install make

apt-get install make

Welcome to 2012, where linux ships in 800Meg distributions that don't even contain make and gcc.

CO2 is not a problem

CO2 IS FINE

It doesn't matter how much CO2 you produce, the only thing that matters is that all the CO2 produced is MANAGED in order to return to the initial state.

That means that we can continue burning fossil fuels as long as we plant X trees and build Y CO2 processing plants.

THERE ARE SOLUTIONS

The world is FULL of solutions to all those problems, from planting trees, to directly piping industry CO2 output to other systems, to recycling nuclear waste, to fusion energy and so much more.

So where's the problem ?

As usual, where the power lies, with the people.

You.

That's where the solution is, too.

facebook's HipHop for PHP is a lie

Ever since I heard about hiphop (from a beginner dutch programer's website -- ), I had my doubts about the approach, and my belief was that real Cpp would have been so much better than automatic PHP to Cpp translation+compile.


I of course knew that PHP was half a billion times slower than Cpp (actually just about 31 times), and even much slower than C (35 times says the benchmark), which is also the level of "highly optimized C++" code.

On facebook's HipHop php page, the presentation of HipHop is that it takes 50% cpu of the apache/php combo.


We of course already know that simply pre-compiling the PHP will yield such results (actually far better in the case of something as simple as facebook's web pages) - and the immediate conclusion is that their hiphop compiler is totally unable to bring PHP code to C-like speeds.

We also know that there are other simpler webservers (that can fit the facebook bill) than apache's httpd out there, most of which beat it in CPU and memory usage - the very fact that facebook did not write their own pure C web server tailored to their own needs is a mistery to me, considering the scale and infra costs.


According to the benchmarks currently available on the web, when PHP code is hiphop compatible (some major stuff is not, and the half-compatible stuff will compile but end up much slower), it can see anywhere from the same performance to between 2 and 10 times better performance, i.e. between 4 and 17 times slower than real Cpp.

The other major observation everyone made is that the better memory handling in the compiled version led to memory savings between 25 and 50%.

Not that bad for a facebook hack ;) Too bad it's mostly due to precompile and not to code quality.




If that's what they call "highly optimized C++", I'll make sure to stay away from anything they write in C++, including hiphop.

Otherwise, if you can't be bothered to find programmers that know C-fu, you'll find hiphop or APC can save you a lot on server bills.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=gpp
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=gcc
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dalioth%2Bshootout%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-US:official%26tbs%3Dqdr:d%26prmd%3Divns&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=pl&twu=1&u=http://php.webtutor.pl/pl/2011/03/26/co-najbardziej-spowalnia-skrypty-php/
http://php.webtutor.pl/en/2011/04/02/hiphop-for-php-bechmark-english-version/
http://php.webtutor.pl/en/2011/05/17/drupal-hiphop-for-php-vs-apc-benchmark/
http://cassandra-php.blogspot.be/2011/05/lightspeed-php-performance-and-scaling.html


Note: I have since then improved the PHP submissions to the computer benchmarks game, and the difference between native PHP and C++ has shrunk considerably. There are however major performance issues related to PHP arrays, and one would expect Cpp to solve that problem entirely (the problems are on the order of 100x slower).

js Templating Engines

Before we even discuss templating engines, I believe it's worth pointing out the advantages of client-side markup generation:

Because your markup generator is cacheable and your templates too,

• you save A LOT of bandwidth
• the ONLY thing a returning user will transfer is the new data, i.e. the strict minimum you can transfer to create the page - considering you transport the data in an efficient format like gzipped json
• you save A LOT of processing power on the server-side (string manipulation is always expensive), spending a bit more on the client-side (not an issue, even 800mhz ARM is much too fast for such tasks)

To take advantage of that kind of stuff, just create js that will echo your html markup, with the parameters it got from json (you can put your json in a non-cacheable include js file, or get it via ajax), and make sure everything but the data is cached.

The only way to improve on that is to make the templating engine faster, and the unique data smaller (think about how much you can cache really -- like normalized data ;) ).

