2009 February

What’s next for Google Chrome

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with Javascript February 26th, 2009 @ 18:31

“If you look at the history of JavaScript it was originally designed to do things like have a pushable button, but it moved beyond that to become what nobody expected; namely a programming language for web applications.

I believe that with the current race to improve javascript performance, JS stands a good chance of being the language to use both on the server and the client in the near future. It is interesting to read about Google’s motivations, since they are somewhat on both sides of the table on this issue. It’s just as important to them that other browsers improve their JS runtime as that Chrome does it, in order to support their JS heavy applications like GMail and Google Reader.

iPhone sync for linux

1 comment By marcus Filed in Links February 25th, 2009 @ 06:23

With the newer iPhone/iPod firmware, Apple has been doing their best to lock out the Linux people and other 3. parties that want to modify the iPhone database. Of course, these crafty hackers did not take it lying down, but have figured out a way around this. Come on Apple, you already know DRM doesn’t work, don’t you? I figured that was why you want out of it on the iTunes store. Why bother continuing the fight on the devices? You’ll only be humiliated again and again. These people have sufficient motivation to find a way around your obfuscation schemes.

Painless rollouts with FCGI::Engine

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with Catalyst, iusethis, Perl February 24th, 2009 @ 22:44

Our software site i use this is built on the MVC Framework Catalyst. We currently run it using the Russian web server Nginx and standalone fastcgi servers. I am using the Moose based CGI::Engine distribution by Stevan Little to start the servers. This module makes it really easy to manage your applications. You just create a YML config file like this:

---
- name: "iusethis-osx.server"
  nproc: 4
  scriptname: "/www/iusethis-osx/script/iusethis_fastcgi.pl"
  pidfile: "/var/run/iusethis-osx.pid"
  socket: "/var/run/iusethis-osx.sock"

with an entry for each server you want to run. (Note that the paths has been changed to protect the innocent.) Then you just create a simple perl script (See the FCGI::Engine::Manager SYNOPSIS for a sample), and you can easily start, stop and check the status for each application individually or every application in your config. If you have a system v style init, you can just stick the script in /etc/init.d/ and it will behave just like any of your other startup scripts.

There is one annoying detail. Each time you roll out code, you have to restart your fastcgi processes. Since Catalyst takes some time to initialize, the application is down, and end users gets 500 Internal Server Error responses, unless you have a load balancer in front and take the node out of the cluster before upgrading. It does not have to work like this. Since the fcgi workers use a non-exclusive lock on the socket, you can start a new set of processes before you kill the old ones. this way, no requests are lost.

I really wanted this feature, so I have spent some time today hacking on FCGI::Engine. Stevan accepted my patches, and released version 0.06, which supports this restart mode, via a new ‘graceful’ method added to FCGI::Engine::Manager + some bug fixes. Nginx already support On the fly upgrades, which means there is no need for us to drop a user connection when rolling out new code again.

More reasons to love Twirc

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with irc, Perl, Twitter February 24th, 2009 @ 15:26

15:18 < mattgemmell> Wives and girlfriends around the world rejoice at 
Safari 4's Top Sites feature. #privatebrowsingtotherescue
15:20 < marcus> favorite mattgemmell 
15:20 < @tweeter> Which tweet?
15:20 < @tweeter> [1] Wives and girlfriends around the world rejoice at Safari ...
15:20 < @tweeter> [2] @mattfarrugia Which podcast?
15:20 < @tweeter> [3] @Zyote They were just in-case-of-no-beans backups, and I ...
15:20 < marcus> 1
15:20 -tweeter:&twitter- favorite added

For those who missed my previous post about Twirc, you can get it through CPAN or Github.

Last Ninja on the WII

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with Console, Games, Untagged February 24th, 2009 @ 10:45

Nintendo has started offering C64 titles on the WII, and one of the launch titles are one of my all time favorite games, The Last Ninja. I just spent way too much time getting through that swamp. If you don’t know what it’s all about, you can check out this long play video.

