Wow.

FOMS and Linux.conf.au 2007 absolutely rocked the house. I go to my fair share of conferences each year, and even though I’m mostly a Mac OS X user these days, I can heartily say that there really is nothing that matches the flair, co-operation and vibrance of the Linux community.

The Foundations of Open Media Software mini-conference and workshop took place the week before Linux.conf.au to discuss problem areas in open-source media software and how to tackle them, and a number of worthy goals came out of it. One really important project is the advancement of totally free multimedia codecs that sites such as Wikipedia can use for their video: we’re gunning for Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio) support out-of-the-box for Firefox 3, which means that everyone will finally be able to watch video in a Web browser in a non-patented, totally open format without installing plugins or any other nonsense. Putting all the faces to names and seeing all the different projects co-operating to improve open-source multimedia and hit common goals is fantastic.

Linux.conf.au was just as stellar: the atmosphere was vibrant, talks were casual and informative, the organisation was the best I’ve ever seen for any conference, the parties were great, and the community just wonderful. Kathy Sierra’s keynote about Creating Passionate Users was the best keynote I’d ever seen at a conference, even rivalling Steve Jobs’s famous reality distortion field (and Kathy’s was arguably better, since she was actually delivering a ton of information rather than just unveiling “ooo shiny iPhone!”). As jdub would say, awesome. Thanks so much to the amazing Seven Team for organising the best conference I’ve ever been to, all the volunteers and helpers that made it go so smoothly, the A/V team that preserved the talks for all eternity (plug: including mine, of course :-).

Now to catch up on these 700+ RSS articles that I’ve abandoned reading for the week and await the return of life to normality. See you all at FOMS and Linux.conf.au next year!

Wow.

FOMS and Linux.conf.au 2007 absolutely rocked the house. I go to my fair share of conferences each year, and even though I’m mostly a Mac OS X user these days, I can heartily say that there really is nothing that matches the flair, co-operation and vibrance of the Linux community.

The Foundations of Open Media Software mini-conference and workshop took place the week before Linux.conf.au to discuss problem areas in open-source media software and how to tackle them, and a number of worthy goals came out of it. One really important project is the advancement of totally free multimedia codecs that sites such as Wikipedia can use for their video: we’re gunning for Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio) support out-of-the-box for Firefox 3, which means that everyone will finally be able to watch video in a Web browser in a non-patented, totally open format without installing plugins or any other nonsense. Putting all the faces to names and seeing all the different projects co-operating to improve open-source multimedia and hit common goals is fantastic.

Linux.conf.au was just as stellar: the atmosphere was vibrant, talks were casual and informative, the organisation was the best I’ve ever seen for any conference, the parties were great, and the community just wonderful. Kathy Sierra’s keynote about Creating Passionate Users was the best keynote I’d ever seen at a conference, even rivalling Steve Jobs’s famous reality distortion field (and Kathy’s was arguably better, since she was actually delivering a ton of information rather than just unveiling “ooo shiny iPhone!”). As jdub would say, awesome. Thanks so much to the amazing Seven Team for organising the best conference I’ve ever been to, all the volunteers and helpers that made it go so smoothly, the A/V team that preserved the talks for all eternity (plug: including mine, of course :-).

Now to catch up on these 700+ RSS articles that I’ve abandoned reading for the week and await the return of life to normality. See you all at FOMS and Linux.conf.au next year!

An engaging quote from Paul Johnson, from the January 9, 2007 issue of Haskell Weekly News:

Mutable state is actually another form of manual memory management: every time you over-write a value you are making a decision that the old value is now garbage, regardless of what other part of the program might have been using it.

My little theory: there is no reason to ever change the value of a variable except for efficiency. Instead, make a new immutable variable based on the old value, which gives you freedom to name your new variable to better describe what it does. My C and C++ code is littered with const almost everywhere, and it helps enormously when you look back at the code a month later to figure out what it’s doing.

And, just to throw in a little more Haskell evangelism from someone else who’s merrily had their brain reconfigured to to see the awe of the lambda calculus:

So far I’ve written about 300 LOC replacing about 1500 LOC of a system written in Perl… The thing that totally, utterly blows my mind is that I’ve done all this without any loops and using only 3 conditional statements. (One if and two case, if it matters. And I don’t mean this in the cheap sense that Haskell doesn’t have any looping constructs and so I’m writing recursive functions instead, which everyone knows is the same thing. There is no explicit recursion in my code. I’m just flabbergasted.

An engaging quote from Paul Johnson, from the January 9, 2007 issue of Haskell Weekly News:

Mutable state is actually another form of manual memory management: every time you over-write a value you are making a decision that the old value is now garbage, regardless of what other part of the program might have been using it.

My little theory: there is no reason to ever change the value of a variable except for efficiency. Instead, make a new immutable variable based on the old value, which gives you freedom to name your new variable to better describe what it does. My C and C++ code is littered with const almost everywhere, and it helps enormously when you look back at the code a month later to figure out what it’s doing.

