I just took the "Which Programming Language Are You?" quiz. Was hoping to be Python.

Apparently I am LISP?

Which Programming Language are You?

I saw this message from Linus on the LKLM and I thought it was well stated.  I love the way Linus runs the crazy bazaar of Linux Kernel development.  He stays true to technical merit and essentially bases all of his decisions on this.  (though sometimes this is in conflict with the ethics of Free Software).

Linus Torvalds from the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"One of the most motivating things there *is* in open source is "personal pride".

It's a really good thing, and it means that if somebody shows that your code is flawed in some way (by, for example, making a patch that people claim gets better behaviour or numbers), any *good* programmer that actually cares about his code will obviously suddenly be very motivated to out-do the out-doer!

Does this mean that there will be tension and rivalry? Hell yes. But that's kind of the point. Life is a game, and if you aren't in it to win, what the heck are you still doing here?

As long as it's reasonably civil (I'm not personally a huge believer in being too polite or "politically correct", so I think the "reasonably" is more important than the "civil" part!), and as long as the end result is judged on TECHNICAL MERIT, it's all good.

We don't want to play politics. But encouraging peoples competitive feelings? Oh, yes."

Microsoft has renamed "WPF/E" to "Silverlight":

"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

It looks like Microsoft is pushing this technology aggressively to CDN's and content distributors:

"Early supporters of the new platform include Akamai, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, Limelight, Major League Baseball, Navisite, Netflix, Skinkers, Sonic Solutions, SyncCast, Tarari, Telestream, Winnov, and more."

Silverlight will work on Windows and Mac OSX.  OK.. so no Linux support?  I think if Microsoft hopes to supplant Flash, it truly needs to be cross platform (not just Windows and OSX).

from the Silverlight FAQ:

"Microsoft is gathering feedback from customers like you on Silverlight and to help determine which platforms should be supported in the future."

Better hop to it boys.. With the proliferation of GNU/Linux, pushing a presentation framework that doesn't run on it is a large oversight.

You need the geeks on board.. lose the geeks.. lose the battle.

OK, this is huge news: www.webload.org

The commercial performance/load test tool market is dominated by large proprietary commercial vendors (HP/Mercury, Borland/Segue, etc). Radview has a nice product called WebLOAD that competes in the space.

As of this morning, Radview announced they have released WebLOAD OS, an open source version of WebLOAD. It is full-on GPL licensed (no fake open source). I already browsed their source tree. They have a Subversion repository.. code is in C and C++,

The Open Source performance/load test tool market doesn't offer many choices. Currently the most popular tools are JMeter and OpenSTA. 

This will be exciting. I wonder how well Radview will deal with the community on this. Though if it's not good, GNU GPL certainly allows forking :)

more to come...

I have been using IEC lately for automating repetitive administrative tasks within my company:

IEC.py - Automating Internet Explorer with Python

IEC is a simple library with a nice API for automating an IE browser. I found it simple to work with for basic automation needs. I have also used it as the core of a small UI testing framework.

From Mayukh Bose:

IEC is a python library designed to help you automate and control an Internet Explorer window. You can use this library to navigate to web pages, read the values of various HTML elements, set the values of checkboxes, text boxes, radio buttons etc., click on buttons and submit forms.

Yeah I know.. pretty lame it only works with IE, but in the environment I was working in, the applications ran on *IE Only*.

A personal story:

My company is very analytical and detail oriented when it comes to tracking/planning project resource allocation. We track all sorts of projections, budgets, resources, etc. The workflow is basically: some business guys (no idea what they actually do) take data from some reports and enter them into some arcane hosted tracking software. This is done by entering copious amounts of data into web form after web form. Then they submit the form to run a report. Once that is finished, they cut & paste the data into MS Excel. Then they take the Excel spreadsheet and follow some wild sequence of copying, cutting, pasting, converting, running macros, graphing, etc. At the end of this, a few images are produced so some wizz-bang graphs can go into a monthly Powerpoint... wow.

So... I wrote a Python script that takes their input data, drives a web browser to do the report, screen scrapes the result, processes it, generates some fancy graphs with Matplotlib, and presents a web page with the results.  End result: Converted a multi-hour manual process into the click of an icon and 20 seconds of processing.

I could have done this with HTTP directly, but this UI automation technique made it very quick to develop; and it looked impressive ("whoa it's like.. making my browser move on its own").

To use IEC, you need the Python for Windows Extensions. If you use the ActiveState Python distribution, these are already included.

I used to use ActiveState Python for Windows programming (because I was a big fan of ActiveState Perl, where the installer and PPM package manager rocked). I recently spent close to an hour getting SSL (HTTP) to work with ActiveState.  I couldn't get it to work so I ditched it for the standard Python distro.

--
Happy Hacking.

Mapping User Metro Concentration by IP Address

I just posted this: http://www.goldb.org/geo_maps

It is a tutorial/example showing how to create a geolocation mashup by generting HTML/JavaScript code from a Python script.  The resulting code is an HTML page with embedded JavaScript that you can open with your browser.  It works with the Yahoo Maps AJAX API to plot markers at specified locations.  I also explain how this technique can be used to create a [near] real-time map of user concentration based on IP addresses.

... feedback welcome.

It generates cool AJAXy eye-candy like this:

and this:

Since I use the AJAX control, the rendered map has a zooming, panning, dynamic, tiled interface.  Pretty Slick.

It seems to be all about size and massive buildouts of compute and storage grids these days... both commercially (see Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Sun, IBM, HP, Oracle, etc) and in academia.  The interesting thing is that the technology used is good for both distributed and centralized (tight clusters of distributed nodes) computing. Processing and storage can be pushed to the edges, or gathered centrally... it's up to you... the mechanisms are there...  it's all converging.

The world is becoming a massive digital fabric.

I'm just fascinated by the scale of the data centers, operations, and services that are being deployed.

Article from NY Times last summer (June '06):

"The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years.

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users."

Wow. Now we do we understand why our systems must scale?

Related:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/05/24/On-Grids
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/
http://www.sun.com/service/grid/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011

My website and blog were down most of today, after getting pounded with traffic from Reddit Programming.

The day started great... I already had 600 visitors today when I woke up for work at 7AM.  Then one of my posts started floating near the top of Reddit.  My server couldn't handle the traffic and soon fell over.  It didn't come back online until just now.

Granted, I am using ultra cheap shared hosting, so this shouldn't come as a huge surprise.  However, I am now looking for some hosting that is slightly more reliable.  Aside from the the heavy traffic today, my site goes up and down intermittently all the time anyways.

Can anybody recommend some good cheap web hosting?  Basically I am looking for about 1 gig of storage and at least 3 gigs of transfer per month.  I understand that reliability and availability are something one must pay for (and usually mutually exclusive with shared hosting).  So.. I would sacrifice availability for price, as long as availability and reliability were decent.

I need both Windows (with ASP.NET 2.0) and Linux (with Python/Perl) hosting. These can be from a single provider, or with 2 different providers.  I have used lots shared hosting services over the years and all of them generally suck.

.. any good hosting recommendations?

(via)
PyPy had its 1.0 release recently.

Now, This looks *really* interesting:

PyPy Stackless

PyPy can expose to its user language features similar to the ones present in Stackless Python: no recursion depth limit, and the ability to write code in a massively concurrent style. It actually exposes three different paradigms to choose from:

• Tasklets and Channels
• Greenlets
• Plain Coroutines

I posted some pics of the latest OLPC prototypes a few weeks ago.  Well... I got to see them 2 weeks in a row; so here are some more pics of the machine up close.

... Seems the whole "hand crank" idea is gone.  There is now a pullchord on the external power supply with a 10:1 ratio (1 minute of pulling = 10 mins of computing) for manually recharging power... The keyboard is tiny and soft feeling.  The screen is small but is very viewable in direct light without backlighting (which is probably the #1 power drain on laptops).

OLPC rocks!

Me geeking out:

Old school meets new school...
Gerald J. Sussman (yes, the MIT Scheme guy) playing with the latest OLPC prototype:

Closeups:

.. these machines run a scaled down version of Fedora Linux that is loaded with Python applications.

-Corey