Lastly, I don't use any kind of templating engine, but all my client side except html,head,body,script is js-generated, and it's extremely fast, even on my phone.

On the other hand, I write web applications, not websites, so that might be why I don't care about that kind of crap  - web apps are best built with modules like in flex, which by definition handle the view and thus templating internally.

The Best Programming Language

There IS a best programming language

And we can find it by logic alone - what's the most useful code base in the world ?

Unix kernel

What's the best FPS game ever ?

Quake

The holy kernel is written in C.

The holy quake is written in C.

And the winner is C

Why is it so ?

The machine speaks ASM.

To have something humanly readable, we need the thinnest translation layer possible, a layer that would mimic ASM while abstracting the processor-specific instructions.

We have been using two such translations for three decades, and this is not going to change tomorrow.

The first is FORTRAN, which remains the fastest compute language available, barring ASM, and beating C by a tiny margin.

The second is C, slightly slower, but expressive enough to write EVERYTHING in it, including all the other languages - and it lets you include ASM, beating fortran hands down when it matters :).

When does a language become inferior to C ?

The second you remove the possibility to manually direct the ASM output.

There are many languages where it is IMPOSSIBLE to output the required optimized ASM for the task you're trying to accomplish.

There is NO valid excuse for removing that ability, since abstractions are built on top of each other and you can provide the most powerful abstraction along with no abstraction if you so desire.

Like there is NO valid excuse for removing the possibility to manage memory manually. Garbage Collection is a nifty tool, but unless you can turn it off and do the whole thing without, it's not a worthy addition.

As a summary, for a language to be better than C it must :

• provide the means to be as fast as C/ASM
• provide access to every feature C/ASM offer, including manual memory management
• provide higher-level abstractions as well

What about the others ?

I'll take Java and Python, because C# is a bad copy of java anyway and perl is mostly interesting for the regex goodness.

All those languages bring interesting "approaches" (or religions), syntaxes and operators.

But they're NOT in the same layer.

They're above C, they're not ASM translators, they're concept translators.

They essentially could just be C extensions (like Cpp) or C pre-compilers.

So yes, while some languages may bring some concepts or approaches to the front and enable more programmers to use them with ease, they're usually the equivalent of badly implemented C extensions, like the ultra slow ruby for example.

Mobile Development : HTML5 vs Native

http://blog.suthakamal.com/2012/08/go-native-html5-is-going-to-lag-for.html

That guy seems to think native is better because the web is slow, and while he clearly has a point for games (even chrome is not there yet), he's dead wrong on applications, and here's why.

1. most applications do not use 3D
2. the only "slow" thing in the [html5/css3/js] combo is js-loop-type visual effects (like fadeIn and that type of crap)
3. v8 is more than decently fast for js processing, firefox is meh-but-ok
4. most android phones today are powerful quad cores
5. those 100% CPU web apps have very low quality code, and that has nothing to do with the technology

Every application that is not a game can be implemented just fine in html5, and will be plenty fast in most browsers.

Now for the points that "native" does not address:

More than being limited to one OS, native is limited to a few versions of  an OS.

An HTML5/CSS3/JS solution (coded to standards) works -

on a phone

on a computer

on a smart TV

on a tablet

on google glasses

So sure, while some actually design games, and some others can totally afford developing a dozen versions of each application, with a dozen platform specialists to leverage all the platform-specific goodies, the simplest approach remains our good (but evil) friend, chrome.

Less comments, More readability

Comments are technical debt

Like code, they're to be maintained, unlike code they can be totally unrelated to what the processor will do.

Every line that is self-explanatory guarantees a single source of truth, avoids any possible confusion, and minimizes your technical debt.

Unlike code, comments only bring value when the code is revisited, which for so many projects rarely ever happens (I have yet to see code that looks like the 17th revision of refactoring cleanup of doom), and when it happens it covers about 1% of the codebase.

Too many comments

These days, you can find billions of comment lines in programs so simple that comments actually make the read far more complicated than just the bare code.

