Opera on the XO Laptop

No I'm not talking about singing.

I was looking forward to the release of Firefox 3 with great anticipation. I had tried out the beta versions and noticed the improvements in JavaScript execution speed and memory footprint. Since the XO laptop is relatively slow and memory constrained compared to many of the other computers that I work with, I was really hoping that Firefox 3 would be a big improvement over Firefox 2. It turns out, for the XO, it wasn't. The place where the limitations were most apparent, was scrolling on a large web page. The page would hang for a second or so and then slowly creep down. It probably had to do with the short supply of available RAM on my happy little green machine.

As momentum was building for Firefox 3, I started to hear good things about Opera 9.51. When I ran into performance issues on Firefox and the XO, I decided to give Opera a try. Some thought I was crazy since, as Arne mentioned, the XO can be a bit slow. Yes, the XO laptop is a different environment than most other computers out there, and Opera has turned out to be an improvement.

To set up Opera on the XO, I began by downloading from the Opera web site. I selected Opera 9.51 for Linux i386, selected RedHat as the distribution in the drop down menu, then I selected RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9 and checked the box to Download this package in TAR.GZ format. Whew.



Next, unpack the archive using

tar zxvf opera-9.51.gcc4-static-qt3.i386.tar.gz

and then run

install.sh -s

From there, you can just type opera on the command line in the terminal to start it up.

Speedy Dynamic Member Lookup in C (part 2)

The comments on my previous post were highly enlightening. Joe pointed me to an article on the Polymorphic Inline Cache, and it's use in the SELF programming language. And Joel mentioned some different techniques used in other languages (Objective C, LISP, C++, and others) to implement dynamic lookups. With this new information, I can see that my simple solution might fall far short of the optimal solution, which isn't all that surprising as I'm certain more time has been spent on these real programming languages. But what I do think is interesting, is the idea that a more complex solution can give better performance than a simpler design. It is as if there is a valley, with the simple solution of static, precompiled behavior on a peak of performance, standing opposite a complex design which introduces overhead of collecting statistics on the most common paths through the code and constantly recompiles to machine code which optimizes the most used idioms. In between lies the poorly performing trough of the half solution. Solutions which provide dynamic behavior, but don't go far enough to mitigate the added cost of runtime lookups. The simple idea that I've coded up sits in this trough of slowness, but I'd wager it is faster than some solutions I've seen out there.

This isn't really a great solution, but I had already started, and wanted to finish because I think it was a good learning experience. We begin with a definition of a data structure that points to an offset lookup method.

typedef struct {
  size_t (*memberLookup)(char*);
} TypedStruct;

typedef struct {
  size_t (*memberLookup)(char*);
  unsigned int age;
  unsigned int weight;
  char* name;
} Person;

size_t PersonLookup(char*);

typedef struct {
  size_t (*memberLookup)(char*);
  char* breed;
  unsigned int weight;
  unsigned int age;
  char* name;
} Dog;

size_t DogLookup(char*);

You can think of Person and Dog as subclasses of a common parent. They share a few member attributes, but the attributes are in different places within the structure. I want to write a function which can find the age member in whatever structure is passed in to it. How do we find out where a member lies within a structure? With this design, we ask the structure to tell us. The memberLookup function takes a name, and returns the offset for the desired member. Here are the lookup functions that describe the above structures:

#include"typed_struct.h"
#include<stdio.h>

size_t PersonLookup(char* memberName) {
  if(strcmp(memberName, "age") == 0) {
    return sizeof(size_t);
  } else if(strcmp(memberName, "weight") == 0) {
    return sizeof(int) + sizeof(size_t);
  } else if(strcmp(memberName, "name") == 0) {
    return 2*sizeof(int) + sizeof(size_t);
  } else {
    return -1; 
  }
}

size_t DogLookup(char* memberName) {
  if(strcmp(memberName, "breed") == 0) {
    return sizeof(size_t);
  } else if(strcmp(memberName, "weight") == 0) {
    return sizeof(size_t) + sizeof(char*);
  } else if(strcmp(memberName, "age") == 0) {
    return sizeof(size_t) + sizeof(char*) + sizeof(int);
  } else if(strcmp(memberName, "name") == 0) {
    return sizeof(size_t) + sizeof(char*) + 2*sizeof(int);
  } else {
    return -1; 
  }
}

With the data structures in place and the functions which map member names to locations, we can now write functions which dynamically lookup the location of a member. This simple function displays the age of the entity which is passed in. The static variables are designed to speed up repeated calls with the same type. For example, if a Person is passed in as entity several times in a row, the location of the age member will only need to be looked up on the first call.

