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The latest version of Android outshines the latest version of iOS in almost every single aspect. I find it to be better in terms of the performance, smoothness of the rendering engine, cross-app and OS level integration, innovation across the board, look & feel customizability and variety of the available apps.

On the topic of app and system integration:

Another great example: Sharing stuff on social networks. On iOS, I have to rely on the developers again. Flipboard, as one of the better examples, gives me the ability to directly share with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. On my Nexus 4, I have 20+ options. That is, because every app I install can register as a sharing provider. It’s a core feature of the Android operating system.

…

All of this is entirely impossible on iOS today. I’ve stopped counting how often I felt annoyed because I clicked a link to a location in Mobile Safari and would have loved the Google Maps app to launch. Instead, Apple’s own Maps app is hardcoded into the system. And there’s no way for me to change it.

Regarding possibilities for app developers:

On iOS, many things I always wished to see being developed, simply cannot be done because of the strict sandbox Apple enforces around apps.

…

I also have apps [on Android] that give me great insight into the use of mobile data across the device and all apps. Or the battery consumption. Or which apps talk home and how frequently.

None of it is available for iOS. And possibly won’t be at any time in the near future.

And summing up the way I’ve felt for a long time when using iOS devices:

… whenever I grab my iPhone for testing purposes, iOS feels pretty old, outdated and less user friendly. For me, there currently is no way of going back. Once you get used to all of these capabilities, it’s hard to live without them.

There are many things Apple got right with iOS, like making a consistent user experience, and encouraging users to spend money in the market for quality apps. But when they place so many restrictions and limitations on how you can use your phone, and what your software is allowed to do on your own device, I gladly give up those things that make iOS so great for the freedom to run apps that can do what I want — and expect — from a modern computing device.

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Now keep in mind, I still like many of the features that drew me to Poole in the first place, such as the use of a document-centric build process, with YAML headers for defining page metadata rather than an inline, proprietary format used by projects like Jekyll. I also enjoy the simplicity of the content representations, but the lack of an extensible content pipeline is my biggest complaint. Supporting formats other than Markdown requires adding yet another hook to the macro file; generating archives and tag pages required hacking in a multi-phase build using os.exec(); and inlining another page’s content post-render was just not possible, resulting in Markdown named-link collisions when rendering multiple posts to a single page.

I wanted something new. So, for the past few months, I’ve been working on Nib.

The resulting design is based heavily on the concepts of Poole, but built around a primary goal of producing a proper content pipeline that is simultaneously aware of the differentiation between resources and documents, and defines multiple stages where plugins can hook into the process and alter or generate page contents at build time. Indeed, most of the actual functionality of Nib is contained within a handful of plugins, while the main module merely defines a framework for the content pipeline.

In effect, adding support for more content or resource formats should be as simple as adding a new plugin attached to the appropriate file extensions. Advanced content manipulation, generating “virtual pages”, and aggregating pages or documents into multiple locations are all possible as well.

The Markdown plugin is 14 lines of code; the LessCSS plugin is 13; even the blog plugin — which generates the archive pages, tag listings, and Atom feed — takes only 86 lines to do a better job than the old Poole macros that required double the effort.

Today, I’ve thrown the switch. While it looks nearly identical to the old site generated by Poole, the page you are now reading has officially been generated by Nib. The news feed sees the biggest makeover, having changed formats from RSS to Atom, and now offers full content posts. Link-style posts, a format that I’ve been wanting to experiment with, are also a new option. Both features would have required more effort on Poole than I was interested in expending, but the new architecture has allowed me to indulge myself.

Nib is still in an extremely early, and unstable, phase though. It works for the needs of my site, and does come with some basic documentation and a sample site to start from, but it’s far from complete. Near term goals include adding support for an intelligent menu, as well as support for more content and resource formats, like reStructuredText or SASS. Contributions are always welcome though, even at this early stage. Nib is liberally licensed, and I would love to hear feedback from anyone trying to use it. Hopefully it will be useful for someone other than myself.

λ

What do you prefer about Android?

I prefer Android because it allows apps to do more things for the user, and allows them to better integrate with the system as a whole.

I can replace the on screen keyboard with one that has a full five-row keyboard for times when I SSH into a machine. On a similar vein, when I SSH into a machine, I can actually leave the SSH session running in the background while I switch to another app, without fearing that the OS is about to kill my SSH app while I’m looking something up or responding to a text message. I can also leave my IRC client running in the background without it constantly needing to reconnect when I switch back to it.

Intents in Android, especially in combination with the global Share mechanism, allow any app to receive arbitrary data from any other app, meaning apps don’t need to know about specific apps or services in order to integrate with them. Clicking on a URL allows you to choose which browser (or set a default) to open the link in, allowing you to use alternate browsers (or alternate email clients, SMS apps, dialers, etc); tapping Share in the browser allows you to send the current URL to any application that can receive a URL, making apps like Instapaper, Pinboard, and 3rd party Twitter clients have the same capabilities as first party applications.

Sideloading apps means I’m not limited to installing programs from the Android Market/Play Store, and can do things like buy apps directly from the Humble Indie Bundle and install them on my own.

Proper background service support, and allowing apps to affect things outside their sandbox, lets me run programs like Locale that can monitor the phone’s status, location, etc, and modify the phone’s settings automatically based on a set of conditions that I’ve pre-arranged. My phone automatically silences itself at night time and while I’m physically at work, turns on my Wifi when I’m at home or work while defaulting it off when I’m out and about, and more.