And, just to throw in a little more Haskell evangelism from someone else who’s merrily had their brain reconfigured to to see the awe of the lambda calculus:

So far I’ve written about 300 LOC replacing about 1500 LOC of a system written in Perl… The thing that totally, utterly blows my mind is that I’ve done all this without any loops and using only 3 conditional statements. (One if and two case, if it matters. And I don’t mean this in the cheap sense that Haskell doesn’t have any looping constructs and so I’m writing recursive functions instead, which everyone knows is the same thing. There is no explicit recursion in my code. I’m just flabbergasted.

I have a lot of friends who’ve switched to Mac OS X from both Windows and Linux in the past few years. I think it’s a good computing platform (duh, otherwise I wouldn’t be using it), but of course it can take a while to find all those handy little bits of software that make life just a bit easier.

So, since I’m a lazy bastard and got sick of regurgitating my list of Mac OS X software to switcher friends in the past few years, I finally made a Mac OS X Resources page with a list of software that I personally use and think kicks ass. There’s also a (small) collection of hints and tips, including some coding tips for those moving across from Linux. (I’m aware that the coding tips really are quite sparse — I’ll hopefully find some time to expand that in the future.) I hope the resources page is useful for someone else out there: if you do find it useful, a very simple one-line email saying thanks is always appreciated! As Larry Wall would say, have the appropriate amount of fun.

I have a lot of friends who’ve switched to Mac OS X from both Windows and Linux in the past few years. I think it’s a good computing platform (duh, otherwise I wouldn’t be using it), but of course it can take a while to find all those handy little bits of software that make life just a bit easier.

So, since I’m a lazy bastard and got sick of regurgitating my list of Mac OS X software to switcher friends in the past few years, I finally made a Mac OS X Resources page with a list of software that I personally use and think kicks ass. There’s also a (small) collection of hints and tips, including some coding tips for those moving across from Linux. (I’m aware that the coding tips really are quite sparse — I’ll hopefully find some time to expand that in the future.) I hope the resources page is useful for someone else out there: if you do find it useful, a very simple one-line email saying thanks is always appreciated! As Larry Wall would say, have the appropriate amount of fun.

You know those frigging stupid 20-line disclaimers that lots of corporates and law-talking guys¹ type insist on putting at the end of their emails? I wonder how much bandwidth would be saved if there was a simple link to a disclaimer policy on a Web server instead of attaching it to the end of every single stupid email. Not that I advocate such disclaimer monstrosities—quite the opposite—but if you’re going to do it, at least be as considerate as possible. I had 7 messages total >200k the other day because it was (1) HTML email, (2) top-posted and quoted the entire previous email, and (3) consisted of 98% email disclaimer and 2% content.

I understand the argument that bandwidth and storage is a technological constraint and that we shouldn’t bitch about archiving 200k because we have 500GB desktop hard disk drives these days, but there’s waste, and then there’s waste.

End rant. Back to happy coding land and preparing slides for Linux.conf.au! (You are going, right! If not, why not?)

¹ Note to law-talking guys: I don’t have a beef with you, I have a beef with your people.

This blog article is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient you must not disclose or use the information contained in it. You may or may not be offended. If you have received this article in error please notify ANDRE PANG immediately by email and delete the document from your cache, proxies, and all your base. ANDRE PANG is not responsible for any changes made to a document other than those made by ANDRE PANG or for the effect of the changes on the document's meaning. ANDRE PANG accepts no liability for any damage caused by this article or its attachments (if any) due to viruses interference interception corruption, your own sexual inadequacies or unauthorised access. By the way, ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG Google juice all caps 1111one-one-one-one. FFS zomgwtf roflcopter.

You know those frigging stupid 20-line disclaimers that lots of corporates and law-talking guys¹ type insist on putting at the end of their emails? I wonder how much bandwidth would be saved if there was a simple link to a disclaimer policy on a Web server instead of attaching it to the end of every single stupid email. Not that I advocate such disclaimer monstrosities—quite the opposite—but if you’re going to do it, at least be as considerate as possible. I had 7 messages total >200k the other day because it was (1) HTML email, (2) top-posted and quoted the entire previous email, and (3) consisted of 98% email disclaimer and 2% content.

I understand the argument that bandwidth and storage is a technological constraint and that we shouldn’t bitch about archiving 200k because we have 500GB desktop hard disk drives these days, but there’s waste, and then there’s waste.

End rant. Back to happy coding land and preparing slides for Linux.conf.au! (You are going, right! If not, why not?)

¹ Note to law-talking guys: I don’t have a beef with you, I have a beef with your people.

This blog article is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient you must not disclose or use the information contained in it. You may or may not be offended. If you have received this article in error please notify ANDRE PANG immediately by email and delete the document from your cache, proxies, and all your base. ANDRE PANG is not responsible for any changes made to a document other than those made by ANDRE PANG or for the effect of the changes on the document's meaning. ANDRE PANG accepts no liability for any damage caused by this article or its attachments (if any) due to viruses interference interception corruption, your own sexual inadequacies or unauthorised access. By the way, ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG ANDRE PANG Google juice all caps 1111one-one-one-one. FFS zomgwtf roflcopter.