void GiveIntroduction(void* entity) {
  static size_t age_offset = 0;
  static size_t (*last_lookup)(char*) = NULL;
  
  if(last_lookup != ((TypedStruct*)entity)->memberLookup) {
    // In words, convert entity to a TypedStruct pointer
    // (TypedStruct*)entity
    // Find the function pointer called memberLookup
    // ((TypedStruct*)entity)->memberLookup
    // Call the function at memberLookup with "age" as the parameter
    // (*(((TypedStruct*)entity)->memberLookup))("age")
    age_offset = (*(((TypedStruct*)entity)->memberLookup))("age");
    last_lookup = ((TypedStruct*)entity)->memberLookup;
  }

  printf("I am %i years old\n", *((int*)(entity + age_offset)));
}

Here is a program which uses the above structures and functions.

int main() {
  Dog nelly;
  nelly.memberLookup = &DogLookup;
  nelly.age = 4;
  nelly.name = "Nelly";
  
  GiveIntroduction(&nelly);
}

When the above is run, it should display "I am 4 years old".

Now, what is the point of all of this? In statically typed, compiled languages, the compiler usually has to know in advance where the data is and what it's type is. For example, with the Dog structure, the compiler knows that age is 12 bytes from the start of the structure (on most 32-bit processors), and that it's type is int. All of the offsets are calculated at compile time. By moving the offset lookup into a function which is executed at runtime, we free up the compiler from having to know where to look for a particular member. Now we can pass in any data type into GiveIntroduction and as long as the object's memberLookup function tells us where to find the age member, everything will work.

We've gained flexibility at the cost of some overhead. Setting the memberLookup on every instance of a TypedStruct uses a bit of memory, and calling the function to find the necessary offset adds a runtime cost. This example has been a bit simple, even too simple, as there are ways to provide more aggressive caching of the lookups and faster ways to perform the lookup within the XLookup functions.

Speedy Dynamic Member Lookup in C (part 1)

If my senior class had voted for a "Most likely to try to invent a new programming language", I probably would have at least gotten a nomination for the category. From time to time I think about how I could design language constructs that maintain efficiency while allowing for more flexibility than statically linked, early bound languages like C. Some of my previous posts have been along these lines. And I've recently been thinking about performing member lookups on an object instance and how I could write a more flexible object system in C.

C has a concept of structs and types, and allows you to define a data structure, which is compiled. Here's an example:

typedef struct {
  uint16_t age;
  uint16_t weight;
  wchar* name;
} Person;

Now when you say Person fred, your program will grab a chunk of memory (likely from the stack) that is 8 bytes, or 12 bytes, or something similar depending on the compiler, size of pointers, ect. Now if I write fred.age in my program, this is translated to "the value of the two bytes at the start of fred's address" and if I ask for fred.weight, that turns into "the value of two bytes which are at exactly fred's address + 2". Since C is early bound (AKA static), the compiler knows that weight is always found in the same location relative to the start of fred, and as a result, the machine code generated by the compiler can be very fast and efficient.

The place where this optimization breaks down, is when you have a different structure but you want to be able to use a function written for one type of object with a different object. Say for example, we had a different structure that also used age and weight:

typedef struct {
  wchar* breed;
  uint16_t weight;
  uint16_t age;
  wchar* name;
} Dog;

Now if I want to reuse the code I wrote earlier to find out the age of a Dog, I have a small problem. You see, the age is in a different location for a Dog than a Person. If it had been in the same position, I could have cast the Dog to a Person, and then my compiled code would be looking for age at the same location. But for one reason or another, the layout of Dog is different.

In many programming languages, the difference in layout would present no problem, because the offsets aren't set in stone at compile time. Instead there is a dynamic lookup which says "where can I find 'age' for the type of data this is?" and we can add the same functionality here in C. Often this lookup is done using some kind of associative array, but I have a few slightly different ideas in mind.

C gets around this potential limitation by requiring you to specify the type of the each chunk of data. So for example, if you have a Person fred and a Dog nelly, then age is converted into a different offset from the start of the data. However this means that you would need to write the same function multiple times, once for Person and once for Dog.

Instead of rewriting a function for each different type, I'd like to use the same function for all types which have members which match up. In other words, as long as a type has a member named age of type uint16 and member string called name. It should be possible to create a C function which behaves a bit more like dynamic languages like JavaScript and Python.