That’s just some of the reasons I like Android better than iOS.

λ

Oh, and I got a job at Facebook.

On May 3rd, BioWare informed me that my position in the studio was being eliminated. My terrible luck had struck again. But this time was different; within a few days, a recruiter from Facebook found this website and my open source work, reached out to me, and encouraged me to apply for an engineering role. Four weeks later, after phone screens and an on-site interview, I was offered a position as a Production Engineer. My luck had not only reversed, it had gone off the scale in the opposite direction.

Alongside Facebook, all my other leads paled in comparison. I wanted to stay in gaming, but here was the opportunity of a lifetime, to join one of the biggest and best engineering companies in the world, and the chance to learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. The position is similar to the role I had at BioWare: writing and maintaining software to manage and automate the vast array of infrastructure that supports the front-end applications and engineers. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Monday was my orientation, and I was immediately impressed by the level of passion, vision and dedication from the entire team. Boz discussed the culture of “hack”, and told a story about building a loft in a war room when it couldn’t fit everyone in just two dimensions. Chris Cox gave an inspiring talk about where Facebook is heading, and I got a surreal sense of wonder when he mentioned our long term goals or the level of impact we have on global society and the way people communicate. It feels amazing to be part of a company that truly wants to change the world and improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Even the training process embodies those same ideals. The first few weeks, every engineer goes through “bootcamp”, attending learning and development sessions, sitting among other bootcamp engineers, and working with veteran teammates on real tasks to get familiar with the infrastructure, tools and codebase. Everyone is given the chance to progress at their own pace, with as much or as little help as needed. I’ve already learned so much in a few days, and I’ve also had the chance to share my own knowledge and experience with my fellow newcomers. And yet there’s still so much left to cover.

Wednesday was my first day at a desk. Taped to the monitor was a sheet of paper printed with bold, red lettering.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I don’t have an answer for that yet, but I will soon.

λ

Now, I’ve been a core developer, and de facto release manager, for the project for many years — since I was still in university and getting paid by my then-employer to contribute features and plugins that they wanted to use for their engineering team. Those plugins, like Source Integration, wouldn’t be free without me fighting to license and release them for the community. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without the experience and help I received in turn from the very same community.

I know I haven’t been as involved in the project these days as I would like to be; there is an endless list of features and improvements to make to both the core system and the array of plugins I’ve created for it. Some great community members have stepped up and filled my place at times, while I have at least tried to stay active on the mailing lists and in the IRC channels. I’ve still guided and cut the last couple releases, but I haven’t played a part in shaping the future of the project.

There are multiple competing visions charting new paths for the aging project, with conflicting goals and revision histories, and it really needs a stronger leader to take the reins and guide the project to its next milestones. I’m unfortunately not the person to fill this role, for many reasons. Maybe a few years ago it would have been better timing.

Lately, I’ve come to the realization that I can no longer bring myself to work with PHP for personal projects. I don’t like the syntax, I don’t like where the language is heading, I don’t like how much memory and CPU it requires to run on a web server, and I just spend the whole time wishing I was writing Python code instead.

This blog hasn’t run on PHP or a database for just over a year now, and with my MantisBT install being used mainly for projects I don’t have the time or will to work on, it just seems to be dead weight. Github can serve my needs well enough for the few remaining projects I work on, and without needing a complicated setup on my end. Turning off MantisBT means I no longer need MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, APC, or even mod_php at all. The remaining apps can easily be replaced with external services.

So basically, this is me announcing what I’ve already been practicing for many months now: I will no longer be a developer for Mantis Bug Tracker, but I will remain involved as a mentor for other core developers, or for those seeking some advice on my plugins or creating their own. I won’t be maintaining any of my plugins, but I will look at and accept pull requests until someone else wants to step up as maintainer. I will be removing MantisBT from my site, but will keep a database dump in case I ever need to reference it in the future.

This is not me withdrawing from open source; I have many other projects that I’ve been working on, most of which are written in Python or C++. I find them more enjoyable to deal with, and most importantly, they allow me to break out of the realm of writing web applications. IRC, as old as it is, has been my point of intrigue lately, and is at the core of my current “pet” project.

Regardless of language, you can still find me on Github, where all my toys are available for the public to point and laugh at. And as always, I will answer questions on Freenode as “jreese”, or via email, although there may sometimes be a long delay before I can reply.

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to MantisBT or its plugins, and thank you to everyone who helped me on the way to where I’m going.

λ

Hey man,

Just wanted to say thanks for the ZNC Push Module you made. I’m using it with Notify My Android and it works great! This should be a standard module in ZNC imo. Stellar work my friend.

Best,
~Lucien

It makes me smile every time I hear from someone using my software, knowing that I can make an impact on peoples daily lives, no matter how small it may be. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to thank me for my work.

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I won’t be working on games directly, but I’ll be working in a devops role to automate and manage servers for games and internal projects. It’s a good fit with my experience in web applications, system administration, and tool development. It also can be a potential stepping stone to a game development position later on.

The next two months are likely to be hectic, as I move to temporary housing in California, and then find an apartment and move into it. Ongoing projects may have to take a back seat until I can get the free time again. But the weather and job will be worth it!

λ

The module is released under the MIT license, and the source code and full documentation can be found on the project’s Github repository page.

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From any SSH client, I can seamlessly pick up my IRC session where I last left it, regardless of where I started that session. Similarly, I can connect with my phone’s IRC client, get a short backlog of recent conversations, or answer pending private messages. When I’m not already engaged in a conversation, I get near-instant notification on my phone and desktop, allowing me to respond at my leisure and from any location. I never miss a private message because I was connected from the wrong place, other users always see a single nick, and I get a central, searchable history of every channel and private message.