Another launch title is International Karate, which was arguably my first exposure to Versus Fighting Games, a category that have consumed more of my time than any others, with game series like Street Fighter and Tekken. I did buy Street Fighter IV when it was released on friday, but it hasn’t been able to wrestle my attention away from Tekken V Online.

Carnivals around the world

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with Photography February 23rd, 2009 @ 22:02

These awesome, burlesque pictures from Big Picture makes me want to order a plane ride to Brazil right now. They just don’t celebrate things that way around here.

sunday cuteness overload

By marcus Filed in Links February 22nd, 2009 @ 11:39

Because the intarweb will never get tired of cute animals.

linkhack – a smarter search?

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with search, webapp February 22nd, 2009 @ 00:22

The search dropdown feature of firefox has never been one of my favorite features. It just takes too long to switch between them, so I’ve mostly left it at google, and hoped it would be smart enough to understand what I mean. However, with linkhack, it just proxies through to google most of the time, but understands keywords such as ‘imdb’ to do a movie search, or ‘img’ to do a image search.

I’m quite pleased that they are using iusethis to ‘get’ an application as well (try ‘get firefox’, for instance). I can’t help but think that this maybe should be implemented in the browser itself rather than as a web application, but it’s definitively an interesting concept. one thing that worries me is if I’ll be wanting to google those magic keywords some times. Of course, you can always prefix queries with “google”.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Perl.org dns broken

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with Perl February 21st, 2009 @ 19:38

< @ask_> Looks like DirectI/resellerclub (the domain registrar) decided 
to  suspend perl.org!  I've no idea why.  They're not a communicative 
bunch.  Also, nice touch doing it on a Saturday.

For now, if you need access to search.cpan.org, you can reach it directly by ip: http://207.115.101.144/ Also, note that you can access the catalyst framework home page through http://www.catalystframework.org/. You can read more about it from Ask’s blog.

*update* perl.org is back, serenity has been restored to the world. Hopefully they will also move to a less insane provider soon.

pwn!youtube and all that jazz

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with iwatchthis, streaming, youtube February 21st, 2009 @ 17:29

Want to download that youtube video you saw to your hard drive? Now you can. simply add ‘pwn’ to the hostname in the url. pwnyoutube.com provides both flv and mpeg4 downloads (when available from youtube). If you prefer, you can also use a bookmarklet. Using this service, I have added a download link to all youtube videos on our video bookmarking service iwatchthis.

I find it interesting that streaming copyrighted material seems more acceptable to old media than straight downloads. This seems to stem from some deep misunderstanding about it being possible to restrict what you are able to do with media while still letting you play it back on your own system. This is just as wrong for streaming as it has been for every encryption-based scheme they’ve tried up until now. I’m guessing it won’t be long until you get a ‘save from spotify’ utility as well.

The history of this has been failure upon failure. First DVD encryption, then DRM and lately, whatever failure Blueray brought with it. It just doesn’t work, and given enough initiative, it gets broken. Actually, it requires a lot less effort to break these schemes than it takes to device them, which is a pretty clear indication that they are fighting reality. Wanting it to be otherwise does not change that, and scaring consumers into submission with legal threats won’t work either.

I assume that is the same misunderstanding that made content owners allow so much content on Hulu. They think that they can restrict the viewers usage of the material to that format closely, and avoid competing with their existing dying markets. Guess Boxee came as a nasty shock to them. Hope nobody told them that foreigners watch it through US proxies as well. They are probably old men, and it could give them a heart attack…

There is a wealth of content out there, and the sooner content owners start focus on winning over customers with quality and convenience, rather than to try to force them into bondage with DRM and geographical restrictions, the sooner they will have a chance against the file sharers. I always found it amusing that the only people who are forced to watch those ghastly “You wouldn’t steal a car” ads are the ones that actually buy DVDs. Pirates just edit it out.

People don’t mind paying for content, as long as the price is reasonable, and they feel like they are being rewarded rather than punished for it.

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