fidzu : Twisted

I think it has now been over two weeks since I touched pen to paper.

I learned I can summarize meetings just as well on a laptop/eee, I can take notes on the Eee - and last time I needed to carry instructions, I saved the HTML and took my eee with me. I have not had to write on paper for a while now. Most of my books are now PDF files on a laptop or eee.

I read the physical newspaper when I'm at my parents, and there I also occasionally read a paper book (although more often than not, I read an e-book). I hardly use any paper at work.

I think the only thing I really do with a paper nowadays is sign contracts (and contract-like stuff - govt. forms, for example).

22 Jul 2008 2:13pm GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I get back the firefox 2 behaviour of allowing me to access SSL websites with 1 or 0 button clicks, instead of the multiple screen nagpages?

Yours,
Stephen.

21 Jul 2008 12:35am GMT

$ traceroute6 mirror.ipv6.internode.on.net

traceroute6 to mirror.ipv6.internode.on.net (2001:44b8:8020:7a80::20) from 2001:44b8:61::e3, 30 hops max, 12 byte packets

 1  2001:44b8:61::e2  87.049 ms  89.126 ms  125.079 ms

 2  vl67.cor1.adl6.internode.on.net  98.27 ms  77.689 ms  77.303 ms

 3  mirror.internode.on.net  109.942 ms  177.193 ms  148.519 ms

Huzzah. Internode is now running a tunnel broker. :)

20 Jul 2008 1:31am GMT

Check out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a video musical. It's by Joss Whedon, famous Hollywood writer/director/terrorist. It's free to watch on that web site until Sunday, July 20th, 2008. After that you'll be able to purchase it for a nominal fee.

Here are some things which he said about this project that I think are cool.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap - but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

...

It's time for the dissemination of the artistic process. Create more for less. You are the ones that can make that happen.

19 Jul 2008 3:54am GMT

Despite my own impeccable credentials as an elite cyber-hacker, I am friends with a number of people who are bewildered by the profusion of different technologies that the internet now affords us to interact. I recently had a conversation where someone was just confused by the whole "blogging" thing. Why do people blagoblog on the intertron? What is the point? I'm a prolific "blogger" myself, I guess, but I found myself sympathizing as I tried to explain.

I'm a huge fan of the activity of blogging, but I have never liked the word, "blogging". I never really understood why until I was attempting to explain what it's all about.

For thousands of years - well, okay I don't have any citations of exactly how long, due to the evolution of English as a language, but, for a really long time - we've had one word for the activity of "blogging". We called it writing. That's all you're doing when you're blogging.

If we were to describe the activity of a Sumerian scribe pressing symbols into soft clay, we'd say they were writing on that clay. An ancient Egyptian putting words onto a sheet of papyrus: they are writing. Similarly, we don't typically have separate words for "scrolling", "codexing", "booking", "newspapering", "magazining", and so on. Each new technology for moving writing around didn't need a new verb. So why has "blogging" gotten one?

I think there is a good reason this term exists, but that reason doesn't justify the term, it provides a warning, and a reason to try to actively resist the term and just say "writing". The web is a more radical and democratizing shift in publishing technology than any of the ones which preceded it, so publishing on the web (especially automated publishing, as on a blog) affords a feedback cycle where the author and the audience are effectively peers. In fact, the nature of the terms "author" and "audience" has changed; formerly a description of social classes, the people who produce and the people who consume, they have been re-framed as roles within an individual conversation. You might be the audience when you're reading someone else's blog, but ten minutes later you can easily reverse that relationship with that author as you're writing your own. This extremely rapid cycle has given a wholly new quality to the style of many blogs, unseen in any prior form of written media.

So, why resist the term "blogging"? It confuses the possibilities that the medium presents with conventions that it enforces. Writing is a powerfully diverse art. A lot of it's good, a lot of it's bad. "Blogging", however, is more specific, and unfortunately implies a sort of perpetual half-finished conversation. It calls to mind a semi-private, informal, ephemeral, link-heavy style of extremely short-form writing. This form has its masters: Tycho of Penny Arcade infamy leaps to mind immediately. It also has a sea of mediocrity. Statistically speaking, you can probably click the 'next blog' link at the top of this page for an immediate example. I don't have a problem with any of this. Even the "mediocrity" is just evidence of the degree to which this is empowering people: much of what I'd consider "mediocre" just isn't relevant to me, and isn't written for me.

But blogs can be, and are, so much more than that. They are a disruptive technology in the world of publishing, where any style of writing can easily be published, circulated, and promoted. One can write an entire novel, serialized chapter-by-chapter as blog posts. Many people have, in fact, done this already. You don't even need to emulate older forms of writing to step outside the style implied by "blogging". The tools that the web affords - instant publishing, hyperlinks - are ideal for collaborative scientific research. Hyperlinks take the work out of footnoting.