With this sort of setup, I gain a lot of freedom — to deal with conversations on my terms — and convenience. It’s served me well for a couple years, and I’ve enjoyed IRC much more since putting it all together. For each layer, I’ll detail the tasks it covers, the software I’ve chosen, and give a copy of any configuration files or options needed to replicate my environment.

λ

I didn’t get to take pictures of the XB-70 like I wanted to though; it was in their Research and Development hangar, which requires an ID check and bus ride to visit. Hopefully we’ll get to return soon and rectify that.

The full gallery is on Picasa, and contains 130 photos.

B-29 “Bockscar”

F-86 Saber

F-117 Nighthawk

F-22 Raptor

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The Spotify client supports DBus for controlling the player, using the MPRIS Specification, but does not listen for basic media key signals provided by Gnome. This program acts as a “wrapper” around Spotify to translate media key signals from Gnome and send them to the Spotify client.

The program is released under the MIT license, and the source code and documentation can be found on the project’s Github repository page.

Many thanks to Mike Houston at kothar.net and Fran Dieguez at Mabishu for their blog postings that pointed me in the right directions to get this implemented.

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General

• Linking changesets to issues requires commit messages to match the regular expressions specified in the source integration configuration page. By default, phrases like “fixes #123” or “resolved #123, #123” are supported, in present, past, singular, and plural forms.

• Remote checkin must be enabled for use by post-commit hooks that don’t use an API key to authenticate, and must list the IP addresses or blocks for any repository server that will push commit data to Mantis.

• Remote imports must be enabled for use by cronjob-based scripts that will trigger Mantis to pull in new changeset data for a given repository.

Subversion

• Your web server needs to have the SVN client binaries installed, and they must be accessible by the account that your web server uses. Similarly, if the binaries are in a directory that’s not included in your web server’s default path, you will need to specify the directory path in your source integration configuration. On Linux, this is usually /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin — on Windows, something like c:/path/to/subversion/bin is likely required.

• For Windows servers, you may also need to enable the “Windows start” source integration option.

• Make sure that the individual repository URL that you use for Mantis is the same URL you would use to checkout the repository when using an SVN client.

• When using repositories that require authentication, make sure the username and password you enter in Mantis has read access to the entire repository.

• If your repositories are hosted using HTTPS/SSL, and your server is using self-signed certificates, you will need to have SVN version 1.6 or newer installed, and you will need to enable the “Trust all SSL certs” option from source integration.

• If your commit messages contain UTF-8 or other non-ASCII characters, or your system’s locale is not set to “en_US”, then you may need to look at issue #93 and #130 on my bug tracker for help modifying your server or SourceSVN plugin to use an appropriate encoding or locale.

Git

• If using Gitweb, versions newer than 1.6 may not work correctly, as the Gitweb plugin is scraping HTML from the viewer, and changes to the HTML structure will break the Gitweb plugin. The version of Gitweb in use on MantisForge is known to work with the plugin.

• Using Github with private organization repositories is not yet supported. Private repositories for normal user accounts, however, is supported. Enter the username and API key from any Github account with access to the repository, and it should import correctly.

• Using branches other than “master” will require you to modify the individual repository configuration in Mantis to list any branches that you want to be imported.

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There are a lot of applications that don’t yet take advantage of what’s offered by the Honeycomb APIs, but still tend to work really well. It mainly depends on how well the author designed the application to scale with the user’s screen size and density. An example of doing it wrong is the official Facebook app; it’s still usable mind you, but it certainly looks dumb in process, showing the main menu as a large grid of tiny icons with massive amounts of whitespace between them. It would have gone a long way if they had simply scaled the images to fill the screen.

I’ve been meaning to write about some of my most cherished apps, and seeing them in new form has given me an even better reason to get to it. Some of them really only work well on a phone, and others have only gotten better than ever when given a tablet form factor to call their own. So in no particular order, here are my favorite apps for Android. All prices are rounded up from Market estimates at time of writing, and all screenshots are taken from my devices:

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Future plans for the feature include support for configuring multiple API keys simultaneously, as well as adding support for using the API keys from other data sources, such as SVN or Gitweb repositories. Additionally, the old options for listing allowed IP addresses is now considered deprecated, and will likely be removed entirely at the next major release.

To set up an API key in your MantisBT instance, visit the Repository Configuration page, where you will find a new option labelled, strangely enough, “API Key”. You will need to generate your own key; the best way to do this is on a machine with OpenSSL by running the following command to create a secure, random string of hexadecimal digits, and then copying the resulting string to MantisBT:

$ openssl rand -hex 12

Once this is done, you can enable this on your Github projects by visiting the Service Hooks admin page for your repositories, activating the MantisBT hook, and copying the same key string into the “Api Key” field there. Any future pushes to your Github repo should send data to your MantisBT install using the API key to authorize the data submission.

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There is quite a lot of suggestions for mitigating this issue, such as given in this question on Stack Overflow. Many places point to Bryce Boe’s article, where he advocates rolling your own replacement for the multiprocessing module’s Pool class, but that seems to not only invite bugs and added maintenance overhead, but also doesn’t address the root cause.

I have figured out (what I think is) a better solution to the problem, and have not found anyone else mentioning it online, so I have decided to share that here. It not only solves the problem of handling the interrupt for both idle and busy worker processes, but also precludes the need for worker processes to even care about KeyboardInterrupt in the first place.