In order to accomplish a dynamic member lookup, I'll add one thing to the types I've defined above. The first member will always be a pointer to something that allows the location of a named object to be determined. This could be a function that takes a name and produces an offset, it could be a hash table that maps names to offsets, it could point to a binary tree, or something else.

typedef struct {
  void* type;
  uint16_t age;
  uint16_t weight;
  wchar* name;
} Person;

typedef struct {
  void* type;
  wchar* breed;
  uint16_t weight;
  uint16_t age;
  wchar* name;
} Dog;

Now that the type information is stored along with the data, I could write a PrintAge function that would lookup the correct location of the age member. Here's some pseudocode for how this more dynamic code would look:

function PrintAge()
  // Note that this age offset is stored between function calls so 
  // that if the function is called with the same type as in the most recent call, 
  // the offset will not have to be looked up again. This should improve 
  // performance by avoiding the need to perform a lookup in some cases.
  static long age_offset = -1
  static void* most_recent_type
  if most_recent_type != current_type || age_offset == -1
    age_offset = lookup(age)
  printf("age is *(person+age_offset)")

I haven't decided yet on the best way to lookup the offset based on the member name. I think it might be a close call between pointing to a lookup function with if statements, and a lookup in a presorted binary tree. Depending on the number of members, I could see it going either way. What do you think, what is the best way to implement a dynamic member lookup?

Password Generator part 2

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had designed a simple password generator for use with the myriad of websites on which I have accounts. Rather that store passwords and carry them around with me, I've decided to carry around the code for a password generator in my head, so that I can generate difficult-to-guess passwords using a few easy to remember pieces of information. Namely these are a reusable master password, my username on the site, and the domain name of the site (like twitter.com for example).

The generator algorithm takes these three pieces of information as strings of text (ASCII characters to be exact), and uses them to populate three pseudo-random data streams (I used ARC4 for the pseudo-random algorithm because it is easy to memorize). These three streams are combined to create the characters in the password. For more details, see the list of steps in the first post about the password generator, or better yet, take a look at the source code.

I have uploaded the password generator here, so if you'd like to use it, feel free.

In order to account for some websites which do not allow special characters or passwords that are thirty characters long, I created a settings file which has special rules for some websites. If there are any websites that you would like me to add to the settings, please let me know in the comments.

Now for a disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure that these passwords would stand up to cryptanalysis. It might be possible to figure out the inputs (the three secrets). So I recommend just using it for websites which are not too sensitive. I'm just using it on social news websites at the moment.

Someday this might all be made unnecessary through the use of OpenID or some other authentication solution. I'm looking forward to it.

Claire is here

Our daughter was born June 23rd at 2:29 AM and weighed in at a whopping 9 pounds, 3 ounces. She was 20.25 inches long, so it seems like Trevor was closest with his guess. She's absolutely wonderful. For now, we're quite busy keeping up with her, so I don't anticipate much writing in the near future.

The first picture (Claire sleeping) was taken by my good friend Matt.

Simple Password Generator

My most recent little side project is a web page for generating passwords. It's a very simple page, which takes a few inputs, generates a pseudo-random stream from them, and produces a password using printable characters. Now now, hold it down. I can hear you from way over here. "But Scudder, aren't there like 40,000 password generators out there? Won't a web page be much slower at complex calculations than an installed desktop application? Wouldn't a truly random password stored in an encrypted keystore be a more secure way to handle passwords?" Well yes that all tends to be true. The idea here though, is to be able to regenrate passwords that I use non-critical accounts (you know, for sites like digg.com and reddit.com) on whichever computer I happen to be using. In fact, even if this password generator web app is for some reason unavailable, I made sure that it is simple enough that it all fits in my head. In a pinch, I could rewrite it from memory.

So here's how this little app generates passwords:

1. Ask for a username, password, and domain (like example.com).
2. Generate an RC4 stream for each of the three inputs above.
3. Throw away the first 1,000 bytes from the three streams.
4. Get three sets of the desired number of pseudo random bytes, one for each key stream. And xor each group of three bytes together to get single pseudo-random values. For example, if you want a 15 character password, get 15 bytes from each of the three keystreams.
5. Translate the bytes into printable characters, or alphanumeric characters, by taking the modulus of the pseudo-random byte and using it as the index to looking up a character in a table.

A couple of the items above need some clarification. First is RC4. RC4 is a well known algorithm for generating a pseudo-random stream of bytes. It's not really up to snuff in terms of high security these days, but it is really simple. So simple in fact, that it is easy to remember the steps, and therefore, I chose it for this all-in-my-head password generator.

The second detail you would need to know in order to reproduce this generator, are the tables that I use to translate pseudo-random bytes into characters. I created this table, by typing in characters beginning on the first row of a US keyboard then I repeated the first row while holding the shift key. For example, the table begins with: `1234567890-=~!@#$%^&*()_+qwertyuiop[]QWERTYUIOP{}...