Prominent web writers who I respect also seem to avoid the use of the term "blog". Joel Spolsky refers to other people's blogs, but the term "blog" does not appear anywhere describing his site, despite the fact that there is quite a bit of self-descriptive text that refers to "this site". Paul Graham goes a step further, foregoing many traditional blog trappings and has a link that says, simply, "Essays". I wonder if it's for this reason.

So, if you need to explain to someone who doesn't quite get what all the whole "blogging" thing is about, don't talk about social dynamics and the singularity and the mass popularization of media. That's all great stuff, but it's a confusing distraction. It's just like writing a book - or, more likely, a magazine. Except you don't have to talk to a publisher. And you don't have to have an editor. And it's free. And the publishing part doesn't actually take any time. And it's accessible from anywhere in the world. And you can read it on your cell phone. When you stack up all the advantages, the lack of some bound paper doesn't seem like a big deal.

If you find this explanation useful, feel free to point your relatives at this post. Tell them that you saw it on my blog, but don't tell them I blogged about it. Tell them I wrote about it.

17 Jul 2008 1:11pm GMT

16 Jul 2008 8:56pm GMT

I'm reading some essays Chomsky wrote in the 1960s, about Vietnam... It's worth remembering that Vietnam was a liberal project, supported by two Democratic presidents. Here's an update on the war our current batch of Democratic leaders can all believe in:

KABUL, July 9 (Reuters) - Foreign troops led by NATO and the U.S. military must exercise caution to avoid further civilian casualties while hunting militants in Afghanistan, or people will rise against them, lawmakers have warned.

...
"They should not act like the former Soviet Union did in Afghanistan," the [Afghan upper house of parliament] said in a statement, the Anis daily newspaper reported.

It was referring to the 10 years Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s when Moscow's forces relied heavily on air raids in the war against guerrillas known as mujahideen, or Muslim holy fighters, causing widespread destruction and civilian deaths.

Update:

From today's Washington Post:

Congress has quietly used fiscal 2008 legislation on military construction to signal that it plans on a long-term military presence in Afghanistan.

In the recently approved supplemental funding bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, legislators approved construction of a $62 million ammunition storage facility at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, where 12 planned "igloos" will support Army and Air Force needs.

...

In another sign that U.S. troops will be there a long time, the Army requested, and Congress provided, $41 million for a 30-megawatt power plant at Bagram. It is capable of generating enough electricity for a town of more than 20,000 homes.

14 Jul 2008 12:13pm GMT

Originally when I was implementing PyMeta I was sure that the input stream implementation that the Javascript version used was inefficient. Rather than having a mutable object with methods for advancing and rewinding the stream, it has immutable objects with "head" and "tail" methods, which return the value at the current position and a new object representing the next position in the stream. All that allocation couldn't be healthy.

Turns out I was wrong. I misunderstood the requirements for OMeta's input stream. Various operations require the ability to save a particular point in the stream and go back to it. To further complicate matters, arguments to rules are passed on the stream by pushing them onto the front, and rules that take arguments read them off of the stream. This is very handy for certain types of pattern matching, but it totally destroys any hope of simply implementing the input as a list and an index into it, because there has to be a way to uniquely identify values pushed onto the stream. If a value gets pushed onto the stream, is read from it, then another one is pushed on, both of them have the same predecessor, but they don't have the same stream position. It becomes more like a tree than a sequence. JS-OMeta handled this by just creating a new stream object for each argument. I didn't give up soon enough on my clever idea when initially implementing PyMeta, and it grew more complicated with each feature I implemented, involving a bunch of lists for buffering things and a complicated mark/rewind scheme.

After writing a rather complicated grammar with PyMeta, I began to wonder if I could improve its speed. By this time I knew the JS version's algorithm was less complicated so I decided to try it out. It cut my grammar's unit tests' runtime from around 40 seconds to 4 seconds. Also, it fixed a bug.



Moral of the story: I'm not going to try to implement clever optimizations until I understand the original version any more. :)

I've released a version with this new input implementation. Get it in the usual place.

12 Jul 2008 10:07pm GMT

The second (of what should end up being many) round of TSF sponsored development has just wrapped up. Like last time, this was two weeks of work by yours truly (with an afternoon of Glyph's time spent reviewing code to keep things moving). This time around there were fewer tickets waiting to be reviewed when I got started, however there was still plenty of code to look at. Over the full period, I reviewed:

#1144 Documentation: twisted.internet.reactor does not appear in the API docs
#1253 Create index.xhtml files for non-core doc trees
#1255 Update copyrights in the man pages
#1878 twisted.web.monitor traceback_ AttributeError: class IChangeNotified has no attribute '__class__'
#1890 move examples from core into correct sub-packages
#1900 Error in documentation online
#2169 twisted.plugin documentation errors
#2208 Standardize on the Python shebang line
#2438 Get rid of references to maintainer email addresses from code
#2552 broken links in intro.xhtml
#2607 conch.checks.SSHPublicKeyDatabase calls os.seteuid/os.setegid even if it's not necessary
#2716 Eliminate relative imports from twisted.conch
#2815 Update VFS backends to an async interface
#2821 create twistd plugin for vfs
#2845 twisted.internet.thread._putResultInDeferred should be public
#3182 Trivial typo in twisted.internet.protocol
#3257 Rewrite twisted.web.static.File.directoryListing to not use woven
#3269 curses.setupterm must only be called once per process
#3300 twistd should support setting the syslog facility
#3326 Typo in gtkmanhole.py

Other tickets I worked on included:

#1069 log observers that throw exceptions should not be removed
#1152 xmlrpc.html doesn't describe how to return errors to the client
#1291 Expose "process exited" hook on ProcessProtocol_ turning current processEnded into user-overriddable behavior
#1493 static File web module doesn't support byte ranges
#2303 Deprecate setUpClass and tearDownClass and_ if possible_ fix the subclassing behaviour.
#2327 Intermittent failure in PB tests
#2631 Update coding standard to indicate preference for TestCase methods which being with "assert" and which do not have an underscore in their name
#2874 _sslverify.problemsFromTransport should be deprecated
#3029 documentation for twisted.python.deprecate.deprecated is incomplete (and other sundries)
#3059 twisted.internet.tcp.Client.getPeer incorrectly returns hostnames
#3116 Errors in processEnded can cause processes to be eternally reaped
#3159 t.i.utils process functions should have a default cwd of None_ not '.'
#3218 SSL disconnection sometimes hangs indefinitely with pyOpenSSL 0.7
#3255 Trial fails to display the line where the error occured in case of SyntaxError
#3300 twistd should support setting the syslog facility
#3301 superfluous local in AMP.__init__
#3305 CR IAC ignored in TelnetClient
#3306 twisted.test.test_ssl.StolenTCPTestCase has a number of defects
#3339 mailmail raises an exception instead of giving an error message

In particular, I spent a lot of time on #1291 which will make it possible to control child processes more precisely with Twisted by separating out the notification that a child process has actually exited from the notification that all of its file descriptors have been closed.


Thanks to the SFC (<http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/>) and all of the sponsors (<http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TSF/FoundingSponsors>) who made this possible, as well as to all the other Twisted developers who helped out by writing or reviewing code.

10 Jul 2008 9:02pm GMT

Last night at a dinner with Ivan Krstić and Itamar Shtull-Trauring, we were all lamenting that too many (all?) software conferences focus specifically on positive results. This is what you want, of course, if you treat a conference as purely a marketing venue. However, most learning takes place based on something that someone did wrong and then needed to correct, not something that they did right.

All of the great software developers I know have at least one great story of how a project they were working on was a complete disaster. Often these projects are shielded from the public eye, since nobody wants to talk about failure. So, how do we make a public discussion of these ideas socially acceptable?

Thus, an idea was born: FAILcon. The idea is simple: submitted talks and papers must be related to projects which failed in an interesting way. The larger the better, of course - the bigger they are, the harder they fail - but anything that failed in an interesting way would be a valid subject for discussion.

I'm writing about it so that it won't be forgotten, because I think it's a great idea. But I doubt that any of us are going to organize a conference any time soon. So please, steal this idea. Does anyone out there with conference-organizing skills want to get something together based around the common theme of failure?

09 Jul 2008 9:54pm GMT

Everything seemed to work, except for my wireless. Yes, big deal…

After googling a little bit, I found it's a bug in the new kernels. I rebooted and chose the "2.6.15″ kernel, and everything worked fine.

09 Jul 2008 4:43pm GMT

Free Hugs Campaign

09 Jul 2008 3:25pm GMT

"Plaintiff has a great deal to say,
But it seems he skipped Rule 8(a).
His Complaint is too long,
Which renders it wrong,
Please rewrite and refile today."

- A federal judge responds to a lawsuit that was too long with a limerick (via The Associated Press)

09 Jul 2008 12:54am GMT

Sliced bread 'a world first' | NEWS.com.au: Happy (belated) birthday pre-sliced bread! It turned 80 on July 6th.

08 Jul 2008 5:20pm GMT

It's that time of year again. Does anyone want to join me for da Vinci Days in Corvallis this year? My current plans are to be there on Saturday the 19th. (I have a thing in Keizer to be at on Sunday afternoon.) Kinetic sculptures, human kaleidoscope, fun stuff.

Let me know if you're interested in going.

08 Jul 2008 2:28am GMT

I didn't note it when it happened, but 6/28 was the 1 year anniversary of working with the Participatory Culture Foundation. I didn't really know what to expect when I started with them, but it's been an awesome ride so far.

07 Jul 2008 8:04pm GMT