case. Originally, I thought that I would wait for one of the third party cases, but all of the ones that looked like a fit for me were out of stock, so I broke down and ordered the Apple case. It does the job, but I am not crazy about the material, and I wish that it had one or two small pockets for a pen, a little bit of paper, and perhaps some business cards.

I am pretty much using the iPad as my “away from my desk device” when I am in the office. Our office spans 5 floors in a skyscraper, and I have meetings on several floors during the course of a day. The iPad’s form factor and long battery life, make it well suited as a meeting device. I have access to my e-mail and calendar, and I’m using the iPad version of OmniFocus to keep my tasks and projects in sync with my laptop. I’ve written some py-appscript code that looks at the day’s calendar in Entourage and then kicks out a series of preformatted Evernote notes so that I can pull those notes on my iPad and have notes for the various events of the day. This kind of Mac GUI to UNIX to Mac GUI scripting is something that I’ve commented on before. Thanks to multi-device application families like Evernote, I expect to be doing some more of this hacking to extend my workflow onto the iOS devices. I don’t have a huge need for sharing files between the iPad and the laptop, but Dropbox has done a great job of filling in the gap when I’ve needed to share files.

Several people have asked me about OmniFocus on the iPad, and whether or not it is worth it. I have a large number of both work and personal projects, so being able to use the extra screen real estate on the iPad definitely does help. I have come to rely on several features in OmniFocus for iPad which are not in the desktop version. There is a great UI for bumping the dates for actions by 1 day or 1 week, which I use a lot. I am also very fond of the forecast view, which lets you look at the actions for a give day, with a very quick glance at the number of actions for each day of a week. Both of these features are smart adaptations to the iPad touch interface, and are examples of iPad apps coming into a class of their own.

Another application that I’ve been enjoying is Flipboard. Flipboard got a bunch of hype when it launched back in July, and things have died down because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Conceptually, Flipboard is very appealing, but the actual implementation still has some problems as far as I am concerned. I can use Flipboard to read my Facebook feed, because Facebook’s timeline is just highly variable in terms of including stuff from my friends. I don’t feel that I can read Twitter via Flipboard, because it can’t keep up with the volume, so I end up missing stuff, and I hate that. Some of the provided curated content is reasonable, but not quite up to what I’d like. Flipboard is falling down because there’s not a good way for me to get the content that I want. I want Flipboard to be my daily newspaper or magazine app. But I can’t get the right content feed(s) to put into it.   

As far as the iOS goes, my usage of the iPad is making me horribly impatient for iOS 4. I would use task switching all the time. Of course, then I would be unhappy because the iPad doesn’t have enough RAM to keep my working set of applications resident. Text editing on iOS is very painful on the iPad. I’m not sure what a good solution would be here, but it definitely is a problem that I am running into on a daily basis – perhaps I need to work on my typing. There is also the issue of better syncing/sharing. My phone and iPad are personal devices, so they sync to my iTunes at home. I use both devices at work, where I have a different computer. This is definitely an area that Apple needs to improve significantly. At the moment, though, the fact that I am using my iPad hard enough to really be running into the problem means that the iPad has succeeded in legitimizing the tablet category – at least for me.

OSCON 2010

Published on July 28, 2010 in open source. 1 Comment Tags: , .

It’s nearing the end of July, which means that OSCON has come and gone. Here are my observations on this year’s event.

Talks

As always, there are a huge number of talks at OSCON, and this year I found it particularly hard to choose between sessions, though in several cases, hallway track conversations ended up making those choices for me. There wasn’t a theme to my talk attending this year, because a lot of topics are relevant to the work that I am doing now.

I attended a talk about Face Recognition on the iPhone. Sadly this turned out to be very focused on setting up for and calling the OpenCV library and less about face recognition, UI, or integrating face recognition into applications. As I’ve written previously, I think that new interface modalities may be arriving along with new devices, so I was hoping for a bit more than I got.