The solution is to prevent the child processes from ever receiving KeyboardInterrupt in the first place, and leaving it completely up to the parent process to catch the interrupt and clean up the process pool as it sees fit. In my opinion this is the most optimal solution, because it reduces the amount of error handling code in the child process, and prevents needless error spew from idle workers.

The following example shows how to do this, and how it works with both idle and busy workers:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Copyright (c) 2011 John Reese
# Licensed under the MIT License

import multiprocessing
import os
import signal
import time

def init_worker():
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_IGN)

def run_worker():
    time.sleep(15)

def main():
    print "Initializng 5 workers"
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(5, init_worker)

    print "Starting 3 jobs of 15 seconds each"
    for i in range(3):
        pool.apply_async(run_worker)

    try:
        print "Waiting 10 seconds"
        time.sleep(10)

    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "Caught KeyboardInterrupt, terminating workers"
        pool.terminate()
        pool.join()

    else:
        print "Quitting normally"
        pool.close()
        pool.join()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This code is also available on Github as jreese/multiprocessing-keyboardinterrupt. If you think there’s a better way to accomplish this, please feel free to fork it and submit a pull request. Otherwise, hopefully this helps settle this issue for good.

λ

• Saying you found my resume on Monster.com or some other job site when I have never ever registered or even visited the site in question.

• Saying you found my resume on a site I did sign up for, and then blatently ignoring that my account is marked as “not willing to relocate” and offering me a job in backwater Arkansas, Montana, Tennessee, or South Dakota. There is exactly one place I want to relocate to, and that is the west coast.

• Requiring knowledge in technologies that aren’t even mentioned in passing on my resume.

• Looking for “Rock Start” software engineers to join a start-up.

• Advertising your start-up with a bullet point of “e-commerce… e-commerce… e-commerce”.

• Having your offer email include a footnote saying “Message sent with an unregistered version of MailList King!”. Nothing says legitimate like a recruiter who uses an unregistered piece of spam software.

Sigh…

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I bought the very first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, when it was first released over two years ago. Even then, Locale was big news for the platform, having won the very first Android Developer Challenge. I have been using it on all my Android phones since then, and I continue to be impressed by it.

Locale is the killer app for Android. It embodies everything that Android is capable of, and everything that Apple refuses to allow in iOS. My phone can now be smart enough that I don’t have to babysit its settings everywhere I go; it knows when to be discreet and when to be secure. No other mobile OS can do that.

For a quick background, Locale is an application for automating changes to your phone’s settings based on a configurable set of “situations”. You define a set of “defaults”, and then each situation is comprised of a set of “conditions” and “settings”. When a situation’s conditions are met, the associated settings override the defaults; when the conditions are no longer met, Locale returns to the default settings. By combining multiple situations together in a priority list, your phone can make intelligent decisions, and seamlessly switch between multiple situations as they become active or inactive.

But what makes Locale even better is that it was designed from the beginning to be extensible. You can find plugins on the Market that add new conditions and settings. Because of Android’s ability to share data between applications, these plugins can even go so far as to use context from, or modify behavior of, other applications installed on your phone. As an example, the Astrid task manager allows you to attach a location to your tasks, and integrates with Locale as a condition when you reach those locations.

But for a more concrete example of just what’s possible, I’d like to show you what my current Locale conditions and settings are.

• Defaults: Wifi off, Ringer volume 85%, Vibrate on, Media volume 70%, Password lockscreen on
• Night (Time 10pm-7am): Ringer off, Vibrate off
• Work (Location): Wifi on, Ringer off, Vibrate on,
• Headphones (Headphones connected): Media volume 20%
• Home (Location): Wifi on, Ringer volume 100%, Password lockscreen off

The Locale plugins that I use to accomplish this:

• Locale Password Lock Plug-in by Willem Stoker
• Locale Media Volume Plug-in by two forty four am
• Headphones Plug-in by two forty four am

Color me happy.

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Not exactly the shabbiest set of servers to work on…

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If you work on the Source engine, or are looking to run or join open source mod projects, I highly recommend you take the time to listen in.

λ

As for the actual reasoning behind the move, it stems from multiple issues I had with the old domain, such as:

• Being able to pronounce my email address and domain to the general public without having to always spell it out and make sure they catch that there are two e’s in the domain.

• Switching at the same time from jreese@ to john@ for my address also means I don’t have to worry about people misspelling my last name, which happens so much even my own family still gets it wrong on a regular basis.

• Not having to explain what “leet” is, or getting remarks about it being a juvenile choice due to the stigma of “leetspeak”.

• It’s a short .com domain, so that people will get it right every time; I’ve had people assume I actually meant leetcode.com, without confirming it before sending a doomed message…

Anyways, in the off chance that you’re a sentient being, and actually reading this, if you happen to catch an error or gap in my redirection efforts, please drop a line to john@ this domain.

λ

ZNC to Notifo is a module for ZNC that will send notifications to a Notifo account for any private message or channel highlight that matches a configurable set of conditions, including the user’s /away status, time since the last notification, number of clients connected to ZNC, and more.

The module is released under the MIT license, and the source code and documentation can be found on the project’s Github repository page.

λ

Rest in peace, Joyce. You will be missed.

λ

Android is all but open.

I’m calling this out. Android, as a software project, is completely, 100%, open. It’s released by Google with the Apache license, which is recognized by OSI and the FSF as a Free/Libre, Open Source license. The Android code itself is freely available, freely redistributable, and can be compiled and flashed onto any compatible device.

