Most of the time, my little hacks are command line apps, without much flash. But lately I find myself doing more and more artsy side-projects.

Aside from my one at work (which is pretty cool!), I’ve been working on writing a Getting Things Done webapp here at home. I named it Sencha after my favorite green tea at Samovar, and the time when I feel most in charge of things.

After designing and implementing the data model, I’m now spending some time on the interface. I sketched this on the BART to work a few days ago. Tonight I finally got to a stage where I’m seeing some resemblance!

It’s just weird that it’s a role I’d never thought I’d like playing or have any talent for. It’s also not something they teach you in engineering school (though admittedly, I never took 160 or 169, but am not sure what level of detail they go into)

And, I mean, me? With a sketchbook?

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an itch of mine — namely, how do I utilize the full power of my little cluster of machines?

My end goal is to bootstrap this on top of the raytracer Lin and I did in CS184 as sort of a proof-of-concept, and run speed tests. Other simple ideas include MP3 encoding (split the wav file, give each machine a piece, and then mp3wrap them together at the end) or if I get really daring, video re-encoding (which would be damn cool for saving off my HD streams)

The idea on top of all of this is that: you split up a problem, you do something to the pieces (Map), you can emit intermediate values (to be further sorted or combined in Reduce), and then you can combine the problem back into the original spec in some way (or not, depends on how you write Reduce). So long as there’s a common NAS (Granted, it’s no GFS, but then, I’m not dealing with petabytes) there can be the necessary file output sharing. SSHFS counts too — it’s just slower.

It’s also cute in that it can spread other time-intensive tasks across machines. It doesn’t even have to transfer files if what you want to compute is somehow representable. Since I’m writing it all in Python (or C# where necessary) a good example is to spread minimax subtrees across machines to make a faster, smarter CS188 Pacman (which would merely return the value of the root-node move — all across TCP).

The backend interface looks something like this right now:

[02:37] michener@enjolras:~$ telnet 192.168.0.16 6278
Trying 192.168.0.16...
Connected to 192.168.0.16.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to the PumaCreed Server on fantine.
Type 'help' for details.
> help
help jobs ls newjob stat quit shutdown
> stat
Computer Name   System  Ranking Threads Description
fantine         Linux   9000    1       2.6.21-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 03:53:02 
enjolras        Darwin  9000    1       9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed O
> shutdown
Connection closed by foreign host.
[02:38] michener@enjolras:~$

Not much, but it’s a start. The machines know about each other, there’s networking and threads and config files going on (praise be unto Twisted) — not to mention the start of a MapReduceProgram class from which all code run on the cluster should inherit (Or at least implement the interface of).

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works out; but I would be lying if I weren’t disappointed (so far)

However, playing with the display computers at TSW I discovered that python is ver. 2.5 and has Twisted and NumPy by default. Which is awesome.

So today I woke up and rewrote my crappy parser from scratch, having had a showertime epiphany about not only how to write a good one, but write one with features we’ll need for the next part of the project.

In the end, I came out with exact same linecount. So I was +0 in lines but plus several million in functionality.

We didn’t get it in just on time because our grammar-rewriter was, well, mangled. This bothered me a little somewhere deep inside. Until I had two quick beers and took another shower. Upon emerging I had an inkling about what to do. Drunken? Perhaps. But that sort of drunken clarity that makes things possible.

So I scrapped darch’s rewriter and started over. At 3 in the morning. I wrote and wrote and things started to just fall into place. A slight change of order here, a minor off-by-one hack there, one piece slyly using some nice output from another piece… and in 2.5 hours I had it up and running. Which is better than busted. And much shorter, cleaner, and compartmentalized than it previously was.

My line count for the day: -70 My contribution: Enough to make me feel like I deserve my trip to Seattle for Spring Break

Right now I’ve got so much hack energy that I can’t sleep if I wanted to. Oh, I’ll crash real soon now, but this is the first time in a while I’ve felt the rush. And it’s this that makes me think that everything’s going to be okay once I leave school and my life is somehow on track — which I was worried about earlier (eating at the dorms makes me feel old).

Lindy on Sproul is still lots of fun. I have ~ 2.5 gigs of swing music now, which is quite awesome. Note that this is only ~ 500 songs because I’m a nut for quality where I can get it (192+) — I’ve even gone so far as to get FLAC albums in some cases

It’s been almost overwhelmingly WARM in Berkeley — my handy internet thermometer suggests that it was 77 degrees earlier — and with a higher humidity than I get up in GV. Blah. At least b33r tastes even better now.

And apparently a troupe of LoS people are out to find a swimming hole after dancing tomorrow, which I am so in the mood for.

Running a LoS movie night (courtesy of the CSUA) in 306 Soda on Monday…. yay Swing Kids.

UU stuff on Monday too.

And I can write a simple lexer in 38 lines of Python, including comments and whitespace? Who’s the man?

And then darch and I want to write what seems to be a gstreamer-based mpd/mserv replacement in Python — which is totally doable and would be bunches of fun — mainly because it scratches a mutual itch in terms of music serving.

Looking for work, as always — considering Google SoC and research and whatnot.

Next minor project is to finally SVN my interesting homedir stuff (the theory being I can sit down at a fresh machine and go “svn co Homedirstuff” and have my shell work as it should) and possibly reinstall/fully-move-into a copy of Feisty Fawn, which I dunno why I haven’t et myself do — for some reason, my brain calls it temporary when I want it to be more permanent. Likewise, it’d be very nice to put FF extensions and configs into SVN for total cross-platform ‘lovin.

That and update my blogroll to also include blogs of people who a) are not Karen and b) are not on LJ. LJ is for legacy connections — and besides, that’s what my friendslist is for.

In short, what AREN’T I doing these days?

===== This is DokuWiki syntax =====

For the record — open source rocks. This Dokuwiki syntax plugin is about two years old and was not WP2.1 compatible. But I fixed it And then, I upgraded it’s version of [[http://qbnz.com/highlighter/|GeSHi]] to support more languages. As you can see below. Ruby, for instance wasn’t in there

Does it really work? The mind boggles…

BTW, FireBug has been immensely helpful in the process of setting up this blog ====Ruby Test==== 0.upto(9) do |x| print "This is cool -- ", x, "\n" end

====Scheme Test==== (define (fib x) (if (< x 2) 1 (+ (fib (- x 1)) (fib (- x 2)))))

And Flickr picture integration? Rock. Or at least I think So. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Cras imperdiet risus sed neque. Sed bibendum elit. Vivamus imperdiet molestie velit. Integer venenatis, pede ac ornare viverra, nisl justo vestibulum quam, id ultricies massa metus consequat felis. Phasellus non orci. Donec interdum. Etiam ullamcorper ante sed ante. In consectetuer congue nisl. Vivamus scelerisque. Aliquam pede dui, nonummy sit amet, posuere eget, porttitor non, turpis. In eleifend porttitor metus. Fusce dictum. Nunc orci. In interdum lacus sed neque. Ut lorem turpis, fermentum vitae, elementum id, tempus non, velit. Nulla dictum diam eu metus. Aliquam vestibulum sem.

The first write was slow. This rewrite is shorter and much faster. Sure, it basically scrapes the page, but hey, it’s kinda cool.

Cheap hacks FTW.

Check out the source here