Big Data is also a topic of interest for me, so I went to Hadoop, Pig, and Twitter, and Mahout: Mammoth Scale Machine Learning. Hadoop, Pig, and Mahout are all projects at Apache, and each of them have an important part to play in the emerging Big Data story. The sort of analytics that people will be using these technologies for are part of the reason that data is now the big area of concern when discussing lock in.

The open source guy in me likes the idea of WebM, but it looks to me like there’s quite a way to go before it will be replacing H.264. I was surprised that the speaker didn’t have a better answer than “our lawyers must have checked this when we acquired On2″. More than anything else, getting clarity on the patent provenance for VP8 is what would make me feel good about WebM.

Robert Lefkowitz (the r0ml), is always an entertaining and thought provoking speaker. His OSCON presentations are not to be missed. This year he gave two talks, and you can read some of my commentary in my twitter stream. Unfortunately, r0ml picked licensing as the topic of his second presentation, and his talk was interrupted by an ill-tempered and miffed free software enthusiast, thus proving r0ml’s earlier solution that open source conferences are really legal conferences.

I’ve been following / predicting the server side javascript space for several years now. One of the issues with that space is the whole event based programming model, which caused mortal Python programmers headaches when dealing with the Twisted Python framework. Erik Meijer’s group at Microsoft has been grabbing techniques from functional program to try to make the programming model a bit more sane. I had heard most of the content in his Reactive Extensions For JavaScript talk before, and I’m generally enthusiastic about the technology. The biggest problem that I have is that RxJS is not licensed under an open source license. At JSConf I was told that this is being worked on, so I dropped in for the second half of Erik’s talk hoping to hear an announcement about the licensing. It was OSCON after all, and the perfect place to make such an announcement, but no announcement was made. I hope that Microsoft won’t wait until next year’s OSCON to get this done.

This year there were two of the keynote presentations that made enough of an impression to write about. The first was Rob Pike’s keynote on Go, where he eloquently noted some of the problems with mainstream programming languages. There was no new information here, but I liked the approach that he took in his analysis. The second was Simon Wardley’s Situation Normal, Everything Must Change . Simon is an excellent presenter and full of insight. While his talk was ostensibly about cloud computing, I think it was a little deeper than that. His story about the cloud is the story about commoditization of technologies, and since one of the roles of open source is commoditization of technology, I felt that there was some nice insight there for those of us working in open source. Simon also discussed the mismatch between innovation and mature organizations, another issue that people in open source often run into. The video is already up on YouTube, so you can make your own assessment of the talk.

The size and breadth of OSCON gives it one of the richest hallway tracks of any conference. This year was no exception – the hallway track started on the train from Seattle to Portland, and extended all the way through the return train trip as well. I always look forward to these discussions and to connecting with old friends. One friend that I caught up with was Cliff Schmidt, now executive director of Literacy Bridge, which is working to make knowledge accessible to people in poor rural communities throughout the world via their Talking Book device. Cliff had one with him, and this was the first time I had seen one. Just in case you haven’t, here’s what they look like:

Dailyshoot 249

Languages

OSCON began as a language conference, and this year, there were two special events in that space, the Scala Summit and the Emerging Languages Camp.

I have followed the Scala community pretty closely, because they are quickly accumulating real-world experience with functional programming. There are lots of cool tricks that remind me of stuff that I played with when I was in graduate school, and there are lots of bright people. But there are some things that I find worrying. For example, one of the speakers was touting the fact that Scala’s type system is now Turing complete. If I’m using Scala, one reason is that I want my programs to type check at compile time. Having the type checker go off and fail to halt is not what I had in mind. I recognize that you’d have to write some gnarly type declarations for this to happen, but still.

This was the first year for Emerging Languages Camp, and from what I can tell it was a roaring success. I didn’t attend as many sessions as I would have liked. This was due to a combination of factors – other talks that I wanted to see, being the biggest. The other factor was that the first talk I attended was Rob Pike’s talk on Go, and the room was very full, which made it hard for me to concentrate (probably had more to do with me than the room). When I saw that all the talks were being recorded and that the video folks promised to have them up in 2-4 weeks, it made it seem less urgent to try to pop in and out and fight the crowd. Still, this is a sign of success, and I hope that the minimum, the Emerging Language Camp will be given a larger room next year. Part of me would like to see it be a completely separate event from OSCON, but that’s probably not realistic.