However, there is a significant portion of the Android ecosystem that is not “open” by the same definitions above:

• Device drivers for individual phones are open or closed depending on the device and the individual chipsets in question, but that is a moot point in my opinion as there are plenty of people who use Free desktop operating systems with closed “binary” drivers. Therefore I will leave this topic for another discussion.

• All of the Google-branded applications — including the Market, Gmail, and Maps — are closed-source and must be licensed with Google to be included on a phone. This means that Cyanogen is not allowed to include these apps when he releases his amazing CyanogenMod firmware. Other services that Google then builds on top of these closed applications are also closed by nature, including their proprietary “push” communication model.

For some purists, this is a major problem, and I would generally agree. But unlike Apple and iOS devices, none of these Google-branded apps are “privileged” applications; they don’t get special treatment from Android, and they don’t have access to anything that “normal” applications can’t access through the SDK.

But more importantly, these apps are not Android, and they are not necessary to delivering an Android phone or firmware. Developers can write and release competing or nearly indentical applications that replace these closed system apps, and indeed, there are multiple competing “app stores” for Android, with Amazon rumored to be creating yet another. There are even better alternatives for Chrome to Phone already available. And if you insist on not using — or have a phone without — the Android Market, Android is perfectly capable of “side-loading” software packages, and nobody needs to pay Google for the rights to do so.

What is all this proclaimed openness worth if it still boils down to exploiting security systems if you want to run that system you just modified?

That is the real problem, and in my opinion the blame is firmly with the carriers; not Google, and certainly not Android. I specifically purchased a Nexus One because it supports the ability to flash the phone with unsigned firmware. I can download the Android source code, compile it, and flash that resulting firmware to my phone, without needing to root, exploit, or jailbreak my phone. I could do that with my Openmoko Freerunner, and I can do that with my Nexus One.

If enough people insisted on purchasing phones with this capability, then the carriers and manufacturers would pay attention and deliver. Or perhaps Google should be standing up to carriers and demanding that all Google-branded and licensed Android phones have this capability. But even if they could get away with that demand, they can’t enforce it on all Android devices; the very definition of Free Software allows carriers and manufacturers to take Android and do what they want with it if they don’t like Google’s terms.

Maybe the real lesson is that Free Software is a double-edged sword, and if you want corporations to join in, you have to be willing to play their game too.

λ

I’ve been typing with the Dvorak layout for about three years now. I personally can’t fully touch type, and never have been able to, although these days I’m getting pretty close if I stop thinking about it and just start typing. My typing speed has slightly increased, but is more or less limited by the speed at which I can think about what I’m trying to type. The real benefits are in the related experience.

I’ve noticed a dramatic reduction in wrist strain at the end of the day, mainly due to the shorter movements for the majority of keystrokes, as well as the proper alternation between hands. Both are hallmarks of the Dvorak layout’s primary design requirements.

Regarding impact on programming efforts, My biggest complaint is that the brackets are on the number row instead of just above the home row, but when I’m writing Python code, I use them far less, so it’s not much of an issue; when I’m writing PHP, C, or Java code though, it can get a bit annoying, but it’s a good trade-off since the +/= and -/_ keys are now closer at hand.

For my editor, I’ve been using Vim for longer than I’ve been using Dvorak, but I’ve never used the hjkl keys for normal movements; I bought keyboards that specifically have the arrow keys right under the Enter key, so moving to use those is very simple, and allows me to use Vim without having to remap any of the normal movement keys.

In all, I highly recommend the switch, especially for anyone who plans to do a lot of typing in their daily routine. The benefits have far outweighed any of the drawbacks. And purchasing a purpose-built Dvorak keyboard will be one of the best investments you can make. I personally love and highly recommend the TypeMatrix keyboards, not only for their great layout, but because it has a physical toggle switch for moving between Qwerty and Dvorak layouts, which is priceless when you want to be able to play games that aren’t friendly to non-Qwerty layouts.

If you’d like an entertaining way to learn more about the Dvorak layout, DVZine has a very informative comic book about the history and benefits.

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I’ve long been on the fence regarding PHP’s type coercion and comparison issues, but a recent bug in Mantis Bug Tracker has made me /facepalm for the first time in my long history of working with PHP:

When I click on “Edit” next to 1.2, mantis shows me the 1.20 properties. When I click 1.1 it shows me 1.10!

The offending snippet of code:

foreach( $g_cache_versions as $t_version ) {
   if ( ( $t_version['version'] == $p_version )
      && ( $t_version['project_id'] == $c_project_id ) ) {
      return $t_version['id'];
   }
}

At first glance, it seems perfectly normal… and then you read the commit log, emphasis mine:

This is due to an incorrect version name comparison in version_get_id whereby the following check between strings was occurring:

if( "1.1" == "1.10" ) { ... }

PHP evaluates this expression to true because 1.1 and 1.10 are treated as floats. We however need to preserve the string type during this comparison, thus we need to use the === comparison operator instead.

I thought I’d seen it all…

λ

Now if only I could find a job local to Cincinnati… If you are interested in hiring me, or know someone who’s looking for an open source developer, take a look at my resume.

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Anyways, the information and explanations presented in his article are pretty accurate. Until I can get the time to fully document the SVN and Git plugins, or the framework as a whole, consider Chris’s post to be canonical information.

Cheers

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The Good King Lisp raised his glass and toasted with the Knights of Lambda, “To much recursion!”

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What’s twenty-four?