It turns out that some websites don't allow special characters like % and & in passwords. Why they don't is beyond me. So I created a table using the same method as above, but it only contains alphanumeric characters. Like this 1234567890qwertyuiopQWERTYUIOP... For websites which don't allow special characters, you can choose to use the alphanumeric table to translate the pseudo-random bytes into a password which is usable on the website.

I must sign off for now, so stay tuned for part two.

Upcoming Arrival

I imagine most of my regular readers have already found this out through other channels, but we're expecting. (Really it is Vanessa who is expecting, I have never really figured out why people say "we".) The bouncing baby bundle should be arriving in the very near future, so we've decide to guess the delivery date, weight, and length. The due date is June 22 and the doctor will usually try to induce labor if the baby hasn't arrived a week after the due date. Please write your own guess in the comments.

Here are the guesses we have so far:

Jeff
- date: June 17
- weight: 7 pounds 8 ounces
- length: 21 inches

Vanessa
- date: June 15
- weight: 7 pounds 7 ounces
- length: 21 inches

My mom's
- date: June 18
- weight: 7 pounds 6 ounces
- length: 21 inches

Vanessa's mom
- date: June 15
- weight: 6 pounds 15 ounces
- length: 19.5 inches

Vanessa's dad
- date: June 18
- weight: 8 pounds 6 ounces
- length: 20 inches

Sister
- date: June 15
- weight: 7 pounds 4 ounces
- length: 22 inches

The person who guesses the closest may receive a major award.

The Big Remodel

Over the past year, we've been remodeling our first house. It has been a very big job encompassing every room, and we did most of the work ourselves with help from family and friends. We hired out for some of the more complicated tasks, and we could not have done this without the help of many people (thank you!). I have a few hundred pictures of the entire remodeling process, so I thought it would make sense to show just a few pictures from the living room.

We began by removing all of the carpet in the house. In this first picture. you can see the front door as Vanessa is cleaning the floor. The rest of the pictures are taken from the front door (on the right) looking towards the back door (to the left).

When you first walked in the front door, you used to see this big structure which contained a couple of closets and was made of wood paneling. It created a short hallway which you would walk through to get to the living room from the front entry. We decided to remove this completely to create one great room.

After a significant amount of demolition, the closets are gone along with all of the wood paneling. Now you can see the old sliding glass doors in the back of the house from the front door. We replaced these with french doors. The water bottles are marking large nails embedded in the cement which we later cut out with a circular saw. (fun!)

Fast-forward ahead a few months, and we have hardwood floors, new drywall, paint, and we're moved in.

The master bedroom was actually the first room we finished, followed by the kitchen, then this, the living and dining room. I'll probably post more pictures at some point in the future. There are still a few details left to do, but the big remodel is basically finished and it feels very very good to be so close to completely done.

Not programming

So many posts related to programming recently. Time to change it up.

A Haiku

Tough to be funny,
because sometimes you fall flat.
Still it's worth trying.

A Fibo

Plain.
Bland.
Simple.
Serious.
Stay away from jokes.
Impress others with knowledge,
but sometimes it's dull.
Spice it up!
Let loose!
Try
puns.

A Joke

What do you call a joke that stinks?
Pungent.

A Better Joke

What's another name for a beach bum?
A tangent.

An Even Better Joke

What is equivalent to sine divided by cosine?
A beach bum.

See what I mean about falling flat ;-)

Creating and Using .so Files With gcc

And what is an .so file you might ask? Those from a Windows background might know them as .dll files, but that still doesn't answer the question.

Normally, when you compile a program, the system takes all of the pieces of code that you've written, converts them into something the computer can understand (machine code) and glues them together. You might compare the process to building a pyramid. All of the stones that you've sculpted are joined together and stacked up. Just like with a pyramid, if you want to change one of the stones, everything that sits on top of it needs to be adjusted. With a C program, making changes in a piece of code means lots of pieces need to be recompiled and reglued together.

If you use dynamic linking, shared libraries, whatever you'd like to call them, things work a bit differently. With dynamic linking, the pieces are not all glued together or stacked up, instead they are plugged in when they are needed. As a result, changes to a piece of code don't require that lots of other pieces get reshaped (recompiled) to fit. With dynamic linking, it is possible to change a piece of code while the program is running. Funny, that sounds a bit like a scripting language.

Here's an example. Let's say I wrote a library with a function called SpecialPrint. (It's like printf but different!) Here is the code for speciallib.c:

#include<stdio.h>

void SpecialPrint(char* payload) {
  printf("Special Print:%s\n", payload);
}

Now I write a program that uses this library. Here's the normal, non-dynamic, static linking, built like a pyramid way of using the library.