Of the talks that I was able to attend, I found the Caja and BitC talks to be the most relevant. Fixing Javascript to have security is important for both client and the burgeoning server applications of Javascript. I wish that I had seen the talk on Stratified Javascript, since concurrency is ever the hot topic these days. As far as BitC goes, we are well beyond the time when we should have had a safe systems programming language. As much as C has contributed to the world, we really need to move on.

What is OSCON for?

I had a few discussions along the lines of “What is OSCON for?”, and Tim Bray shared some thoughts in his OSCON wrap up. As I have written before, I think that open source has “won”, in the sense that we no longer need to prove that open source software is useful, or that the open source development process is viable. There are still questions about open source business models, but that’s a topic that I’m not as interested in these days. Open source having “won” doesn’t mean that our ideas have permeated the entire world of computing yet, so there is still a need for a venue to discuss these kinds of topics. OSCON is more than that, though. It’s also a place where hackers (in the good sense) have a chance to showcase their work, and to exchange ideas. In that sense, part of OSCON is like a computing focused eTech. Apparently O’Reilly is no longer running eTech, which is fine – the one time that I attended, I was underwhelmed. I think that perhaps what is happening in the Emerging Languages Camp might be an example of how things might move in the future.

Of course, there’s a larger question, which is why do we have conferences at all anymore? Many conferences now produce video content of the sessions. I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in having an event to do product launches or announcements. The big thing is the hallway track, which allows for realtime interchange of ideas and opinions, and in the case of open source, provides a dosage of high bandwidth, high touch interaction that helps keep the communities running smoothly. We’re in the 21st century now. Is there something better that we can do?


iPhone.next?

Published on June 4, 2010 in iPhone. 5 Comments Tags: , .

Apple’s WWDC is next week, and I’ll be attending for the first time. There’s a lot of speculation swirling around the next iPhone, especially given the prototype obtained by Gizmodo. As I wrote previously, having an iPad has definitely cut into my iPhone use, and at the same time has raised the bar on my expectations for my next phone, iPhone or otherwise.

iPhone

I am using a 3G iPhone now, and I’m not having the best user experience at the moment. There are lots of lags and stutters at inopportune moments, both in the user interface and in the performance of AT&T’s 3G network. I’ve grown used to the briskness of the iPad, and I expect that on my phone now. Apple has set their own bar here. So getting me to iPad level responsiveness is job one. Job two is to get me decent battery life. My iPad lasts way longer than my iPhone. I understand why, but I don’t like it. I really, really want to be able to use my phone without redlining it every day. The last of the big items has to do with AT&T or a rumored second carrier. I want to be able to rely on the phone for accessing data. Right now it’s not as reliable as it needs to be, and I think that everyone knows that. It’s not at all clear to me that a second carrier will do any better, because I doubt that they are prepared for the level of traffic that is coming their way once they get the iPhone. Sprint and Verizon crumbled at Google IO, so let’s not kid ourselves that the other carriers are going to magically fix things. But maybe if a bunch of people jump ship to another carrier, things will get better on AT&T.

There are some secondary issues:    16GB has turned out to be less space than I anticipated, but since the 3GS already comes in a 32GB size, I expect the next generation to come in at 64GB, although I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t. I expect there to be camera upgrades, and I am pretty sure that I’ll be happy with what happens there. The real trick in cameras is the lenses not the megapixels, and all camera phones are on the same footing there.

This time around, there’s a “but”.

Android

After the Android 2.2 (Froyo) announcements, I am considering an Android phone as my next phone. There’s no question that today, the iPhone user interface is more highly developed, polished and intuitive than Android. At the moment fragmentation of the Android platform is a reality, despite Google’s assurances that this will get cleaned up in the future. There are numerous good apps in the Android Marketplace, but some of the applications that I use the most are not there, because they are the iPhone counterparts of Mac desktop applications. That’s a fairly large problem. These are all good reasons to stick with the iPhone.

