Anthony Bailey

Continuity is a great little Flash game. It’s an original...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:34:37 +0000

Continuity is a great little Flash game. It’s an original hybrid of platformer and sliding block puzzle. Playing through it cost me an hour or so of sleep last night.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:48:47 +0000

https://panopticlick.eff.org/:

The EFF have been looking into how many bits of identifying information your browser provides to the sites you visit. They suspect: very many. They have an experiment called Panopticlick running to test this out for real. It’s fascinating. As an example, my own fingerprint was unique amongst the 50K they’d sampled so far.

Uncle Bob: mocking mocking and testing outcomes

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:46:13 +0000

Uncle Bob: mocking mocking and testing outcomes:

Bob Martin wrote a great article on the overuse of mocking frameworks.

His position is that whilst they are sometimes useful, they shouldn’t be the hammer with which you hit every nail - which is how they are often presented.

He advocates hand-rolled mocks for the simple cases, and realizing that when this gets painful, you have a code smell re the coupling of the classes in the system under test.

Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great concept, poor...

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:49:10 +0000

Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great concept, poor name.)

Greg Wilson talks about teaching condensed coding wisdom in this episode (53min) of Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators. He has for many years run a stand-alone course for university scientists summarizing important software concepts. Wilson is very pragmatic about both the value and the difficulties of having some kind of computational thinking taught throughout education.

It is software carpentry as a limited subset of subset engineering - “About putting an extension on the house, rather than building the Channel Tunnel.” I hate this term; I greatly dislike the engineering metaphor, and carpentry also triggers the differently valuable software craft metaphor for me.

Toward the end they discuss how outdated some of the key concepts in the course have already become (Wilson is hoping to work on a new version) given the rise of networks and agile. I was reminded of a recent conversation with an ex-colleague on which abstractions and worthy books on coding survive such changes.

OnLive demo - could cloud really get game? Steve Perlman of...

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:06:51 +0000

OnLive demo - could cloud really get game?

Steve Perlman of OnLive demos the cloud gaming service at Columbia NYC (48min video.)

You plug a box into your TV, or a 1MB plug-in into your low-end PC or mobile device. You subscribe to the service (now in public beta) and rent/”buy” access to games. They lease the very high-end main servers the games run on.

Eighty milliseconds from input to output at the player’s end is the magic number they enforce for acceptable interactivity. The servers are in data centers max one thousand kilometres from the player, and use UDP over (I think) circuit-switched connections from pretty much every provider, and optimize for latency elsewhere in the last mile too (e.g. their wireless controllers use a more aggressive protocols than standard console ones.)

They compress on specialized hardware two ways: one on a frame-by-frame basis for the live stream that the player sees with various measures to tune for the connection, correct/conceal errors due to packet loss, etc., and one slightly more conventional media stream IP multicast within the center for replay and broadcast to a wider audience.

Proof of the sufficiently low latency and the plausibility of the business model (hardware is expensive!) will be in the pudding, but this idea sounds less implausible the more I hear…

rashitproductnaming.apple.com

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:17:41 +0000

People keep speculating that Apple’s tablet will be called the iSlate. Seems a bad idea unless they’re really confident it won’t get delayed.

Wave propagation

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:12:45 +0000

So yeah, Google Wave can be confusing, and certainly isn’t sufficiently dense in the average social/thinking circle to have been useful yet to, say, me.

But I am impressed by its potential as a platform for prototyping new collaborative workflows. There are already some intriguing demos. I think this is fertile ground and wonder what else might blossom?

See, I think this kind of application is very hard to develop from the ground up - but Wave gives you a framework for delta-based multi-party editing, a network of users running clients to embed the widget housing your great idea, and perhaps most importantly, all the other multimedia communication channels that you have to surround the key interaction with to make it work the best it can. (The old chestnut is that useful software grows features until it can read e-mail; I suspect contemporary group-think apps will prove to have IRC-envy.)

Kata lists

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:32:16 +0000

This post contains a collection of thoughts about coding katas.

A fair few are gripes - apologies for this negativity. I should start by saying I do love many aspects of the idiom:

practice as play
solving puzzles
simple examples to unearth core ideas
enjoying exploring multiple perspectives

But (perhaps because with passion comes a desire for perfection) I do find a few aspects of the movement irksome:

Most trivially, the “software as martial arts” thing is way overblown. I’m sure some analogies work, but many seem stretched. I detect lame Neo aspirations / geek Zen tourism.
More substantively, the form is very often used in combination with B/TDD. But the katas necessarily have a small scope and hence more algorithm-centered than typical code; so solving the problems often involves an “aha!” moment after which the implementation is kind of obvious. Because of this the driving that you do tends to be along a path you can see the end of. You get value from the refactoring safety net and in the micro-design decisions of test-driven development, but aren’t very likely to encounter the joys of test-driven design.