• Six by four
• Eight by three
• Twelve by two
• Six past legal
• Three past drinking
• One before cheap insurance
• Space Shuttle Discovery
• SLR cameras

Nifty.

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The slides are hosted directly on Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dffhxmhs_1273ct3kc8

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I’ll be attending it to give a presentation on MantisBT and the Source Integration framework. Specifically, I’ll be covering the myriad of new features that have made it into the project over the past week and a half. I plan to walk through setting up a project in Mantis, creating a new repository on GitHub, linking the Source Integration framework to that, and showing how the branch mapping and auto-resolving features work. Should be interesting.

After the presentation, I plan to post the slides, along with my presentation notes, up here. If anyone decides to video the talk, I’ll also make sure I can get a copy of that as well, but no promises.

Cheers!

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Considering that my last post on Integrating Git and SVN has garnered a fair amount of attention, I thought that it would be useful to discuss my Source Integration framework in more detail. Specifically, I’ll be covering topics such as the design and implementation of the framework and, more importantly, how developers can go about implementing support for other version control tools.

The point of this is to show that it’s quite possible to integrate just about any type of version control tool with the Source Integration system; indeed I planned from the beginning to create a generalized framework that would support many different types and paradigms for version control. This should at least be evident in that I have already created extension plugins for Git and Subversion - it should be quite possible to extend the concepts further to Mercurial, Bazaar, CVS, or any other tool.

For the point of brevity, I’ll make the assumption that the developer at least has a fair understanding of PHP, their version control tool, and how events and plugins work in MantisBT. If you are not yet familiar with the plugin system, there is currently a basic introduction in the MantisBT Developer’s Guide, which I’ll hopefully be adding more information to in the near future.

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Thank you Explosm, you’ve just made my day! :)

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As the core developer of the new plugin system, I have been working on a variety of plugins. In particular, I have created a vastly improved method of integrating source control repositories within MantisBT. The plugin package is named, aptly enough, Source Integration, and implements a generic framework that will allow integration with multiple repositories, each potentially using any source control systems available, simply by creating an extension plugin for each new tool. Currently, I have implemented integration packages for both Git and Subversion, my two source control tools of choice.

The Source Integration package tracks repository information based on a series of changesets, each of which may have a list of affected files. The data representation is generic enough to cover version control concepts used by all types of tools, from the ubiquitous CVS and Subversion, to modern distributed tools like Git and Hg. However, the system takes the stance of implementing as few details as possible, so it relies on existing repository-viewing tools for tasks such as viewing commit diffs, file contents, tree browsing, etc. Extension plugins handle translating tool-specific information, like history logs or checkin data, into the generalized data objects used by the framework. Extensions also generate URL’s for viewing files and diffs, but everything else is handled automatically by the core framework.

The true benefit of the Source Integration package lies in the amount of repository integration that it implements within MantisBT. When importing changesets from your repository, Source looks at the commit message of each changeset for references to bug numbers in your tracker, and sets up links in the database for any bugs mentioned. When viewing bugs mentioned in commit messages, a new section is displayed after the bugnotes called “Related Changesets”, giving a list of linked changes, including information about the changeset, such as the branch, author, timestamp, and a list of changed files.

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A few choice quotes that I most enjoyed:

I don’t know anyone who programs in PHP and hasn’t … become much more acquainted with the concept of “haystack” and “needle” than any one person should have to in a lifetime.

With time, an experienced developer learns that the only reason why any particular functionality is not in PHP is that it’s not there — yet.

Invariably, PHP developers who try to settle into a framework have the (often irresistible) urge to simply drop it and write their own, because, you see, there is no framework that does things the way he or she wants — yet.

I really like working on the PHP projects that I’m a part of, but every time I write a Python script to do something, it just reminds me of how unsophisticated PHP really is as a language. Perhaps that’s OK; it certainly hasn’t stopped me… yet.

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Why again does John need to go through this long, redirection process? Why not just use a different email client on the iPhone? Because Apple is anti-competitive, and third party apps can’t run in the background, straight from John Gruber himself.

Isn’t this a bit absurd? Why do people let Apple stifle competition like this? Am I the only one that thinks this situation is far worse than anything presented in the huge anti-trust cases against Microsoft in the past decade? Apple is specifically denying competition on the iPhone, and all the groupies think that it’s perfectly acceptable, even good for the consumer! But shame on Microsoft for bundling Internet Exploder and a Media Player; how dare they allow anyone to choose a different browser even!

People ask me why I purchased my Neo Freerunner instead of an iPhone. Even disregarding that I’d lose my choice of carrier, I don’t see why people are rushing to a company that depends on anti-competitive practices to maintain the ‘best’ apps on the phone. If Apple’s browser, mail reader, etc, don’t suit the customers’ needs (as is apparent from Gruber’s post), why are they trying to stop them choosing a better option? It’s not like Apple’s revenues depend on users choosing Safari or Mail.app; hell, wouldn’t they get even more revenues from the App Store if people could buy a superior browser for even $1 a pop?

Sounds to me like Apple cares more about maintaining control than providing their users with the best experience….

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How about rather than asking web designers, server owners and IT staff everywhere to add some hack tag to their code, you force IE8 into compatibility mode unless a designer specifically enables IE8 rendering on their page by adding said tag? That mediates the issue pretty easily.

They [Microsoft] were originally planning to require a special tag to enable standards compliance in IE8, but there was a gigantic backlash from the web development and standards community.

Why? Because then we get nowhere; all the clueless web designers never find out about the special tag to make IE8 comply with internet standards, and continue making web pages for the broken IE rendering model for the next 10 years.

