THIS IS ONLY HALF WRITTEN.  I have been sitting on this post, waiting for the mood to finish it, for months; because EEP18 is now being treated as a likely implement, I am immediately publishing the half-written version, because it exposes many (though not all) of the serious, irreconcilable problems with EEP18.

On the mailing list, people are actively trying to bring Erlang up to snuff with regards to web standards.  One of the more unfortunate choices being discussed is JSON as a data notation.  JSON, unfortunately, does not actually map to Erlang in a useful way.  Joe Armstrong has gone as far as to suggest BIFs, which are decidedly unrealistic as well as unnecessary.  My goal is to create a JSON handling library.  However, the mailing list is beginning to put momentum behind an alternative proposal which is currently presented in BIF form.

This post explains why my approach is different.  Many of the issues herein are discussed by the tabled EEP (EEP 18, “JSON BIFs” by Rickard O’Keefe), but some are not, and some of these issues are accepted when I believe they should not be.  It is my position that EEP 18 is unacceptably dangerous.  I will explain why.

Read the rest…

[digg-reddit-me]My good friend Jeff happened to mention offhand his knowledge of a document I’ve been looking for for quite some time now.  I’m sharing it with my readers in case they’re looking for something similar.

Let me be forward: I cannot stand the various Objective C books I’ve tried.  They all want to teach me to be a programmer.  I’m already there.  I just want a book like Stroustrup.  The PragProg book is awful: the first several chapters are about Mac development tools, like I give a damn.  Everything’s through interface wizards.  It’s nauseating.

Jeff heard mein painz0rz, and turned me on to From C++ to Objective-C.  It isn’t perfect: it’s not super comprehensive, and it’s translated from a different native language (French), which leaves a few passages cumbersome.  However, as one can tell from reading the intro, the author of the document, much like me, found little to love in the state of Objective C documentation, and wanted to write something for people who were already well established.

Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not.

My boss’ boss, Varun, is letting me open source some of the work I’m doing at Kayako.  I’m not supposed to talk about the interesting three until they’re ready for release, but I can tell you that a JavaScript ISO8601 implementation is among them, and that they’re all going to be MIT licensed, no GPL contamination.

More news as I get my butt in gear and finish the libraries in question.  But, yay Varun!

So, I’m not really sure what to do here.

There’s this host.  I’m not going to name them, because it isn’t clear to me whether it’s ethical to do so.  Four times in the last year, I’ve caught their engineers telling customers who are shared with my employer complete horseshit.  They’ve blamed their servers being compromised on our application without a lick of evidence (which turned out to be their own fault after basic inspection), they’ve made absurd claims about our policies, and now they’re making claims that we don’t support MS Exchange, which is of course completely false.

What’s worse, when their engineers get caught being completely full of crap, the company’s response is to isolate those engineers from explaining the claims they made, and instead they’ve been going to my company’s CEO, trying to get me in trouble for telling our shared client to be careful about the advice received from their engineers, despite knowing perfectly well that the advice being handed out by their engineers (particularly during commercially motivated server takeover) was dangerously incorrect.

So I’m not really sure what to do.  Do I go public with the names and claims of the individuals involved?  Do I just choke on the rage and be silent?  I tried going to their bosses; their bosses’ response was to try to get me fired from my own job.

How do my readers suggest that I handle such an improbably unethical hosting company?

It’s finally done!    And, thank god, “concepts” are officially in.

[digg-reddit-me]One of the things I was most looking forward to about my new iPhone, knowing there were SSH clients, was the ability to use it as a genuinely remote terminal, no matter where I was, to do little shell tasks and write simple code and so on.

Ha!  The problem is, the iPhone has an autocorrecting keyboard which corrects if you don’t tell it not to (the obnoxious kind like Outlook has), and it makes completely asinine replacements (its becomes it’s, as if the word its doesn’t exist).  This is bad enough if you just speak above the level of an eighth grader, but it makes using unix shells and writing code genuinely impossible.

Classic apple zealot response from IRC: “don’t be stupid, just teach the iPhone every word you want to use when programming.”  Like they don’t even think before they answer.

Apple: why can’t I turn this off?  It’d be simple enough: there’s bound to be some function somwhere get_best_replacement(char* current), which signals no reasonable match (as you get for, say, ‘zzzzz’) by way of an empty string, or something similar.  That’s the hack point.  Add if (customer_isnt_retarded()) { return “”; } else { previous_logic(); } and it’s fixed.

Seriously, who locks people into an autocorrecting keyboard?  Ugh.  This ruins the iPhone for any kind of technical use.  What a mess.

If you hate this too, vote this up on digg and reddit, so that an Apple employee will see it.

[digg-reddit-me]No, really.

It’s not really a supercomputer; it’s a cluster.  Specifically, it’s an eight node cluster in one box.  Each node can have up to two Quad Xeons and up to 64 gig of RAM, meaning the box, maxed out, would be running 64 cores and half a terabyte of ram.  It runs Windows Server HPC 2008, which is why Microsoft is involved.

No word on how decked out the box is at $25,000, but it’s supposed to be selling on Amazon starting today, and Amazon’s good about giving out specs.  As of this writing it isn’t yet available.

[digg-reddit-me]An image version of the “piracy isn’t theft” meme which the pirates use to convince themselves they aren’t thieves is going around; apparently the fact that they keep going to jail as thieves isn’t enough to get it through to them that their insistance that there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing doesn’t make it true.  (I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing pirates brag about how what everyone knows isn’t okay actually is.)

There’s a comic version of it which has gotten disappointingly popular on Reddit lately.  I edited that comic.

Pederasts and pedophiles also say they’re not hurting anybody, and tell each other lies about the law.  But I digress.