I can think of many but I recently read a bit of CodeIgniter (a PHP framework), which is so full of comments and empty lines that you need to reduce the line count to less than a fifth to make it readable.

Less comments is more readable

Unless you're using a very particular C or ASM trick (à la XOR var swap or better), which makes sense to explain, comments are useless to any decent programmer.

Let's consider the following code ...

 function sql_match($item,$rkeys,$rcomp){  
      $match=array();  
      for($i=0;$i<count($rkeys);$i++){  
           $match[]= "(".$rkeys[$i]." = " . "'".$item[$rkeys[$i]]."')";  
      }  
      return array_merge($match,$rcomp);  
 }  

I believe we can all agree this is perfectly clear, such a function is so short and so explicit that anyone looking at it will understand it instantly, even many who are not coders.

Would you add comments to this ? why ? what's the point ? It can only get less readable from here on.


Most code does NOT need comments



Let's see with a function that does much much more...

 function pre_edit_actions($p){  
      $p["post"]['changes']=array_change_key_case($p["post"]['changes'],CASE_LOWER);  
      return specific_pre_edit_actions($p);  
 }  
 function edit_item($p){  
      $p=pre_edit_actions($p);  
      if(!isset($p["iid"])){  
           $r=insert_rows(array($p["post"]['changes']),$p["iclass"]);  
           $p['iid']=$r[0]['id'];  
      }else{       
           $p["post"]['changes']['id']=$p["iid"];  
           update_rows_encrypt_password(array($p["post"]['changes']),$p["iclass"],array('id'),array());  
      }  
      return post_edit_actions($p);  
 }  
 function post_edit_actions($p){  
      if(isset($p["post"]['relation'])){  
           add_relations($p);  
      }  
      if(isset($p["post"]['relremove'])){  
           delete_relations($p);  
      }  
      return specific_post_edit_actions($p);  
 }  

Right here, we have a function that will create or update any item, as well as handle pre edit and post edit actions (like associated uploads or more) including creating and removing relationships with other items.

All so short you can't possibly misread them, with every function call or verification clearly named and everything.


I don't think code should be readable for non-programmers and I don't believe any programmer of any language would have any issue reading and understanding those functions under 5 minutes.

I also believe that the vast majority of code being written can be segmented and abstracted to a level where commenting is useless.

Another approach

Since such code, that is self-explanatory and well segmented/abstracted, implies almost zero commenting costs (don't underestimate the cost of writing clear comments), clearly improves code quality, also diminishing the debug and update costs, shouldn't we be focusing on those characteristics rather than frail comments that easily become stale, take at least as much time to express clearly, and add zero value in most cases ?



Do you have some code that still requires comments although it seems to be well written ?

Do you have a reason to make code readable by the non-programmers ?

How to survive Paypal

PayPal is evil

I came across a rather interesting blog post on HN today, http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/good-riddance-paypal/

In it, the author explains how himself and others had their paypal accounts frozen for dubious reasons, for extended time periods and without any proper customer support.

Now that sucks, and that warning is PRICELESS.

However, the blog post could be answered with the old standard saying:

Want some cheese with your whine ?

I know, I'm an insensitive asshole, but think about it, if you were facing the same risk, wouldn't you rather have a solution with the warning ?

The problem

• paypal is the fastest, safest, easiest way to pay - in the eyes of many customers (maybe a majority)
• paypal can freeze your account for long periods
• paypal cannot possibly freeze your account indefinitely, as a court would eventually force them to unfreeze it
• paypal seller support is impractical to fix those issues

So, either we drop PayPal and lose 30% flat of all sales (arbitrary number), OR we find a way to lower the impact of the PayPal system bugs.

And in fact, such solutions have existed for a long while, because it has happened in the past that customers would take months or even YEARS to pay an invoice.

The solution

From the top of my head, one could easily use the following fixes:

1. withdraw from paypal at regular intervals
2. have backup paypal accounts in case one gets frozen
3. use other payment services that enable paypal themselves (so THEY are taking "the paypal risk")
4. credit cards
5. other credit solutions
6. loans

So sure, you will lose time and money on the solutions, but will that really cost you more than losing all those paypal sales because you didn't care that your customers preferred paypal ?

