Friends

[2.136] The priests told me that Asychis succeeded to the Egyptian kingdom after Mycerinus. He built the eastern gateway of the sanctuary of Hephaestus, which is the most magnificent and by far the largest. All the gateways have figures carved on them and countless other marvels of construction, but this eastern one easily outdoes the others. They said that during his reign there was a severe financial recession and so a law was passed that a person might use his father’s corpse as security to take out a loan. There was a rider to the law, however, to the effect that the lender also became proprietor of the whole of the borrower’s burial plot, so that if the mortgagee refused to pay back the loan, as a penalty neither he nor any other member of his family could have access on their deaths to burial in the family tomb (or indeed in any other tomb either). They say that Asychis wanted to outdo the Egyptian kings who came before him, so he built as his monument a pyramid made out of bricks, and had the followed words chiselled in stone on it: ‘Do not compare me unfavourably with the pyramids of stone. I surpass the other pyramids as Zeus surpasses the other gods. For I was made out of mud, which was collected from a pole it had stick to when the pole was plunged down into a take.’ So much for Asychis’ achievements.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/12/2009_redux.html

Working today. (What, you thought I took Christmas off work? Hardly — but I've been lying on my back panting for the past week, having finished the first half third of "Rule 34", and you've got to go back to work sooner or later ...)

Meanwhile, unearthed from the archives for your delectation, here are some of the more significant of 2009's 147 blog entries for you to marvel at (or mock). Feel free to poke me via the comments ...

• Dr Strangecraft, I presume? — on the intersection of existential horror and humour (or: what I write)
• Preventing the new dark ages: start here — or, why I hate proprietary file formats
• Technology timeline — a head-trip through 25 years of consumer-electronic revolution, measured in terms of my age
• The art of being late — why it's really hard to stick to a schedule when you're writing a series of novels
• The 21st century FAQ — what it says on the tin
• Halting State has come true — we can all go home now
• Antisocial networking — Why I don't do Facebook or LinkedIn or ...
• LOGIN 2009 Keynote: Gaming in the world of 2030 — some guy who doesn't play enough games bullshits too much

Actually, that's just the first half of 2009. I'll get around to the back end of the year tomorrow. Really must see about bolting that non-fiction book together ...

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-12-25&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/merry_christmas_and_happy_new_year/

Year 2009 has been for us full of opportunities and allowed us to launch new promising software, like OneChannel the first XMPP publish and subscribe client, and to demonstrate our ability to innovate.

We still have lots of new features, software and improvements in the work: Oneteam Media Server, ProcessOne Wave server, new XMPP client, new online service portfolio, and many other surprises.

Year 2010 is going to be a great year for ProcessOne.

Thank you all for your ongoing support. Let's build the realtime web together !

http://nakkaya.com/2009/12/20/cloning-pong-part-2/

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/J95G2GjNmOs/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-12-25/

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-It-Doubles-as-a-Saw-Horse.aspx

http://xkcd.com/680/

http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/todays-bible-reading/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/2009/12/21/xmpp-and-strophe-two-of-the-best-technologies-of-2009/

A great thread was started on Hacker News yesterday asking what the best technologies were that people worked with in 2009. I was thrilled to see XMPP and Strophe listed not once, but twice!

Here's what one user had to say about it:

Earlier this year I got tasked with implementing a system which involved multiple mobile clients talking to a rendering server. The mobile devices had a fairly beefy browser (Nokia N900), so the client was clearly suitable to be delivered as a web app. On the server side, we already had a realtime graphics system I had written earlier, to which the web clients would need to talk over a bidirectional connection with near-realtime responsiveness.

...

[My work partner] showed me some demos of realtime XMPP web apps built with Strophe.js, and I was rather impressed. Then we went over our system's client/server design and how it would map to XMPP, and I was sold.

We ended up using many more XMPP features than I had initially imagined, including publish/subscribe and multi-user chat rooms. Had we gone with my original approach, these concepts would have been implemented in some haphazard way in the render server itself. Now the rendering system just talks to the XMPP server like any other client. It's stable, scalable and fast.

The built-in tools in XMPP are quite powerful and can be applied to a huge range of problems. The layered extensions like pubsub and multi-user chat provide robust and well tested building blocks on which to create great things. There is now a decade of shared knowledge and experience baked into XMPP and its many extensions, and it's great to see more and more people discovering this.

I'm really excited to see what will come in 2010!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/2009/12/18/better-ejabberd-vhosts/

When Chesspark migrated to ejabberd I explained how we modified ejabberd's authentication and SQL queries to support storing users by their bare JIDs instead of just the local parts (the foo part of foo@example.com). This let's each vhost in ejabberd have a completely separate set of usernames as opposed to make all usernames globally unique in the server.