#include<stdio.h>
#include"speciallib.h"

int main() {
  printf("normal printf argument\n");
  SpecialPrint("special print's argument");
}

With the above code, I compile the SpecialPrint library with my main code and link them together, producing a single executable file. However, I can use the same speciallib file with code that loads the library dynamically while the program is running. The code might look something like this:

#include<stdio.h>
#include<dlfcn.h>

void ShowError() {
  char *dlError = dlerror();
  if(dlError) printf("Error with dl function: %s\n", dlError);
}

int main() {
  void *SharedObjectFile;
  void (*SpecialPrintFunction)(char*);

  // Load the shared libary;
  SharedObjectFile = dlopen("./speciallib.so", RTLD_LAZY);
  ShowError();
  // Obtain the address of a function in the shared library.
  SpecialPrintFunction = dlsym(SharedObjectFile, "SpecialPrint");
  ShowError();

  printf("normal printf argument\n");
  // Use the dynamically loaded function.
  (*SpecialPrintFunction)("special print's argument");

  dlclose(SharedObjectFile);
  ShowError();
}

In the above, the show error function is optional, I added it so that any errors that occur would be displayed. When you compile the above code, you'll need to make the speciallib into an .so file and make sure that the speciallib's directory (the current directory in my example) is listed as one of the places that we should look for shared object files. Here's what the steps to compile look like:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`
gcc -c -fpic speciallib.c
gcc -shared -lc -o speciallib.so speciallib.o
gcc main.c -ldl

For an explanation of what the above compiler options mean, and further explanation on .so files, see these two IBM articles on using shared object files on Solaris and linux.

Learning about .so files has been very interesting to me, because they bring a new level of flexibility to a traditionally rigid environment like C.

Early vs Late Binding

I've been thinking recently about programming languages (surprised?), specifically about the things that make them different. One of the really nice things about C, is that it compiles into machine code which tends to run lean and mean. By that I mean it is blazing fast and doesn't take up much memory. On the other hand, programming in Python and JavaScript has really been growing on me. There is so much flexibility to create elegant solutions quickly and without rewriting lots of existing code. In fact, I'd say greater ability to reuse existing code is a natural outgrowth of programming language flexibility.

So where does this flexibility come from? One place I tend to notice it most, is in the ability to give an existing function a new body, in other words, you can plug in different behavior in place of the default.

Here's a simple example to illustrate the idea. Let's say that we created a simple checkout register which takes a receipt, adds the sales tax, and spits out the grand total. Here's our code foundation in both Python and JavaScript (these two examples do essentially the same thing):

Python:

def CalculateTax(amount):
  return amount * 0.18

class Receipt(object):
  
  def __init__(self, items=None):
    self.items = items or []
  
  def CalculateTotal(self):
    return sum([item + CalculateTax(item) for item in self.items])

JavaScript:

function calculateTax(amount) {
  return amount * 0.18;
}

function Receipt(items) {
  if (items) {
    this.items = items;
  } else {
    this.items = new Array();
  }
}

Receipt.prototype.calculateTotal = function() {
  var total = 0;
  for (var i = 0; i < this.items.length; i++) {
    total += this.items[i] + calculateTax(this.items[i]);
  }
  return total;
}

To use the above code, you might write something like this:

Python:

my_order = Receipt([5.50, 10, 7.89])
print my_order.CalculateTotal()

JavaScript:

var myOrder = new Receipt([5.50, 10, 7.89]);
alert(myOrder.calculateTotal());

Now let's say someone asks you to change the tax rate which is used when calculating the total. Here's the catch, you're not allowed to change the existing code. It turns out this is actually really easy. You can define a new function, then make an existing function name point to the new function. Here's an example of how to inject our new code:

Python:

def CalculateHigherTax(amount):
  return amount * 0.25

CalculateTax = CalculateHigherTax

print my_order.CalculateTotal()

JavaScript:

function calculateHigherTax(amount) {
  return amount * 0.25;
}

calculateTax = calculateHigherTax;

alert(myOrder.calculateTotal());

After adding the above code to the foundation we started with, you will notice that the calculate total method now uses calculate-higher-tax instead of the original function, even though you are calling the same method on the same object as before. Congratulations, you have just witnessed late binding in action.

So what is late binding? The idea is that the computer decides which code should be executed while the program is running. This seems normal in scripting languages, but compiled languages often use this too (I'm looking at you Java and C++). For example, overloaded methods and polymorphism take advantage of late binding. With late binding you can change the meaning of an identifier (for example, change the behavior when you call a specific function) at just about any time.

Now lets take a look at a language which uses early binding. C is a great example. With early binding, the meaning of things like function names are locked in when the code is compiled. There is no dynamic lookup while the program is running to see which code should be executed, instead the address of the desired code is embedded directly into the binary machine code.