There are two big reasons that I am looking more closely at Android. The first is that Android has much much better “integration with the cloud”. One of the biggest annoyances that I have with my iPad is the hassle of moving PDF ebook files from my Macintosh to the iPad. I shouldn’t have to use a cord, and I shouldn’t have to use iTunes. 1Password can implement wireless syncing to the iPad and iPhone, why won’t Apple? The second and more important reason is that I like what I see in some of the directions that Google is taking the user interface. Specifically, I’m talking about use use of voice and (possibly) the use of computer vision as demonstrated in Google Goggles. The iPhone, and more recently, the iPad have done something very interesting with multitouch/gestural interfaces. If you subscribe to the theory that science fiction influence science fact, then we could look at Iron Man 2 for some examples of future interfaces. Tony Stark interacts with his computer via a combination of gestures and voice commands, and from the content of the voice commands, it is clear that the computer is employing something like vision in order to resolve references in Stark’s words. As great as Apple’s advances in multitouch have been, they have done very little in terms of voice. Perhaps their acquisition of Siri is a step in that direction, but Apple’s famed secrecy makes it hard to know. The same is true in vision, except that Apple has made no such acquisition. There’s quite some distance to go before Android’s speech and vision could bring about a multimodal interface like the one in Iron Man, but at least I can see the signs that Google is going that direction. Of course, I could just wait it out on a few more generations of iPhone while Google engineers work all these issues out, but I see signs of Google acting like a leader instead of a catch up player, and I like that.

What about Apple’s recent behavior with regard to languages other than Objective-C? Yes, I am bothered by it, but it’s not as big an issue to me as working well in an internet centric world, or working towards a much more multimodal user interface. Nobody is leaving the web platform because they are unable to write in-browser applications in their favorite language, and lots of people are delivering all kinds of interesting stuff in that space. More choice would definitely be nice, but if choice or freedom are your high order bit, that’s what Android is for.

If nothing else, I think it’s a good sign that there are two mobile platforms good enough to put me in this conundrum.

Thoughts on Open Source and Platform as a Service

Published on May 31, 2010 in internet and open source. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The question

Last week there were some articles, blog posts and tweets about the relationship between Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings and open source. The initial framing of the conversation was around PaaS and the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/{PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby}) stack. An article on InfoQ gives the jumping off points to posts by Geva Perry and James Uruqhardt. There’s a lot of discussion which I’m not going to recapitulate, but Uruqhardt’s post ends with the question

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Has cloud computing reduced the relevance of the LAMP stack, and is this indicative of what cloud computing will do to open-source platform projects in general?

Many PaaS offerings are based on open source software. Heroku is based on Ruby and is now doing a beta of Node.js. Google’s App Engine was originally based on Python, and later on Java (the open sourceness of Java can be debated). Joyent’s Smart Platform is based on Javascript and is open source. Of the major PaaS offerings, only Force.net and Azure are based on proprietary software. I don’t have hard statistics on market share or number of applications, but from where I sit, open source software still looks pretty relevant.

Also I think it’s instructive to look at how cloud computing providers are investing in open source software. Rackspace is a big sponsor of the Drizzle project, and of Cassandra, both directly and indirectly through its investment in Riptano. EngineYard hired key JRuby committers away from Sun. Joyent has hired the lead developer of node.js, and VMWare bought SpringSource and incorporated it into VMForce. That doesn’t sound to me like open source software is less relevant.

Cloud computing is destined to become a commodity

The end game for cloud computing is to attain commodity status. I expect to see markets in the spirit of CloudExchange, but instead of trading in EC2 spot instances, you will trade in the ability to run an application with specific resource requirements. In order for this to happen, there needs to be interoperability. In the limit, that is going to make it hard for PaaS vendors to build substantial platform lockin, because businesses will want the ability to bid out their application execution needs. Besides, as Tim O’Reilly has been pointing out for years, there’s a much more substantial lock in to be had by holding a business’s data as opposed to a platform lock. This is all business model stuff, and the vendors need to work this out prior to large scale adoption of PaaS.