Since I wrote that post, several people have asked me to share this patch. I finally dug it out of the Chesspark code repository and modified it for use with the recent 2.1.1 version of ejabberd. You can find the patch included with bug EJAB-1131.

Please note that I only modified the queries that were needed for Chesspark. Not all modules' queries were transformed. Also, I didn't make any changes to the MSSQL queries. However, if you look at the patch, it should be extremely obvious how to make further modifications if I missed something that you need. This patch has been running well in production on Chesspark for over a year now, but I have not fully tested this updated version.

Please let the ejabberd team know if you find this functionality useful, and please let me know if you have any questions or if you run into any problems.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/2009/12/17/javascript-testing-taxonomy/

Everyone talks a lot about testing, but it seems few people actually do much of it. I certainly am guilty of not doing as much automated testing as I should, but I am working hard to improve. I write a lot of JavaScript, so I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with a range of JavaScript testing tools. There are a lot of different options, and I've come to the conclusion that you need several of them.

xUnit Frameworks

There are tons of xUnit inspired testing frameworks for JavaScript: QUnit, JsUnit, YUI Test, etc. There are probably over a dozen of these, and many of the other testing tools include their own xUnit style assertion framework.

Almost all of these work by having you create an HTML page that serves as the test runner. To run or re-run the tests, you simply open the page in a web browser and off it goes.

The tests that one writes are quite valuable, but the way you run them leaves a lot to be desired. For example, to test in multiple browsers you must hit refresh in all those browsers, and there is no way to run a specific test in isolation easily.

These HTML test runners have one very good quality though; they make it trivial for an outside person to run the tests. All they have to do is open up the HTML page in a browser, and the tests run.

Because of the HTML runner limitations, I think this can't be the only way you run tests. However, because it's so easy to run tests this way, I think it's important to have it, since users can easily use it to run the tests without any effort.

Testing From the Command Line

Developers want to run tests from their IDEs, run specific tests only, and avoid hitting refresh in lots of open browsers. This is commonly achieved by making the tests runnable from the command line, and there are a number of frameworks which do this.

EnvJS and a few others set up pseudo-browser environments inside stand-alone JavaScript interpreters like Rhino. JsTestDriver captures browsers and provides a way to run tests quickly and easily inside them, without having to interact with them directly.

These types of tools make JavaScript testing very similar to testing in other languages. You can run tests in isolation, automate the running of tests, and run tests extremely quickly.

Unfortunately, these tools have their drawbacks. It often takes some infrastructure to run the tests. For example, the test runner may need Rhino or another JavaScript interpreter. Also, running the tests outside of a true browser environment may not lead to accurate results.

Testing Farms and Integration Tests

None of the previous tools help much with integration tests, and very few of them have any kind of support for controlling browsers. For those tasks there are tools like Windmill and Selenium.

Windmill, for example, can launch a browser, run a test suite, and then shut the browser down at the end. It can also record and play back user interactions, making it a great tool for integration testing as well.

Either tool can be integrated with things like BuildBot to automatically run test suites upon commit, and some Selenium developers even have a startup to run tests in the cloud on a wide variety of browsers and platforms automatically.

The main downside of these tools is that they are slow. It takes time to launch and terminate a browser, and this makes them less than ideal for test driven development where a developer is running the test suite many times.

You Probably Need Them All

I think each of these three kinds of tools has a place in your testing workflow.

HTML test runners are useful for easily running the tests and providing users and external developers a hassle-free way to write and run tests. After all, if it's not dead simple to run and write tests, people won't bother.

Command line driven tools are a necessity for the test driven developer. Tests must be able to run extremely fast since they will run multiple times, and it must be possible to run just the specific tests you want. It takes a little work to set up, but the result is a much more pleasant testing experience. A tool like JsTestDriver can also make it just as easy to test in many browsers at the same time, all controlled from the command line and lightning fast.

Finally, if you want a test farm or to do more system-level tests, tools like Windmill and Selenium are there. Developers might interact directly with JsTestDriver or an HTML runner, but the continuous build systems which run the suite on every commit aren't nearly as sensitive to run speed. Also, starting from a fresh browser every time can be helpful to make the test runs consistent.

Fortunately, all these tools can usually be made to work around a basic xUnit style assertion framework. The tests themselves don't need to be duplicated and remain simple.