Your call, bud considering option 3, which is pretty cheap, why wage a holy war ?

Last thing, the OP talked about his own payment solution, that sounds nice, but either you get into that business seriously and make a global payment solution, or you'll just be annoying users (and you can be sure I will avoid purchasing anything on your site as much as possible, just because I don't give my credit details to "anyone") and losing sales, and risking way more than just your paypal account balance.

If you give a man a knife, prepare to get stabbed.

File Sharing between Linux and Windows

File Server = linux ( or any unix really, except crapOSX)

User = linux (android,ubuntu, others) or windows (ouch. still home to visio and lots of adobe stuff though)

It has always been an issue to connect these two, and as all data should be centralized and kept on at least one resilient raid setup within a file server, we always have that big issue of how to connect the autist windows client with the unix file servers.

The standard way used to be (for me at least) to setup samba, as an open source imitation of the windows file sharing solution is almost perfect (there are quirks, but then it's more than usable).

But then, it's clear that samba isn't that great, and that if we could get everything running under the very standard NFS, it would be great.

Some guys coded dokan / nekodrive to help with that, unfortunately dokan is a buggy piece of crap, and nekodrive is based on it.

Microsoft offers NFS support easily click-installable on entreprise and ultimate versions, but then that's not exactly the license we all get with OEMs.

So I'm currently looking at finding a way to make w7hp access an NFS share

ocsetup does not work.

sua does not work.

cygwin doesn't want to help.

The world hates me, and apt-get install samba. If you're looking for me, I'll be crying under the shower.

The first real ultrabook

update: official trackpad drivers now ok-ish, not worth the trouble. Can't find a bios to disable hyperthreading. otherwise really happy about the laptop still. had to cut a micro-hdmi cable to make the micro-hdmi output work (port in laptop too deep).


Been a while since the macbook air started a trend of very thin very light laptops... but so far they were only crap to me.

Sure they were light and thin, but do you really expect me to work in 1366x768 on a MBA or 1600x900 on a zenbook ?

More than that, the only credible competitor to the macbook air, the asus zenbook, had a very bad touchpad and keyboard, or so the reviews said.

And then, ASUS eventually got it.

And then, I bought a laptop.

I must say this zenbook prime hit the spot with the only quality I was looking for in a thinbook (confusion intended) : a high quality full HD IPS pannel.

This screen is just awesome, and although the keyboard feels a little strange, it's more than fine for a laptop.

Just a word of warning though, basic stuff like tap to click has more than 300 ms lag (I call that completely unusable) and should be disabled.

The rest of the touchpad is fine though, except the bottom would've been better without touch sensor, that accidentally moves the mouse when you click, or record it as a second finger or ...

All in all, once I find the touchpad configuration utility, remove the tap to click and find a way to ignore the bottom of the sensor area, it'll be perfect.

Let's hope the other manufacturers wake up and we start seeing more ultratops with killer screens (like an affordable fullHD MBA (although they'll probably call that retina, or cornea... or whatever really) running windows 7 ...).

Oh and, contrary to most reviewers, I don't get free stuff or make money so you can trust me ;)

Obviously the trackpad drivers issue was enough for someone to leave the beautiful screen in the trashcan --
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/zenbook-prime-flunks-blogging-torture-test-gets-replaced-by-a-macbook-air/2656

They say a few driver updates do away with the problems, I have always touch typed and I have absolutely no problems, as if the european version which came out later didn't have the same driver version or something.

major edit

Let me correct this : asus update .24 sucks too. The elan pad sucks, there are no usable drivers like what you would get with an old dell / synaptic combo, letting you set preferences like deactivate when mouse plugged in, no solution to have a working click (because the tap sucks, too), overall I feel like writing my own driver with a part to ignore the address range of the button positions, and making buttons register correctly rather than laggingly (measured >100ms,this thing sucks balls) - Let's hope I find a solution though.

fixing the problem

Step 1 : get a usable driver

From asus.com

Step 2 : tweak the driver

As explained here : 

http://littlepctrickslearned.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/asus-x53e-asus-elan-elantach-touchpad-edge-scroll-or-other-option-missing/

Go to the etd.inf file (the .bak is not important), and select lines 751 to 907, replace all 0 to 1 (that is, in all the [ETD_SmartPadDisplay*] sections) - if you can't replace all in selection, get notepad++

Step 3 : palm contact when typing

Skip if you intend to game with the touchpad on the laptop, this disables touchpad when typing.

