Thought Palace

Twitter: Charming in brief doses, he tells you little one-liner jokes, then wanders off after two sentences to go talk at somebody else. He absolutely will not shut up for an instant, and namedrops shamelessly about his famous friends. When he’s outworn his welcome he passes out drunk on the floor and has to be dragged home.

MySpace: Who? Oh, right, this anorexic high-school girl who threw herself at you at a party once in 2005. She kept bragging about all the bands she knew (and which you could overhear on the tinny earbuds she wore.) After one too many Jägermeister Jell-O shots she barfed Day-Glo all over your shoes. Last you’ve heard, she’s found some 80-year-old media mogul to be her sugar daddy.

Facebook: You vaguely remember him from high school. He was a nonentity then and he’s equally uninteresting now, but he’s somehow infiltrated your circle of friends and shows up at every social event you go to, telling boring anecdotes about last night’s game and what he bought at Wal*Mart. Worse, it seems he’s joined some cult and wants you to join too so he can go up a level.

Tumblr: She’s got impeccable taste, a lovely apartment and fascinating [...]

I’ve never figured out whether I prefer Python or Ruby, so I’ve written things in both languages. Sometimes I start in one and decide I’d rather use the other. Unfortunately, converting code is painful, even though both have fairly similar syntax. For instance, converting to Ruby means inserting zillions of “end” statements!

Having a need to do this recently, I lazily looked around for a script that would do the grunt-work of Python-to-Ruby translation. I couldn’t find one, so I ended up writing one myself. And I’ve uploaded it for the benefit of others who might have the same need, and who might even improve it.

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.)

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.)

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: