Thought Palace

Brent “NetNewsWire” Simmons raises the idea of “an open protocol (and open source server) for syncing RSS/Atom subscriptions”:http://inessential.com/2010/02/08/idea_for_alternative_rss_syncing_system, that is, a way of keeping multiple local newsreader apps (like on a Mac and an iPhone) in sync with each other, so that they share the same set of subscribed feeds, and remember which articles have already been read. You can think of it as “IMAP for RSS”.

NetNewsWire already does this using Google Reader, and Apple’s PubSub framework (which is what Safari and Mail use) shares the read/unread state using MobileMe. But it would be nice to have an open protocol.

I have some experience with this, having implemented the sync system used by PubSub. It’s an interesting problem—you might think I would have just used Apple’s SyncServices, and it’s true that it would have worked great for the subscription list, but it doesn’t scale well to huge numbers of rapidly-changing “read/unread” flags.

I have two suggestions (which I would have made on Brent’s blog, except he doesn’t allow comments anymore.)

Every year the Albums Of The Year lists seem more and more removed from my experience. (Most of the time I haven’t heard a single album on the list.) Worse, we’re now getting into the Of The Decade lists, making me realize how long this has been going on*. If you ask me the top albums of the ‘80s or ‘90s, I don’t have too much trouble rattling off a bunch of names. But this decade? I get confused and have to start thinking hard and looking through the back covers of my mix CDs. Why is that? [Ed.: it’s because you’re getting old. Duh.]

Let me start with this year, 2009. What was good? Hm; my prosthetic brain units at iTunes and last.fm tell me that it’s…

Yes, I’m still working on Ottoman (my append-only multiversion-concurrent storage library). As the code grows in size and complexity, so it grows in its resistance to being changed. But I just pushed my latest changes up to bitbucket.org. What’s new? …

ZSync is a new Mac/iPhone library that uses my BLIP P2P networking protocol.

As everyone knows who works in the pet-food industry (or computer software for that matter), it can be hard to start eating your own dogfood. Case in point: I just this week set Chrome to be my default browser, though I’ve been working on it for four months now.

Partly that’s because when I started in July the Mac version of Chrome was too immature; and partly it’s because a web browser is something you need to have running and working all the time—especially since the Chrome project’s bug tracker and code-review tool are web-based.

But Mac Chrome is quite stable enough to use now, and as I haven’t been doing much Chrome development on this MacBook Pro lately (it takes too long to compile compared to my souped-up Mac Pro) I’ve installed the latest dev-channel build and replaced Safari with it.

I’ve pushed a new update of my Ottoman storage library.

What’s new is the option to have individual additions to the dictionary written directly to disk, instead of being buffered in memory until you save a new version. This helps performance if you’re writing a ton of data all at once. And there’s a simple demo called PackDir that writes a ton of data all at once: it packs the contents of an entire directory tree into an Ottoman file, with keys being filenames and values being file contents.

To implement this I had to violate the lockless semantics a bit, because having multiple clients appending key/value pairs to the file at the same time would make it a lot harder to keep their revisions straight. So before being able to do any direct puts, you have to enter an [ugh] ExclusiveTransaction.

(Of course, the issues with locking don’t matter if the file is only being used by one process. Or even if there are multiple readers but only one writer, since the locks don’t interrupt readers.)

Call the roller of big dice,
The long-haired one, and bid him whip
On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s.
Let the fighters dawdle in such armor
As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap
Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon.
Let a fumble be finale of its caster:
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

Farhad Manjoo writing in Slate about Google Wave:

The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.

… Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I’d gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: “Don’t let the live-typing get you down!” The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the [...]

I’ve pushed out a few updates to the Ottoman library today. These fix a couple of embarrassing bugs, and also add an API in regular ol’ Objective-C for those of you who aren’t into that funky “C++” stuff.

(The Cocoa stuff uses MYUtilities, so if you’re not already using that, please read the setup instructions.)

It’s got a moose! But then I found the ottoman with hanging files inside and it was even more perfect…

I thought this one was pretty damn stylish too: