Nikolas Shertcev Blog

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GlobalNews: 26 May 08 AM

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GlobalNews: 26 May 08 AM

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Released LikeBack - Quick Feedback from Beta-Testers

You’ve seen the system with the icons “I Like / I do not Like / I found a Bug” in BasKet Note Pads 0.6.0 Betas?
You found out it’s a good idea, a good way for users to quickly and easily post comments on applications they use?
You are a KDE application developer?
You want to integrate this system into your application?

Then, I’m happy to announce that today I release LikeBack (the name of that system)!
You can get more information, screenshots of the user interface, screenshots of the server-side interface (how the developers view the comments you post), know the experience I’ve got from the first two iterations of the system (in Beta 1 and Beta 2), download it and integrate it…
It’s there: LikeBack - Quick Feedback from Beta-Testers.

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Doing CPAN Installs Using Capistrano

I’ve been trying to use Capistrano
for application deployment over the last few days, writing rules to
do some common tasks, figuring out how it works, etc. One problem I
ran into is that I have a private CPAN bundle that I use to ensure a
machine has all the right Perl libraries when I deploy to it.

The problem is that CPAN is often run interactively and so module
writers often assume the user will be present. That means that it
stops in the middle and asks questions about skipping tests, etc. I
searched for a while to figure out how to get a default answer to
questions. It’s not Capistrano’s job and CPAN didn’t seem to have a
configuration option that worked. Turns out it’s in MakeMaker.

MakeMaker is the Perl library that the CPAN modules use to automate
the build process. There’s an environment variable called
PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT that when true causes the MakeMaker
prompt function to assume the default answer.

So, here’s the task from the capfile I came up with.

task :load_bundle, roles => :local do
     run "cd /web/lib/perl/etc/kynetx-private-bundle;
          sudo perl -MCPAN -e
             '$ENV{PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT}=1;
              install Bundle::kobj_modules'"
end

This works fine. Of course, you also need to make sure the account
you’re using for installs can sudo without a password or this will
fail as well. Maybe there’s a better way to do sudo inside
Capistrano? I’d like to know about it.

Tags:

kynetx

sysadmin

ruby

perl

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What’s Your Architecture’s Agenda?

One of the topics that came up in today’s free range small groups
discussions are IIW2008A was the idea that architectures have
agendas. Brad
Templeton voiced the idea that all designs have defaults and
those defaults represent an encoding of some kind of agenda.

For example, let’s say that you collect click streams from
your web site visitors in order to give them recommendations,
optimize banners, or whatever. What is the default
for how long that
data is stored? One week? A month? A year? Forever? You might
not think of that default as an agenda, but it is in the sense that
it enables or disables certain behaviors in the future.

“But wait!” you say. “I didn’t even think of that! My site stores it
forever because I haven’t written a purge function–yet.” Even
implicit acts create defaults and those defaults represent an agenda.
For example, if your agenda were different with respect to storing
private data, you’d have prioritized your development differently.

I’ve been using privacy as an example, but it’s larger than that, of
course. Designs are full of defaults–some explicit and most of the
implicit. Programmers don’t pay enough attention to defaults.
Rail’s “convention over configuration” is a great example of a system
that carefully thought through defaults. 37 Signals calls this
concept opinionated
software.

The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.

From Getting
Real: Make Opinionated Software (by 37signals)
Referenced Mon
May 12 2008 17:14:47 GMT-0700 (PDT)

I like that idea.

Tags:

iiw2008a

iiw

identity

arcitecture

software+design

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GlobalNews: 26 May 08 PM

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Wall Street and Web 2.0

I really enjoyed this discussion
on Web 2.0 and Wall Street from ETech with Bill Janeway and Peter
Bloom. There are some interesting parallels and some great
discussion from a couple of financial jocks who clearly get
technology and, especially, the ‘Net. Recommended.

Tags:

itconversations

web

old men young girl tgp

Save BasKet Note Pads, Save the World

Due to being very busy with real life, I’m afraid I have to give up on the development part of BasKet Note Pads. This really hurts me because it is my “baby”, but I have no choice: I haven’t programmed anything since version 1.0. BasKet Note Pads has no developer anymore. Without new developers, I’m afraid the project will have to be stopped (and unavailable on KDE 4).

Searching Developers for BasKet Note Pads 2.0

The BasKet Usability Project made a lot of positive suggestions, which resulted in an ambitious roadmap for version 2.0 and more.
BasKet Note Pads 2.0 will rock even harder than 1.0: the interface will be refound do be easier to use more efficiently, and it will have tons of new features currently requested by a lot of people.
Thousand of people are already pleased with BasKet Note Pads every days.
Help make those people continue to be happy by developing and setting the next generation of note taking applications.
See the mockups, read the vision and roadmap…

If you are an interested developer and you know C++ and Qt (or have a strong willing to learn them), then you can send a mail to basket-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.

PS: Why this news title? It’s a joke you can understand if you are following the American TV show “Heroes” Well… It should have been “Save BasKet Note Pads, Save the World of Note Taking Applications on Linux”, but it’s a little too long, isn’t it?

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Transactional Memory

We all know that Intel and AMD have punted. They can’t keep building
larger, faster chips for a variety of technical and economic reasons,
so they have started placing multiple cores on a single chip. This,
in theory, maintains the overall processing power and is easier to
build. There’s just one catch: it’s much harder to program
because to make use of that power, you have to program concurrently.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Microprocessor engineers
have saved programmers from the hassles of concurrency for years.
That’s as it should be: get it right once at the lower level to free
programmers higher up the abstraction hierarchy to think about the
domain problem being solved.

But, alas, that world has come to an end. It’s only a matter of time
before chips with 8, 16, 32, and, eventually, 1024 cores appear. How
will we program them?

Traditional tools for managing concurrency fall short. Processes and
even threads are too course grained. Fine grained concurrency
primitives like monitors and conditional variables are prone to
error. Fabulously prone to error.

But a new abstraction based on transactional memory is gaining
traction and will probably land in your favorite programming language
in the near future. Simon Peyton-Jones or Microsoft Research spoke
about transactional memory at OSCON. We’ve got it on IT
Conversations:

Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research introduces a new tool called
Transactional Memory to simplify concurrent programming. Due to the
increasing prevalence of multi-core hardware, concurrent programming
is becoming more and more important. Unfortunately, the most common
tools for handling concurrency, locks and condition variables, are
over 30 years old and fundamentally flawed. Problems that are simple
undergraduate assignments in sequential programming become
publishable results when done with concurrency.

Transactional Memory borrows the concept of an atomic transaction
from databases. Rather than locking resources, a code block is marked
as atomic, and when it runs, the reads and writes are done against a
transaction log instead of global memory. When the code is complete,
the runtime re-checks all of the reads to make sure they are
unchanged and then commits all of the changes to memory at once. If
any of the reads are dirty, the transaction is rolled back and
re-executed. This, when combined with additional tools for blocking
and choice, allows program to remain simple, correct, and composable
while scaling to many threads without the additional overhead that
course grained locking incurs.

Listening to this talk will give you a fair understanding of what
transactional memory is all about. If you’re a developer and have
only enough time to listen to one IT Conversations talk this week,
this is the one.

Tags:

itconversations

concurrency

haskell

programming+languages