Next Generation Infrastructure Software

The more interesting question for developers has to do with infrastructure software. In my mind LAMP is really a proxy for “infrastructure software” If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the development of web application software, you know that there is a lot happening with various kinds of infrastructure software. Kiril Shenynkman, one of the commenters on Geva Perry’s post wrote:

Yes, yes, yes. PHP is huge. Yes, yes, yes. MySQL has millions of users. But, the “MP” part of LAMP came into being when we were hosting, not cloud computing. There are alternative application service platforms to PHP and alternatives to MySQL (and SQL in general) that are exciting, vibrant, and seem to have the new developer community’s ear. Whether it’s Ruby, Groovy, Scala, or Python as a development language or Mongo, Couch, Cassandra as a persistence layer, there are alternatives. MySQL’s ownership by Oracle is a minus, not a plus. I feel times are changing and companies looking to put their applications in the cloud have MANY attractive alternatives, both as stacks or as turnkey services s.a. Azure and App Engine.

How many of the technologies that Shenykman lists are open source? All of them.   

Look at Twitter and Facebook, companies whose application architecture is very different from traditional web applications. They’ve developed a variety of new pieces of infrastructure. Interestingly enough, many of these technology pieces are now open source (Twitter, Facebook). Open source is being used in two ways in these situations. It is being used as a distribution mechanism, to propagate these new infrastructure pieces throughout the industry. But more importantly (and for those observing more closely, quite imperfectly), open source is being used as a development methodology. The use of open source as a development methodology (also known as commons-based peer production) is definitely contributing to these innovative technologies. Open source projects are driving innovation (this also happened in the Java space. Witness the disasters of EJB 1.0 and 2.0 which lead to the development of EJB 3.0 using open source technologies like Hibernate, and which provided the impetus for the development of Spring). Infrastructure software is a commons, and should be developed as a commons. The cloud platform vendors can (and are) harvesting these innovations into their platforms, and then finding other axes on which to compete. I want this to continue. As I mentioned in my DjangoCon keynote last year, I also want open source projects to spend more time thinking about how to be relevant in a cloud world.   

My question on PaaS is this: Who will build a PaaS that consolidates innovations from the open source community, and will remain flexible enough to continue to integrate those innovations as they continue to happen?

JSConf US Gear Report

Published on April 22, 2010 in photography. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

JSConf was my trial run for a bunch of new equipment, so here’s a separate report on those experiences.

iPad

Conference like settings are one of the situations where I felt that I could make the best of the iPad. Apparently, I was not alone, because there were probably somewhere between 5 and 10 iPads at the event.

My flights from Seattle to JSConf included 6 hours of flying time, and hour and a half of layovers, plus the usual waiting around time in airports. During that time I read some e-mail, watched about 90 minutes of video, and read several PDF books / documents. By the time I finally ended up in my hotel room, I still had around 80% of the battery charge remaining. I used the iPad as much as possible during the first day of JSConf, and the battery finished at 49% at the end of the first day. Thus far, the battery life is beyond my expectations.

During the conference, the primary activities that I was doing were e-mail reading, web browsing, twittering, and taking notes. For the first two activities, I used the built in Mail and Safari. For Twitter, I switched back and forth between Twitterific and TweetDeck. I used Evernote as my primary note taking tool.