Here is how the same calculate-total example might look in C:

#include<stdio.h>

float CalculateTax(float amount) {
  return amount * 0.18;
}

typedef struct {
  float* items;
  int num_items;
} Receipt;

float CalculateTotal(Receipt this_order) {
  int i;
  float total = 0;
  for(i = 0; i < this_order.num_items; i++) {
    total += this_order.items[i] + CalculateTax(this_order.items[i]);
  }
  return total;
}

int main(void) {
  Receipt my_order;
  float my_items[3] = {5.50, 10, 7.89};
  my_order.items = my_items;
  my_order.num_items = 3;
  printf("%f\n", CalculateTotal(my_order));
}

If you try to set CalculateTax to a new function definition, you will get an error at compile time because a function cannot be changed once it is bound. Early binding tends to produce more efficient programs. However, if you want to, you can still use the flexiblity available in late binding in C.

Using function pointers, you can store the address of the code that you want to be executed, and change the address while the program is running. We can achieve the same late binding effects that I've illustrated in Python and JavaScript by making some small changes to the C code (marked in bold below). Declare a function pointer named TaxCalculator which will store the address of the desired calculate-tax function, then change CalculateTotal so that it uses the TaxCalculator instead of directly calling a calculate-tax function.

#include<stdio.h>

float CalculateTax(float amount) {
  return amount * 0.18;
}

float CalculateHigherTax(float amount) {
  return amount * 0.25;
}

typedef struct {
  float* items;
  int num_items;
} Receipt;

float (*TaxCalculator)(float) = &CalculateTax;

float CalculateTotal(Receipt this_order) {
  int i;
  float total = 0;
  for(i = 0; i < this_order.num_items; i++) {
    total += this_order.items[i] + (*TaxCalculator)(this_order.items[i]);
  }
  return total;
}

int main(void) {
  Receipt my_order;
  float my_items[3] = {5.50, 10, 7.89};
  my_order.items = my_items;
  my_order.num_items = 3;
  printf("%f\n", CalculateTotal(my_order));
  TaxCalculator = &CalculateHigherTax;
  printf("%f\n", CalculateTotal(my_order));
}

There you have it!

Here's another way to think about this comparison. In high level languages which don't expose pointers, functions, variables, and other identifiers actually act like pointers.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Last week, I downloaded the beta release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to give it a try. I've been meaning to migrate our last Windows XP machine over to Linux for some time now (the other three computers I use regularly are Linux machines), but I've been reluctant to backup, repartition, and take the plunge. It seems like this is a common feeling among computer owners, but I think the Ubuntu community may have found an effective solution.

And the name of this new innovation: Wubi. Pop in the Ubuntu CD while running in Windows, and an auto-run installer opens which allows you to install Linux alongside Windows. When you reboot your computer, you see a menu of which operating system to boot into: Windows or Ubuntu. This means you can try out Ubuntu on your computer with zero risk to your existing files. In fact, you can access the files on your Windows installation from within Ubuntu. And if you decide Ubuntu is not your you, you can uninstall it as you would any other Windows program. Pretty slick.

Managing in the installation is just the beginning of the improvements the team has made. After I installed the latest version and booted into Ubuntu, it told me that there were propriety drivers for my NVIDIA graphics card and asked if I wanted to install them. I clicked the button, the download started, and I was up and running with 3D accelerated graphical desktop effects. I think I could sit there opening and closing windows all day. I'm looking forward to the upcoming official release.

A Musical Interlude... and back to Programming

I've been listening to Daft Punk and Justice quite a bit recently. Apparently I'm on a techno kick again. I've never found any electronic music that I've enjoyed as much as Joy Electric's The White Songbook. The purity of the tones and style has made it one of my all time favorite albums.

This got me thinking about a project which I thought of years ago, started, then abandoned. It was a music synthesizer/sequencer which you would program, by well, programming. I mean that the music would be controlled exclusively through a programming language. This would alter the creative process in several ways. Most music sequencers are graphical and allow you to lay out musical patterns in sequence. Writing a program is extremely non-linear, with classes, functions, and variables being defined in the code long before they are used. In this hypothetical sythesizer language. a composition might look something like this:

sequence "intro":
  playSample("beat", start=0:32.1, end=0:33.5, beats=[1,3,9,11,15])
  playSample("moog", beats=[5,7,11])
  shiftPitch(start=A4, end=C4, duration=bars(8))

sequence "solo":
  playSample("guitarRiff", start=1:15.3, end=2:09.0)

tempo 150 BPM
play("intro", now)
play("solo", end("intro"))
play("solo" now()+bars(5))

In the above example, the first play statement will be executed, then the third play statement (5 bars into the 8 bar intro), then the second solo will play again, probably before the first solo finishes. There are other interesting features in the pseudo-code above, but the fact that these sequences are played out of order was what I really want to highlight.