My Current Experiments

I'm currently evaluating YUI Test for the HTML runner and assertion framework. It seems quite well designed, and I really like it's ability to simulate common user interactions for unit testing UI controls. That kind of attention to detail is missing from most of the other, similar frameworks like QUnit.

I hate running tests in the browser, however pretty the HTML, so I'm using JsTestDriver from the command line. I can easily capture Safari, Chrome, and Firefox at the beginning of the day and run tests against them all simultaneously as I'm writing code. With a little bit of configuration, I have got it using YUI Test instead of its built-in assertion framework.

I still need to set up a test farm so that I can run these tests on the full range of platforms and browsers, and I'm thinking about modifying Windmill to use YUI Test in order to facilitate this.

I haven't even started evaluated the various mocking frameworks that exist. Specifically for Strophe, I'll need to mock XMLHttpRequest interactions in order to test anything interesting. I also haven't looked at code coverage reporting, but several frameworks I mentioned have some support for this.

What About You?

I'd love to hear your experiences with JavaScript testing. Please let me know what tools you've found useful and how they've worked out for you.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/2009/12/16/make-some-noise-subtractive-synthesis-in-five-minutes/

One of my many passions is music. I play keyboards in the band Lousy Robot, and I spend a lot of time fooling around with synthesizers and music technology in general. My second Ignite NM presentation was an attempt to show everyone that they can have some musical fun with subtractive synthesis:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/2009/12/16/realtime-search-in-five-minutes/

Earlier this year I gave my first Ignite presentation at Ignite New Mexico. Watch below as I explain the what and why of real-time search in five minutes:

http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2009/12/the-met-office-climategate-perl-code/

http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/?p=164

In response to the Climategate goings on the UK Meteorological Office has released a subset of its land surface climate station records and some code to process it. The code consists of 397 lines of Perl (station_gridder.perl and make_global_average_ts_ascii.perl).

At various times I have been asked to suggest which part of an application’s or product’s source code should be made available to a third party. The third party may have been interested in evaluating the quality, getting a feel for the complexity or felt that they ought at least be able to say they had seen some code. In these situations there is always a trade-off between impressing the customer (e.g., well structured code containing lots of comments) and not revealing too much (e.g., impenetrable code with no comments).

Have the Met Office released the code they have used over a period of time or have they release newly written code?

The source does not have the characteristics often seen in well worn, ‘old’, code. There is no revision history (that may be due to poor programming practices or may have been stripped off prior to release; I discuss pretty printing below), the visual layout is generally consistent (this may be because the same small group of people have worked on it over time), there are no obvious hacks used to get around previous design decisions that have changed and unscientifically it just feels to me like newly written code.

Was the original code written in another language (e.g., Fortran), perhaps as part of a larger program and been rewritten in Perl?

The code does not have a Fortran ‘accent’ to it. The code was written by people who are fluent in Perl; perhaps they do not know Fortran very well and were given time to craft something presentable, hence no Fortran accent.

Why have I been referring to the code authors, plural, when writing 397 lines is well within the capabilities of a competent developer working for a day (I bet the authors spent longer in meetings about this code than actually writing it)? Developers tend to have very fixed habits when it comes to bracketing statements with curly braces, there are those who always put the open brace at the end of the line and those who always put it on a newline. The Met Office code contains both usages, sometimes within the same subroutine. Also the use of whitespace around punctuators and operators does not follow a consistent pattern, which for me rules out the use of an automated pretty printer and kind of implies more than one person doing the editing. And why are some variables names capitalized and other not (the names in subroutine read_station are all lower case while the names in the surrounding subroutines are mostly upper case)? More than one author is the simplest answer.

One Perl usage caught my eye, the construct unless is rarely used and often recommended against. Without a lot more code being available for analysis there are no obviously conclusions to draw from this usage (apart from it being an indicator of somebody who knows Perl well, most mainstream languages do not support this construct and developers have to use a ‘positive’ construct containing a negated condition rather than a ‘negative’ construct containing a positive condition).

http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2009/12/oh_my_god_look_at_that_pi.html

Photo: NASA/Bill Anders

http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000002094

The article strongly suggests that the bankers knew what they were doing. They created bundles of mortgages and sold them off to credulous investors. Then they cranked up mortgage creators to market still more toxic mortgages on which to sell more credit default swaps (CDSs).

When that didn't satisfy the demand from investors, they came up with synthetic swaps. They knew the many of the mortgages were toxic and after selling them, bought swaps against their failing. When the demand for these grew too large, they created synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and bet against them as well.

The mechanics of these transactions is a little complicated. First there is a bundle of mortgages. The investors who buy the package expect a steady flow of income. They are okay until the mortgages go bad.