I started out using Twitterific, but at some point it stopped working and was giving a message about an nvalid server certificate error. Echofon on the Mac was having a similar problem. I had TweetDeck installed on the iPad as a leftover from trying it on the iPhone, so I gave it a try and it worked. On the desktop I am not a fan of Tweetdeck’s AIR based user interface, which outweighs it’s advantage of having columns. When I use Syrinx on the desktop, I just open a stack of windows and that works fine. But on the iPad, Tweetdeck’s column based model makes a lot of sense, especially if you hold the iPad in landscape mode. I was mostly happy with the experience, although Tweetdeck has some weird UI in places:

  • It’s hard to get a sense of when the various columns refresh, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to get individual columns to refresh. I’d love to be able to use Tweetie 2′s pull down to refresh gesture to do this.
  • Favoriting tweets (which is how I keep track of interesting information on a mobile device) takes over the whole screen for a moment, causing an annoying flash/blink effect.
  • In Landscape mode you can’t click links or view profiles (the latest update to TweetDeck has added support for link clicking)
  • If you select a tweet and then discover that you need the additional menus popup, then you need to select another tweet and then reselect the tweet you want to act on

I love Evernote, and I’ve written about that before. The iPad version of Evernote is fantastic, with perhaps one exception. If you try to edit a rich text note, you are put into a weird append only kind of mode. I have some Python scripts that create rich text notes from items on my calendar, so it’s annoying to go back to Evernote on the iPad and then be put into append mode. I would love to see a full rich text editing capability come to a future version of Evernote for iPad (and sure, iPhone). Other than that, it was a workhorse at JSConf.

At many conferences, there are multiple WiFi networks, and you have to switch among them as you go from room to room. This was the case at JSConf. On the iPad, this meant a trip to the Settings app in order to select a new network. It would be great if the iPad would switch among multiple known networks based on signal strength. I can think of some reasons why you might not want to do this, but in my situation, it would have been really convenient.

All in all I had a pretty good experience with the iPad as my primary device. I can definitely see it as my primary conference machine, as well as my “in a meeting” machine. iPhone OS 4.0′s “multitasking” will reduce the annoyance associated with waiting for apps to restart on switching.

MacBook Pro

At work they issued me a unibody MacBook Pro 15″. These are supposed to have much better battery life than their pre-unibody forbears. As far as I can see this is true. I imagine that the recently refreshed models are even better on this count. The only other thing that I noticed was that the power adapter gets pretty hot while recharging the machine.   

GF1

Like many photographers, I’ve been looking for a small, high quality, camera that I could carry with me almost all the time. I have my cell phone at all times, and in a pinch, a cell phone picture is better than nothing. But a cell phone camera, regardless of megapixels lacks the controls that I’ve grown used to when making pictures. I’ve started carrying a Panasonic GF1 with the 20mm lens. The wide aperture prime suits the style that I like to shoot in, and the Micro 4/3 sensor gives pretty decent looking pictures. The GF1 produces 12 megapixel RAW files, which in principle is the same as my D3. Of course, there’s a vast difference in quality of those pixels, but thus far I am pretty happy. It has all the controls that I was looking for, as well as a hot shoe for Strobist shenanigans. It’s going to take me a while to master the controls, but I’m in no hurry. It did seem odd to be setting around with the tiny GF1 while the DSLR toting strobists were doing the photos of JSConf. I’ll be doing most of my Dailyshoot assignments with the GF1 — I’m looking forward to drawing material from downtown Seattle. Here are a few of the shots so far:

Dailyshoot 152

Dailyshoot 153

Dailyshoot 155

Bose QuietComfort 15

I am pretty sensitive to noise. Between commuting on the ferry every day, working in a building with thin walls, and spending time on airplanes, I decided that I needed help in coping with all the noise. Ever since the Bose noise canceling headsets came out, I’ve been interested in them for cutting the noise and helping me concentrate. I’ve started carrying a set of the Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones. These do a great job of cutting out noise. Most kinds of background noise gets cut out, but you can still hear human voices, albeit at a reduced volume. A little bit of music takes care of that quite easily. Like many people who reviewed these headphones, I do experience the sensation of pressure while wearing them, but these headphones are much more wearable than the earplug style Etymotic headphones that they are replacing. The only other drawback that I’ve found is that they don’t appear to built super well, so I am taking care to carry them in the semi hard case that they came in, which makes them a little less convenient.   

I think that I am well equipped to survive commuting and office life.