I've done live coding at several events over the years and I tend to have fun with it. It doesn't always go exactly as planned, but that is the whole idea. Live coding turns programming into a performance piece. I imagine there is a niche group of people who could really get into the live coding music scene.

XO Laptop

My XO laptop arrived in the mail recently and it is quite an amazing little machine. Conclusion up front: I'm extremely satisfied with it and in some ways this laptop computer is better than ones that sell for ten times the price.

You might recall from a previous post that I had downloaded the XO's operating system and taken it for a test drive in an emulator. Now I have the real thing in front of me, and it's safe to say that it is even better. After all, some of the most innovative features of this computer are in the hardware. My favorite feature is the screen. It is viewable in direct sunlight which makes it usable outdoors. Second up would be the wireless networking. The graphical network selector is fun to use and the connection tends to be more reliable than any of the other computers I've used with my home wireless router. The battery life is also impressive, easily five hours on a charge of its small battery. It even has a built-in camera and microphone.

It runs all of the software I need too. I used the instructions I wrote up when I installed firefox on the emulated operating system. Everything went smoothly and I was browsing the web using firefox in a few minutes (The XO laptop comes with a perfectly good web browser, but I wanted to use my favorite plugins and have more control over downloads).

I'm quite taken with the little machine. I've been using it as my primary computer at home, using it for all of the tasks I normally do (mostly browsing the web and programming). There are a couple of things that I would change if I had the chance. The first is the keyboard. It is an interesting design, made of a flexible rubber-like substance, and it works much better than other flexible keyboard that I've tried, but it took a while to get used to the shift key (I have to press in the corner of the key). The other difficulty is presented by the slower processor, but it doesn't get in my way most of the time. The only time I notice any slowness is when playing flash videos (like on YouTube). Perhaps part of the problem is flash for Linux, but I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really mind as I don't watch that much video, and if I want to, I have other computers that I can use.

It will probably come as no surprise that I wrote this post using the little green computer. I'm saddened by the end of the "give one get one" program, as I think there is still the opportunity for more people to donate and receive their own XO. If anyone is interested, it might be possible to order a batch of one hundred or more through the "give many" program.

BusyList

Andy and I started work on a simple little open source project for tracking tasks; it's called busylist. We wanted to experiment with Ajax, Python, and web service APIs, so we whipped up a basic system in a few hours. There is still quite a bit of work to be done, but it has been a great learning experience so far. An extremely alpha test version is available in subversion along with some instructions on the project's wiki pages. If you're interested, feel free to check it out (pun intended) and contribute if you like. It is an open source project after all.

(Portable) Ubuntu for Programmers

I've been trying over the past several weeks to find the best fit for Linux on a USB pen drive so that I can boot into my own operating system and get to my files no matter which computer I'm using. As you might notice from my other posts, I tend to spend quite a bit of my computer time in programming and browsing the Web, so the things I'm most interested in are a web browser (Firefox), support for wireless cards in several computers, and a variety of command line programming tools (gcc, python, vim, etc.). It should be possible to take one of the standard Linux distributions and install it on a USB drive (provided the drive is large enough), but I wanted to use a one gigabyte drive that I had, and with my simple needs I should really be able to get all of the necessities in under one gig. Along the way I've tried Puppy Linux, Slax, Feather Linux, DSL, and others, but I decided in the end to roll my own solution based on Ubuntu.

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, but the standard desktop install is far too large for installation on a one gig drive. For a while I was using the live CD booting from a pen drive with a partition for my files. I used the instructions I found on Pen Drive Linux to set up the pen drive with the image from the live CD (only 750 megabytes). The only problem with this set-up was that all of my files were in a seperate partition and my home directory was wiped out each time. Since many Linux programs store settings in your home directory, this turned out to be a bit incovenient. I tried a few different options, but finally decided to go with a stripped down Ubunutu foundation and add the things I wanted.

I began with Ubuntu Server 7.10 and installed it on my USB drive using some of the recommendations in the installation instructions for low memory systems. During the installation process I selected guided partioning and I did not choose to install any of the software configurations in the "software to install" menu. After installing, I rebooted and added the following packages using sudo apt-get install:

lynx (optional)
screen (optional)
gcc (optional)
xorg
x-window-system-core
firefox

If you are using a laptop, you will likely want to install the following modules:

acpi
acpid

With the above installed you can check the battery's charge, remaining time, etc. by running acpi on the command line. For the graphical desktop window manager, I chose iceWM. I installed it by adding:

icewm
iceconf
icewm-themes

In the past I've worked quite a bit with Fluxbox as a window manager, but it seems like iceWM is easier to configure, especially under Ubuntu. The liQuid theme looks quite nice.