There's a hidden feature in the driver, in the ETD_OtherSetting part, that covers disabling the touchpad when you type:

HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\OtherSetting",DisableWhenType_Enable,%REG_DWORD%,1 ; 1 = Disable Function, 1 = Enable Function
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\OtherSetting",DisableWhenType_AllArea,%REG_DWORD%,1 ; 1 = Edge Area, 1 = All Area
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\OtherSetting",DisableWhenType_DelayTime_Tap,%REG_DWORD%,1000 ; Unit (ms)
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\OtherSetting",DisableWhenType_DelayTime_Move,%REG_DWORD%,1500 ; Unit (ms)
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\OtherSetting",DisableWhenType_DelayTime_Gesture,%REG_DWORD%,1000 ; Unit (ms)

This part is cloned in every ETD_OtherSetting, as for the previous tweak (ETD_SmartPadDisplay) and as I didn't check the id being used, I changed them all this time again.

Once you have set this setting, the touchpad will be disabled "DisableWhenTypeDelayTime" after you started typing and re-enabled "DisableWhenTypeDelayTime" after you stop.

I'm currently toying with the delays, trying .3 for the Time_Move, but evidently that setting is going to be quite personal and related to your WPM and typing density distribution (i.e. if you type a bunch, wait, type a bunch, you risk having the touchpad reactivate during the typing break).

For some reason there is no registry key to handle that,and no file in system32 that contains that string so ... goodbye enable/disable script it seems.

Step 4 : Left and Right click

I noticed the touchpad would consider a right click any click from anywhere on the touchpad as long as the last "new touch point" was in the right half, i.e. keep your finger in the left click position, put a finger on the right half of the pad, click with your left finger and wtf it's a right click.

Another hidden setting in the driver it seems ;) - actually three settings

HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\DriverOption",ButtonMode,%REG_DWORD%,1 ; 1 = Button Combine, 2 = Button Indenpendent
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\DriverOption",ClickPadActiveAreaClickMode,%REG_DWORD%,2 ; 1 = Not Two Finger Click, 2 = Two Finger Click (Right Button), 3 = Two Finger Click (Left Button)
HKLM,%ServiceRoot%"\Elantech\DriverOption",ClickPadRestingAreaClickMode,%REG_DWORD%,2 ; 1 = Not Two Finger Click, 2 = Two Finger Click (Right Button), 3 = Two Finger Click (Left Button)

I used 2,1,1 instead of the default 1,2,2 , it feels more normal now.

Step 5 : set some options

After running setup.exe, you can now access your mouse driver like civilized users -- I personally did the following but then that's all up to your preferences.

Removed every multi finger gesture (I hate those things anyway).

Enabled "disable when external pointing device plug in".

Enabled edge scrolling.

Pushed PalmTracking to the max.

Right now I think that's all ;)

Cartels, or how corporations and the government gang bang your wallet

Cartel cases and how the mafia states benefit from it.

Prior to the case, shoemakers A and B are the only participants in the market, and sell their shoes for 100 zlitos a pair.


Shoemaker A and B aggree on a price mark of 200 zlitos for a pair of shoes.

This of course is unheard of, as it would've been enough to buy 2 pairs a year ago.

However.. you do need that pair of shoes and you pay for it.

The evil shoemaker (A or B) receives 160 zlitos, and the mafia state gets 40 zlitos (let's assume they have a simple clean 20% vat rate).


Later on, after many complaints, the state will investigate the matter using the zlitos you and every other citizen of zlitland paid in taxes last year.