We need to make all those old websites break, because otherwise they’ll never comply with modern standards. We need to have standards based rendering be the default because then the designers that test against IE8 will be making sites that work better with other browsers.

By forcing developers to realize that their websites are non-compliant (either from angry users or specifically forcing quirks mode) and by defaulting to standards-based rendering, we make the web design future a much nicer place to be.

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I don’t think the creator of an interface can ever objectively measure the usability of the interface, no matter how much they use it; they don’t ever have to learn it, because they created it in the first place.

…

I’m not saying usability is not the core. I’m saying that the creator of the interface is in no position to objective judge the usability because they have an innate knowledge of the system because they designed it and they know exactly how it functions and how it’s supposed to be used. If you want a real measure of usability, you have to get someone who understands the problem domain, but has never before seen your interface, and then objectively determine how easily they can figure out how to perform tasks and get things done. The fact that you, as the designer, already know exactly how the interface is built and operates precludes you from having an objective opinion of how easy the interface is to understand.

Similarly, a painting’s artist cannot objectively determine how beautiful/emotional/successful the work of art is, because he has an innate sense of what it is trying to convey to the viewers. Just because the artist sees the subtle details, nuances, allusions, etc, does not mean that other viewers will be able to glean the same information.

And to drive the nail home a third time, an engineer could not possibly be an objective judge of how easy a car is to operate (usability), because they already know where everything is and how it works. They need to have someone, without previous experience, sit in the seat to realize that putting the cigarette lighter and cup holders inside the center console is a bad idea and not at all intuitive…

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Where there is money and people with power corruption is very likely.

What fascinates me, about America specifically, is how ingrained the representative democracy concept is. Direct democracy is this wild and crazy thing that absolutely and directly = Hitler.

There could be an interesting argument why Swiss style direct democracy would not work for a huge country like the US. But what about local government? What about little towns?

It’s fascinating that Americans from a very young age learn that the head of local government is the mayor. What would happen if a little town in nowhere decided to mimic Switzerland in governance and eliminates the middle men? Doom?

As an American, I think the biggest reason that the majority of Americans embrace (worship?) representative democracy is because it frees them from feelings of responsibility in the outcome of the government, and means that much less effort they must contribute back to society. Why learn about all the issues and directly vote for what I want, when I could more easily just elect someone else to do all that hard stuff for me so I can spend more time on the sofa watching the drama of Hollywood retards unfold on high definition TV?

As an added benefit, when my elected representatives then vote the “wrong” way, I certainly can’t blame myself, because A) I’m only one of thousands, or millions, of votes, B) I voted for the other guy, or C) I didn’t vote at all / that’s why I don’t ever vote. It’s the exact same reason that companies pay barrels of money for IT support contracts; it’s less work, and when something goes wrong, the blame always shifts to someone else.

Solution: Nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure…

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i need a google account to use gphone; i need itunes to use iphone; i have to buy apps from approved channels.

it favors the vendors apps; no thanks

wake me when i can buy a device that runs apps i choose, connects to the network i want. i realize this is a pipe dream. the wireless world is a world of shit

i might as well look for the smallest flash-based linux notebook possible that runs skype and just hold it up to my ear old-skule style like gordon gecko and that giant cell phone from wall street

It costs $399 direct from Openmoko and is available through multiple worldwide resellers.

I’m not a fan of Openmoko, but you make a good point. There ARE options for people who want them. The cell phone market is more open now than it ever has been in the past.

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Certainly it’s not as polished as the iPhone, but for people who actually care about their freedoms, it’s fantastic. Even if for the simple reasons that I can flash my Neo at will, and that I have no limitations from the manufacturer as to what I can do with my phone, or how it can be used, it’s the best smartphone/PDA I have ever purchased or used.

I find it interesting that you’re the most vocal supporter of the Openmoko on this site, and you still don’t use it as your only phone. Hopefully they will work out the kinks eventually, but it is not an option for most of us yet, not even those of us who care about software freedom. If you NEED to have a backup phone, then it is still just an expensive toy.

Correct. But that doesn’t mean that it’s any less important in the mobile ecosystem. It’s the only truly free phone in every sense of the word. You’re free to do anything with the phone, at any time, without the permission of phone manufacturers, or app store reviewers, or fucking NDAs.

The biggest problem with Openmoko is that nobody knows about them, and nobody realizes why they matter. Everybody sees the horrors going on between Apple, the App Store, and developers’ applications being rejected for competing with Apple, and then they complain about it, but that’s just the way it is.

Yet that’s not how it should be, and if everyone could find out about Openmoko, and actually realize and know why their freedoms truly matter, and that Openmoko makes the most freedoms-loving phone on the planet, then I wouldn’t have anything more to talk about.

But we all know that even Openmoko’s unexpectedly high sales amounts for the FreeRunner is still only a drop in the ocean compared to even only the iPhone, and even less compared to the entire smartphone industry. And that’s why it matters to me and others to get the word out, to let people know that there really is another option, one that doesn’t squelch your freedoms, and that if freedom truly matters to you, then you do have a choice.

Freedom is Your Choice. I choose Freedom.

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So for the public record, I’d like to list the set of features that I feel are most important to have in a browser, and how the array of competitors each handle themselves. Just want to see the results?