This set up boots into a text only command line mode because it is based on Ubuntu Server, to enter graphics mode, you simply run startx. I connected to my wireless network using wpa_supplicant and running iwconfig.

One of the benefits of working on a lightweight system on a flash drive is the bootup speed. In twenty seconds the computer boots from a cold start, connects to my wireless network, and enters the graphical desktop. I'm quite happy with my little portable operating system, and you probably won't be suprised to hear that I wrote this post using it.

In praise of Haikus

Programmers are no strangers to strict requirements on form and syntax, so working in the poetic medium of the Haiku comes almost naturally.

Programming is fun.
Little virtual widgets.
Poems that do work.

The brevity and compactness of the haiku lends itself well to writing something tighly focused. I find them quite enjoyable to write.

Of course, there are quite a few other poetic structures of note which can offer a fun challenge. The limerick and the sonnet are two of my favorites. Here's a limerick I wrote (beware, obscure programming reference ahead).

There once was a coder named Chuck.
And through all the source code he snuck.
  He changed not a line,
  it all worked just fine:
he programmed by punching a duck!

A sonnet would be a bit ambitious for this late hour. So unleash your creativity, let's see what you've got.

Happy Valentines Day

Vanessa prepared a wonderful meal for me this Valentines day. Four courses, the first one pictured here, all delicious. This was the roasted red pepper tomato soup with an artistic heart made of sour cream. And this was only the first course. Have I mentioned that the meal was delicious. I'm very thankful, I married quite a cook. Not only that but she decorated too.

It would seem I borrowed a page from one of Ben's blogs and wrote about food. What can I say, a meal like this makes an impression.

My Programming Journey so Far

One of the great things about working in computer science is that you never stop leaning. It seems that many programmer follow a progression from one popular language to the next, and I thought I'd dedicate a post to reminisce about my journey so far. I first learned to program in C. This was at the age of sometime around eleven or thirteen. I was instantly hooked, and since then, I've kept right on learning. I think the path I've taken has been fairly typical. From C, I learned C++ (starting in high school). I learned Java during a summer internship after my junior year of high school. In college, it was more C++, Java, and C (I really learned the ins and outs of C in my networking class) along with some other programming languages.

My favorite two classes in my college computer science curriculum were the ones in which I learned assembly language and designed an arithmetic logic unit and then a simple processor. I finally felt like I understood exactly how computers worked. With assembly language I learned a bit about machine code, how many clock cycles specific operations take, and it felt so good to optimize a bit of code to run blazingly fast. In circuit design I learned where those clock cycles come from, why operations take the time they do, and how those machine language op codes are determined. In all things software, at some point it all comes back to electronics.

College was also a time to get a taste of other, less widely used, but none-the-less important languages. Scheme and Prolog were particularly interesting to me, but I haven't had much occasion to use them very much recently.

Through my career, I've focused primarily on C++, then Java. After that I've had the opportunity to use a large number of languages. I learned Ajax programming using JavaScript, I wrote some PHP, C#, and a rather large amount of Python. Outside of work, I like to explore new concepts and languages and I've taken a look at some other languages too. Some notable examples include Ruby and Common Lisp, but I haven't built anything serious with them yet. Python is a language which I've really grabbed hold of recently and I've been learning quite a bit about it. At least half of the side projects I'm working on in my spare time these days are in Python. There seems to be quite a bit of momentum behind Python, and I'm very interested to see where this all goes.

So there you have it, a small glimpse into my journey thus far. How does it jive or differ from your own?

Firefox 3 Beta 2

I recently downloaded the second beta of Firefox 3 from Portable Apps. I didn't want to replace the version of Firefox I already had installed, so I used the version from Portable Apps which runs as a standalone binary. Sometimes it's really nice to unpack a program without touching the registry or worrying about installing.

Overall, I'm very happy with the changes I've seen in the latest version. I had heard that there have been some improvements to the JavaScript engine in this version, and they are noticeable. When I logged in to gmail it seemed a bit more responsive. I have to say though that my favorite changes are in the address bar. When typing the address, the address bar shows addresses, titles, and logos for pages that you've already visited. Firefox 2 did this too, but I think 3 gives more detail and a larger number of results. I found myself using it much more often than in 2. Part of the reason is that it shows the most recently visited page at the top instead of the shortest match. I also liked that you could star a URL to add it to your bookmarks, and you can even select a folder and tag the URL from within the address bar.