Right now I’m further feeling (quite unreasonably!) discontented by the recent wave of performance kata as seen at e.g. Katacasts. In principle these should be great - a chance to sit briefly with a fine programmer and watch them play through a problem that they understand well. (I really do appreciate people for giving it a go, and would recommend Bob Martin on Prime Factors despite the criticisms below!) But in practice I’ve found myself somewhat underwhelmed.

My primary disappointment goes: “without saying.” The casts contain no commentary; the audio is simply classical music. The art of coding is interesting because there’s so many subtleties to the thought process. Thanks for the keyboard visualizations, but the keys that don’t get pressed are even more important than the keys that are! I want to hear the inner dialogue. Even better would be to hear a pair in genuine dialogue, point and counter-point. I believe the casters have good intentions and plan to add some commentary to some casts, but for me they currently lack their essence.
My other qualm is the repetition and donkeywork in many of the specs/tests. This is perhaps partly another consequence of the “clever algorithm” computational nature of the kata. Most of the testcases/examples are “ok, now apply the one true function we’re writing to yet another input and expect this complicated result”.

That last bullet point at least provoked me into trying out some other testing approaches for one of the kata myself.

Model and motion capture for props

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:47:48 +0000

Model and motion capture for props:

Static props are considerably easier to create from scratch and script than are animations of a character model, so this won’t be as significant a time saver for machinima as character mo-cap is. Nevertheless, University of Cambridge present an interesting demo of capturing the mesh, skin and registered movement of real world objects through analyzing video from a single camera. [tag: machinima]

Sometimes I don't GET it straight away

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:31:24 +0000

I recently encountered some wwweirdness I’m hoping someone smart can explain to me.

So there’s a client computer A1, and a host C serving some web pages. If you ping or traceroute C from A1, the round trip time is consistently around 200ms. if you use a web browser on A to visit one of the pages that C hosts, then most of the time individual requests are served in a similar time.

But for around 25% of requests, it takes orders of magnitude longer to serve the file: around 20s. The behavior doesn’t seem related to the URL being fetched: all are usually fast, sometimes very slow. Logs on C always show responses being turned around rapidly once requests are received - the delay is never visible within the server side.

A1 is a machine in a domestic residence using a particular Net connection from a particular ISP. The problem is reproduced for another client machine A2 when it uses the same connection. C actually serves a variety of different domains, and the problem is reproduced across all of its websites, and when using its numeric IP address.

It appears that tens of other clients use C’s websites without encountering the issue. A1 is reported to occasionally see anomalous delays when browsing other websites, but nothing quite so remarkable - could be regular network unpredictabilities.

And finally, on overriding A1’s DNS to persuade it that awebsite is actually served by host B, and telling host B to reverse proxy all requests for pages under that domain through to C, then the issue disappears.

So it seems that A’s ISP and C just don’t get along with each other, but they do get along with the rest of the world. I can postulate some kind of blacklist on one side or the other, with a deliberate policy of throttling through introducing huge delays for a random sample of HTTP requests, but that sounds like quite a stretch.

(Especially since A and C are both perfectly reputable. Probably irrelevant concrete values for my abstract identifiers: the ISP for A is VirginMedia / Blueyonder. C is a virtual host I rent from Slicehost. B is another virt rented from Bytemark by a friend.)

Anyone have a halfway plausible explanation?

Consultancy => Affiliates => Shareware => Micro-startups => Robots => Corporate downfall

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:48:16 +0000

Consultancy => Affiliates => Shareware => Micro-startups => Robots => Corporate downfall:

Every so often Giles Bowkett posts a wonderfully zigzagging river of consciousness. Even if he was completely wrong they’d still be worthy poetry. Enjoy the ride.

Great imagery in the latest Dollhouse episode.

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:57:58 +0100

Great imagery in the latest Dollhouse episode.

iplayer-dl is a real TV gem

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:35:59 +0100

Suppose you’re a (Ruby-biased) developer wanting to get at some BBC TV programme in a sane format. (The desktop iPlayer needed to play their default content is actually pretty shiny, but all DRM ends up hurting me eventually.)

How happy would you be if you could just do

% gem install iplayer-dl --source http://gemcutter.org
% iplayer-dl http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/whatever

and end up with the nice unencumbered MP4 they publish for iPhone users?

Pretty happy! Thanks, Paul Battley!

Chromey yum

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:55:39 +0100

I have loved the Google Chrome browser from the moment I saw it. But my main machine at home runs Ubuntu, and the only OS Chrome is properly released on as yet is Windows. So I found myself bizarrely looking forward to needing to launch Windows to play a game or develop in MSVC, since I got the side thrill of launching something shiny when it was time to look webwards.

But lately I’ve been trying the unofficial daily builds of Chromium for Ubuntu and they’re working great. Even the Flash support is getting better (and it isn’t a big deal for me because my only usecase for Flash is video, and save it all up for a single viewing session after midnight due to the unusual bandwidth charging policy of my broadband provider.)