In a totally separate transaction, banks bet against the mortgages by creating a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) made up of credit default swaps set up to pay when the mortgages fail. The banks pay a steady income to the sellers of CDSs until it goes under as the mortgages default. Then the bank collects from each CDS writer for each mortgage that defaults. The losers in these transactions are the ones who bought the CDSs. They may have no knowledge of the quality of the underlying mortgages that they are guaranteeing but are depending on the good faith of the seller.

The article notes, "Goldman used these securities initially to offset any potential losses stemming from its positive bets on mortgage securities. But Goldman and other firms eventually used the CDOs to place unusually large negative bets that were not mainly for hedging purposes, and investors and industry experts say that put the firms at odds with their own clients' interests."

These and other industry practices are now the focus of "investigators in Congress, at the Securities and Exchange Commission and at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street's self-regulatory organization."

We are likely to see some indictments, if the sources quoted in the article can back up their assertions in court. There clearly was a conflict of interest between the firms and the buyers of these securities such that the firms appear not to have been acting in good faith. Former representatives of these firms now hold high positions in Washington.

Right now, one would have to question the sanity of anyone who trusts any of these firms with his money but so far they are still profiting greatly. From a purely economic point of view, these transactions are totally unproductive--the gains are matched by the losses on the other side. They only add to gross output to the extent of the net fees to the banks for creating and marketing the obligations and even that is of negative value to society--equivalent to that of services provided by casinos.

http://bash.org?912101

http://www.insidecolinshead.com/?p=372

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace

should read

Hail the Earth-born Prince of Peace

unless it’s talking about somebody else entirely.

http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-power-winter-solstice-and-new.html

http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2009/12/seasons-greetings.html

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2009122201

http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000002093

Hacker cracks Kindle's copyright

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, reports say.

The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as pdf files to any other device.

The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a challenge posted on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org.

It is the latest in a series of Digital Rights Management hacks, the most famous being the reverse engineering of iTunes.

The Kindle e-book reader has been very successful since it was launched in the US in 2007.

Amazon hopes to have sold a million devices by the end of the year.

It leaves it to individual publishers whether they want to apply DRM but books in its main proprietary format .azw, cannot be transferred to other devices.

It did not immediately respond to the news but it is likely it will attempt to patch its DRM software.

DRM has long divided opinion. While rights holders regard it as a crucial tool to protect copyright, consumers tend to hate it because it limits what can be done with content.

"DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn't a customer out there saying 'what I need is an electronic book that does less," novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog Cory Doctorow told the BBC when the Kindle was launched.

As soon as a new DRM system is active, hackers begin to try and break it.

Most famously Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon, cracked the copy protection on DVDs in 1999.

He went on to break the copyright protection on iTunes, leading Apple to offer DRM-free music.

DVD Jon now runs a company with an application to take the pain out of moving different types of content between devices.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlwaysRight/~3/q7f5rIDM_xY/3588

http://notalwaysright.com/?p=3588

(Church | Westlake, CA, USA)

Me: “Good afternoon, thank you for calling [church's name]. How can I help you?”

Customer: “Yes, I’d like to know why the time of the Christmas Eve mass was changed.”

Me: “There was a scheduling conflict with the Christmas Carol Concert. I’m sorry if it’s caused an inconvenience for you.”

Customer: “It has. Many of them.”

Me: “I’m so sorry.”

Customer: “You’ll change it back, then?”

Me: “Um, no. See, there’s still the scheduling conflict.”

Customer: “But I have plans at the mass’s new time! I need you to change it back!”

Me: “Ma’am, I’m really not in charge of that decision.”

Customer: “I am not getting off the phone until you change it back.”

Me: “There really isn’t anything I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

Customer: “Have you called the Pope and told him about this? Call the Pope and tell him that your priests have changed the mass time. He’ll fix it.”

Me: “I actually don’t have his number on me.”

Customer: “I’ll hold.”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlwaysRight/~3/Lnc8yTjd1CA/3585

http://notalwaysright.com/?p=3585

(Retail | Australia)

(I’m working in layby (AKA layaways) and dealing with the Christmas shopping rush.)

Customer: “Can I organize delivery for this item?”

Me: “We can, but we can’t guarantee it will arrive before Christmas because you didn’t pay it off by the 1st.”

Customer: “What? Are you trying to ruin Christmas? My grandchildren will cry and find out there is no Santa. Nobody told me I had to pay it off by then!”

Me: “I’m sorry, all the terms and conditions of the layby were printed on your receipt…” *I point it out on the receipt* “See, right here, above where you signed to say that accepted them.”