When that succeeds, shoemaker A and B will both be fined <fine amount> zlitos, which the mafia state will then use partly for your own good, partly for their own good.


So in a sense, what really happenned here is that the state leveraged another tax on the shoes in the following manner :

step 1 : 200 zlitos pair'o'shoes purchase -> 160 shoemaker , 40 state

step 2 : cartel fine  -> -2mil shoemaker,+2mil state
fine amount per pair'o'shoes -> -40 shoemaker, +40 state
(for the sake of the argument, we'll consider it happens after 50.000 pairs have been sold)

step 3 : shoemakers tax on profit -> (120*33%*20% = 8) -8 shoemaker, +8 state
(for the sake of the argument, we will consider a low 33% real profit rate (i.e. before accountance conceals most of it) and a moderate 20% profit tax )


Normal mode -> 100 zlitos pair'o'shoes -> 75 shoemaker (100%), 25 state (100%)

Cartel mode -> 200 zlitos pair'o'shoes -> 112 shoemaker (149%), 88 state (352%)



Now you know why the fines required by the states are always lower than the profits generated by the illegal arrangement...

... and that is what happens when everything else is legal.

On arguments of authority

We often hear the name of the following companies associated with high technological skill and technological innovation:

facebook
microsoft
google

The following facts

facebook

• is a copy of myspace and others, that succeeded because it spread through a very fashion-addicted layer of the population, the university students - and because the alternatives sucked way too bad to be credible..
• uses mysql
• uses a php compiler rather than using proper C/Cpp for speed

microsoft

• is a collection of smart market moves, that positionned an inferior OS as the logical choice for many vendors - everyone who used a mac classic knows what I mean, DOS couldn't touch unix and windows 95 was the first time microsoft came close to apple from a visual standpoint
• is responsible for microsoft server (bad)
• has every single of its entreprise network services like DNS or AD much better served by linux appliances

google

• made ONE single search engine. that's like writing a crawler, figuring out an ok way to store data and take it out and that's it.  Sure they did it right, but mostly they were smart enough to license it to yahoo while keeping their branding and then NEVER MONETIZE it until everyone was using it (an equivalent approach to search with 20% less efficiency would have led to the exact same success).
• doesn't make that many public mistakes, but then they too use a mysql fork for some of their stuff, android is far slower than it should be on a quad core S3, implying that they too, like every other company, have hordes of average-skilled drones.

Excellent business examples, all three of them, really I admire them. but thinking they have any kind of "guaranteed tech insight" is misunderstanding their business big time.

The most innovative is google by far, and that's because they pay people to try anything and everything, and then pick what's going to market. That is sound business strategy, not tech mastery or whatever the media like to call it.

On MySQL

I know, ranting is bad ...

But then, it cannot come close to the evil that is MySQL now can it ?

I'll take what's known as the "best" MySQL available, mysql InnoDB 5.6 as it's supposedly the most "RDBMS" of all the forks.

the good :

• it's a database
• it's used by beelions of people (at least)
• there probably are half a thousand tutorials
• it's available on many hosting environments

the bad :

• slow joins
• slow subqueries (some are just on the retarded slow side, like 1m)
• no native FTS, resulting in major WTF on the order of CONCAT LIKE
• hackish foreign key support
• no IP datatype
• bad datetime/date datatypes
• no ACID compliance IF you use triggers (fk change does not fire trigger...)
• MANY gotchas (like weird/undefined default behavior)
• many PHP libraries (mysqli looked more or less alright, mysql is crappy, there are others...)
• no triggers on views (instead of)

So sure we could go on and on, but right now, if you need a RDBMS and not just an EAV store or in-memory cache, try PostgreSQL, it will do so much more for you, starting with keeping your data consistent.

Y u blog ?

Lots of stuff I want to share.

Need a place to write it down and get it read.

Need a place to structure it and make it useful rather than reactive.

I most probably will be ranting about the fake IT people, the bad tools and other stuff - but then I might also post some constructive shit now and then.

If you disagree with me and have a logical reasoning behind your opinion, please do speak your mind, I'm interested.