So for day-to-day browsing, Chromium is now my default choice. Yay!

(Ironically the main time I’m not using it is when I have to swap often between multiple Google accounts - e.g. personal and Modern Mixers - when using their services; in Firefox, there’s an add-on for that. The Fox’s extensibility - Greasemonkey, Firebug - remains unchallenged, and there’s no way I could do without it at work.)

LiveJournal OPML fail

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:52:00 +0100

LiveJournal appears not to have seen updates to any third-party feeds for around forty-eight hours. (It’s a known issue on their support page.) This impacts me, since I use LJ mainly as a feed reader - with very few exceptions, my “Friends” list is composed of syndicated feeds. So I haven’t seen updates from anyone I follow anywhere on the web for a couple of days.

Of course, I know that relying on any one service is a bad idea, because Sometimes Stuff Breaks. But LJ is all fluffy and open, and so my plan for an outage like this was simply to export my subscriptions as OPML and read the feeds elsewhere. But, nuh-uh. The OPML that LJ exports points back to LJ’s own broken endpoints for the syndicated feeds, not to the feeds themselves. This is so dumb! Time to start scripting and scraping, I guess…

http://anagramtubemap.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:07:21 +0100

http://anagramtubemap.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/:

Was pointed at this a week ago: reblogging it now because it continues to amuse me. Very fine anagram work.

undef defun

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:35:37 +0100

When a major programming language conference comes to your home city, it seems churlish to ignore it. I have done precious little functional programming in the last fifteen years, and/but ICFP includes tutorials in the DEFUN development track, which ought to have met my hopes for abbreviated but intense introduction to new languages and concepts. So I attended two tutorials today - but they were kind of disappointing.

Apart from me, the first tutorial (on contemporary OCaml) seemed to mostly attract sympathy attendance from a few people who could quite happily have given the talk themselves. Since they were the majority, it was not unreasonable that the session was mostly derailed from its advertised purpose into a more academic ML family chat, but I still felt somewhat cheated - although perhaps not of very much, since what did survive of the original content seemed pretty poorly organized.

The afternoon session was substantially better, but I was still annoyed that Simon Thompson’s carefully prepared and well presented introduction to Erlang was too often interrupted by what seemed like culturally biased reactionary underinformed first impressions from some of the audience. The resulting delays prevented us from doing any of the planned coding exercises. So really I could just as well have read a book instead.

My overall verdict has to be that I wasted my time and money today. Sigh.

Recommended Listening: RPX and Identity Systems. JanRain’s...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:03:00 +0100

Recommended Listening: RPX and Identity Systems. JanRain’s service wraps a user’s choice of various branded identity/authentication endpoints (OpenID, Facebook Connect, etc) for simpler integration into another site. Doug Kaye discusses how and why he used it, and Brian Ellin how and why JanRain developed it, in this episode (46min) of Phil Windley’s Technometria.

A Bongarded question for you. I spent most of this weekend...

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:48:24 +0100

A Bongarded question for you.

I spent most of this weekend reading again Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies. The philosophy, approach and presentation of the cognitive science research therein always delight me. Maybe I should have become a FARGonaut.

These led me indirectly to the Foundalis index of Bongard problems. I looked through Bongard’s original set of a hundred, and found I cannot discern the solution to this one, number 82. Anyone want to put me out of my misery?

Incidentally, Foundalis stopped working on this topic because he fears nuclear devices hidden inside androids. Wow - academia can be a scary profession.

bub =~ s/pub/hub/

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:44:47 +0100

PubSubHubbub is a sensible step in the direction of a more distributed, less micro, real-time blogging system. Subscribers to a feed register with a third-party hub that then pushes updates to them. Publishers help out by telling hubs when they’ve updates to publish, and recommending hubs in their feed. Hubs take on the complexity of managing subscriptions, calculating and caching updates, and the accordant scaling issues - so publishers now have an easy route to real-time.

This is yet another technology with Brad Fitzpatrick somewhere behind it. I’m continually impressed with his pragmatic approach to politically viable simple pieces of webware, even if they don’t always catch fire. Being part of the Googleplex doesn’t seem to have hurt his open bias, and PubSubHubbub seems plausibly neutral (although for 100% certainty, I guess there’s Dave Winer’s RSSCloud.)

It occurred to me that I have a few syndicating and cacheing jobs that I want to provoke to run asynchronously every time I publish a blog entry, and that I might use the protocol to loosely join the small pieces involved, with the task runners as subscribers to the feed.

Conceptually neat, but because I use external services to host my blogs, I already have to manually intercede to ping the hub; and actually that’s then a very natural point for me to hook in all the provoked tasks, especially since I can take the opportunity to sub-edit syndicated content (e.g. choose which 140 characters make the best summary tweet.) So I’ve ended up just publishing to the default open hub (as you should be able to see in the feed.)