Customer: “But nobody TOLD me to read them!”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlwaysRight/~3/JDsOdyDRuJU/3582

http://notalwaysright.com/?p=3582

(Grocery Store | Southlake, TX, USA)

Customer: “Where’s your peanut butter?”

Me: “Aisle 5, just past the bread.”

Customer: “Thanks, man…”

(20 minutes later, I’m also called up to work as a cashier. The customer comes through my line.)

Me: “Did you find it alright?”

Customer: “Weren’t you just over in like… five places?”

Me: “About there, yeah.”

Customer: “Are you God?!”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlwaysRight/~3/gWgOkIOC-q8/3579

http://notalwaysright.com/?p=3579

(Fast Food | Tennessee, USA)

(We are having our annual Christmas party/potluck dinner one Sunday night at our fast food restaurant. I’ve placed signs showing we are closed and have blocked off the drive thru. One of my fellow employees notices a man standing at the counter.)

Me: “Hi sir, can I help you with something?”

Customer: “I have been standing here for five minutes and I haven’t been helped! Give me a number one with a sweet tea.”

Me: “Well, we are closed on Sundays. This is our Christmas Party.”

Customer: “Closed? All the lights are on!”

Me: “Well, we need them for the party.”

Customer: “I have never heard of such a thing. So I can’t get that number one?”

Me: “No sir, all of our machines are off. We are closed.”

Customer: “What about a sweet tea?”

Me: “Sir, we are closed. We don’t have anything we can give to customers.”

(The customer sees our buffet-style employee potluck.)

Customer: “Well, can I get a plate?”

http://www.circleid.com/posts/network_neutrality_ups_and_fedex/

I buy a lot of things that are delivered by UPS or FedEx. And I kinda like to watch the progress of the shipments.

Now we all know that UPS and FedEx have different grades of service—Overnight, Two Day, Three Day, etc. And faster deliver costs more.

Several years ago UPS and FedEx would frequently deliver a Two Day package the next day, i.e. they would effectively elevate the class of service. A lot of us took advantage of that by sending almost everything using the lesser grade (and price) and often winning a higher grade (and price) delivery.

I am sure that that that did not please the bean counters at the shipping companies.

Today, with better tracking systems UPS and FedEx almost never deliver a package in advance of the delivery time for the paid class of service. They will hold packages in their warehouses in order to make this so. Today, if you want a given class of service you can get it only by paying for it; the old gambling trick no longer works. I am sure that this has increased UPS' and FedEx' revenue.

The thing to note here is that UPS and FedEx can carry packages Overnight, but that they impose a delay, often an artificial delay, on packages that aren't paying the premium Overnight tariff.

So what has this got to do with Network Neutrality?

Consider an ISP that adopts the UPS/FedEx model. In particular let's say that this ISP decides to impose a delay of 100 milliseconds on all standard class packets and does so in a way that is completely neutral as to source, destination, or protocol. On a 10gigabit link that means holding about 125megabytes of traffic, in each direction, in a delay queue—that's a number readily within the range of today's technology.

Then that ISP could offer premium, i.e. more expensive, grades of service that bypass some or all of that 100 millisecond delay.

I have never heard anyone claim that either UPS or FedEx is not acting with neutrality. It would seem that an ISP that acts as I have described would also be able to claim that it is just as neutral as UPS and FedEx.

I did not pick 100 milliseconds out of the air—rather I picked it because it can have a pernicious effect on VoIP. The ITU publishes 150ms as the time limit beyond which the users of a VoIP call to go into "walkie-talkie" mode. 100ms, one way, does not reach that amount, but it is close enough that other network delays could easily push the connection over the edge; and round trip time will certainly exceed the threshold. In other words, a completely neutral application of 100ms to all packets, VoIP or not, will force VoIP users to upgrade to a premium service.

Other network activities would be impaired. Domain name transactions would slow down causing user perceptions of sloggish service.

Bulk data transfers, such as web downloads of images, would only be marginally effected once TCP adapts to the round trip time. But ISP's could "fix" that by adding some packet loss and some delay jitter to their "standard" quality.

The point of this exercise is to suggest that ISPs have a well stocked bag of tricks to induce users to pay more for what we used to get for free from "best effort" services on the internet.

Written by Karl Auerbach, Chief Technical Officer

Follow CircleID on Twitter

More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality

http://wadler.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate.html

http://wadler.blogspot.com/2009/12/time-management-how-mit-postdoc-writes.html

http://bash.org?912051

http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187995

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/12/24/december_2009_web_server_survey.html