• Bookmark Tagging: Saving bookmarks into endless hierarchies of folders is extremely tedious and inefficient; the ability to instead tag bookmarks with multiple words allows users much better context for later search and retrieval. Using a third-party bookmark tagging site shouldn’t be necessary anymore; tagging bookmarks gives such a high return on investment of time and effort that it should be a no-brainer to implement this in any and all browsers. Mozilla was the first out of the gate with Firefox 3.0’s introduction of bookmark tagging, and as an avid user of the feature, coupled with the “Unsorted Bookmarks” option, it is extremely well implemented and dead simple to use. Click the star in the location bar to mark the page, and click again to add tags, rename the bookmark, or file it into a real location; type the tag name into the location bar (Awesome Bar!), and look through the results for what you want. As far as I know, none of the other major browsers have added, or plan to add, this functionality; ouch! Google Chrome gets negative points for not even letting you browse or use your bookmarks: you can only search them.
• Content Synchronization: With more and more users connecting to the internet from multiple locations on a regular basis, the task of synchronizing user content is becoming ever more important. Most importantly, bookmarks must be kept in sync, but things such as saved passwords, cookies, browsing history, and form fields are also up for grabs, and it all must be done securely. Bookmarking websites have it so easy, but some browsers are really stepping it up lately. Initially, Firefox was the only one with such a feature, in the form of much-loved Foxmarks plugin, which automatically syncs bookmarks to a remote server, and offers a page to use the bookmarks even from a browser without the plugin. These days, Foxmarks has been much improved, and works with the bookmark tagging from Firefox 3.0, and now Mozilla has thrown their hat in the ring with the rather ambitious plugin project titled Mozilla Weave, which promises to sync just about everything you can imagine, but is still in beta development. Opera also rounds out the list with their My Opera service, which is rather similar to Foxmarks, except that it’s built directly into the core browsing experience; very nice touch.
• Platform Integration: When I open my browser, it should look like it belongs on my desktop; it should share the same widgets, icons, color schemes, and fonts that I have configured for my environment. Firefox is really good at this on Mac and Windows, but while the Linux integration still looks really good, it’s not perfect, and can stutter on some fancy Gtk+ themes. Safari, Konqueror, and Epiphany fit perfectly, but only in their target desktops; Konqueror looks out of place on a Gnome desktop, and Opera looks horrid on Linux and doesn’t really look right on with Windows either. Chrome doesn’t even try to fit in anywhere (why?).
• Process Separation: When I have multiple windows or tabs open at the same time, JavaScript executing on one page should have no effect on operation of the browser interface, let alone on other web pages open in the browser. It shouldn’t take one poorly-written AJAX site to prevent the user from using the browser, or from working in another tab. So far, Chrome is the first and only browser, as far as I know, to implement this correctly. The way that Google has managed to use a separate process for every single tab, complete with a “task manager” to control errant pages, is phenomenally well put together. Opera comes in a distant second place, with better performance overall when compared to Firefox and friends, which will often block the user from interacting with any portion of the interface while executing JavaScript.
• Standards Compliance: When I visit a page that complies with the various HTML, XML, and CSS specifications, it should be rendered the same as on any other browser. As much as we all know that this will never be true, the harder we try for it, the better we make life for web developers, including me. This is basically a problem for all browsers, but more of a problem for some than others. We know all this already…
• Advertisement Blocking: At a time when online advertising is the lifeblood of the internet (and spam e-mails), the ability to have your browser automagically hide ads from web pages is extremely user-friendly. It doesn’t even need to be installed or turned on by default, but there must be some way to accomplish this task. Firefox takes the cake here, with an absurdly wonderful and easy to use plugin, Adblock Plus, which will automatically update itself with the latest list of ad sites on the internet, and allows the user to customize the list or add their own rules for blocking content. Sadly, this is only available for Mozilla products. However, ever time I mention this topic as a benefit for Firefox, I always get adamant Opera users claiming the wonders of Opera’s built-in content blocking options, but I just don’t see it as coming anywhere close to Adblock Plus; it requires the user to manually download and edit a file in their Opera profile containing the list of blocked content, and there’s no method for automatically updating the list, and if the user wants to block something else, they have to edit that file by hand with no guidance. This strikes me as an extremely unfriendly process, and is only a partial replacement for Adblock Plus. Do note however, that a similar system of ad blocking is also available for Konqueror, but no such option is given to Chrome or Safari.

Summary to Make That List A Waste of Time

• Mozilla Firefox: Extremely flexible and powerful with plugins, but a poor performer with many tabs.
• Opera: Fast and nifty, includes the kitchen sink, poor platform integration, no bookmark tagging.
• Konqueror: Platform integration done right, extensive protocol support, lacks content-oriented features.
• Google Chrome: Extremely fast and robust with true process separation, lacks almost every standard browser feature.
• Safari and Epiphany: Lightweight platform integration, lacking any advanced features.

I’m actually not very happy with any of the browser options available; they all have disadvantages when compared to other browsers, and there is no clear leader, especially when you consider that every user has a different set of requirements.

However, Firefox still makes me cry the least while I’m using it, and, with its myriad of plugins, makes my time surfing the web so much more enjoyable, except for when JavaScript makes it sop responding of course. Probably the best thing Mozilla could do to improve Firefox would be to implement process separation akin to Google Chrome, or at least prevent the UI from becoming unresponsive during heavy JavaScript execution. If that would happen, I would be absolutely elated.

So the real questions now are: Where does this leave us? How far are we towards a better web? Which browser will get us there the fastest? What will eventually make all this goofy garbage obsolete? When will I shut up and let you leave this page?

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I wish the Empathy project would hurry up and mop the floor after the mess Pidgin made of its end-users…

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