It’s been an introspective journey this year. But at least I have a new web site! Woo baby!

Here’s a public thank you to all my family and friends for always being so supportive, and all my workmates at Rising Sun Research and Rising Sun Pictures for a wonderful working environment and teaching me a ton about software development (as well as contributing so much to some awesome movies).

2007 is looking good already. See some of you kids at Linux.conf.au in January! (You are going, right? If not, why not?)

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a safe, relaxing and happy end-of-year holidays to bring in 2007!

It’s been an introspective journey this year. But at least I have a new web site! Woo baby!

Here’s a public thank you to all my family and friends for always being so supportive, and all my workmates at Rising Sun Research and Rising Sun Pictures for a wonderful working environment and teaching me a ton about software development (as well as contributing so much to some awesome movies).

2007 is looking good already. See some of you kids at Linux.conf.au in January! (You are going, right? If not, why not?)

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a safe, relaxing and happy end-of-year holidays to bring in 2007!

John Romero celebrates the ten-year anniversary of when Apple bought over NeXT:

We were building fat binaries of the tools for all 3 processors in the office - one .app file that had code for all 3 processors in it and executed the right code depending on which machine you ran it on. All our data was stored on a Novell 3.11 server and we constantly used the NeXTSTEP Novell gateway object to transparently copy our files to and from the server as if it was a local NTFS drive. This was back in 1993!

Indeed: even the most modern Windows and Linux development environments today still feel far inferior to the NeXT platforms in many ways. I’m thankful that the superb technology from NeXT lives on to this day: when anyone argues that the object-oriented paradigm has failed, Cocoa is living proof that it can work, and deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in development productivity. It’s humbling to think that most of the libraries and frameworks that Mac OS X developers take for grated today existed a dozen years ago, before even Windows 95 was around. If you’re not convinced, watch Steve Jobs’s demo of NeXTSTEP version 3 running on a 50MHz cube — in 1991. Windows Presentation Foundation, Glade/GTK+ and Qt Designer look like stone-age tools compared to what NeXT had fifteen years ago.

John Romero celebrates the ten-year anniversary of when Apple bought over NeXT:

We were building fat binaries of the tools for all 3 processors in the office - one .app file that had code for all 3 processors in it and executed the right code depending on which machine you ran it on. All our data was stored on a Novell 3.11 server and we constantly used the NeXTSTEP Novell gateway object to transparently copy our files to and from the server as if it was a local NTFS drive. This was back in 1993!

Indeed: even the most modern Windows and Linux development environments today still feel far inferior to the NeXT platforms in many ways. I’m thankful that the superb technology from NeXT lives on to this day: when anyone argues that the object-oriented paradigm has failed, Cocoa is living proof that it can work, and deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in development productivity. It’s humbling to think that most of the libraries and frameworks that Mac OS X developers take for grated today existed a dozen years ago, before even Windows 95 was around. If you’re not convinced, watch Steve Jobs’s demo of NeXTSTEP version 3 running on a 50MHz cube — in 1991. Windows Presentation Foundation, Glade/GTK+ and Qt Designer look like stone-age tools compared to what NeXT had fifteen years ago.

I’ve updated the blog part of my Web site to use standard-size fonts now rather than small ones; you should too (if you’re not doing it already, of course). I’d been meaning to do this for a while, but someone emailed me and specifically requested it. The rest of the site will be updated soon.

Yeah. So the other day, I walk into my local AppleCentre to buy myself a nice new STM bag. Of course, since I’m there pretty much every third hour of the day…

• Me: “Can I have myself an André discount at all?”
• Manager: “Hmmm… well, normally I would, but I can’t do that today. How about I throw in a free copy of World of Warcraft? Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea…”

Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Tom, I officially hate you. Do you know how long I’ve been trying to avoid playing this frigtard game? Goodbye sunshine, it’s been nice knowing you. If I don’t reply to any emails from now on, I’m either dead, or I’m playing this bloody MMORPG that I’ve been avoiding so successfully up until now. Bye all!

My dad’s been on a Steven Seagal action movie rampage, recently. How many friggin’ movies has this guy made, you think? A half-dozen? A dozen? Nope, thirty-two. And they’re all exactly the damn same, although some of them have hilarious titles (such as Today You Die, Half Past Dead and Out for a Kill) with equally hilarious taglines (“Whoever set him up is definitely going down”).

Please add Steven Seagal to the list of heroes who I want to be when I grow up. Life just can’t be that bad when you keep starring in action movies with hot Asian chicks in half of them.

I know that the Wii is all the rage right now (rightly so, too!), but some of the more “traditional” games that are coming out next year still look nothing short of stunning.

Sample the HD trailers of:

• Mass Effect (developed by BioWare). The immersion resulting from the new dialog system just looks incredible. Having just finished Neverwinter Nights 2, I reinstalled Neverwinter Nights 1 again to see how it stacks up. It is amazing just how much more immersion the full-screen style cutscenes provides vs the NWN1-style textbox-in-upper-left-corner. (The fullscreen cutscenes being the same deal as those in Knights of the Old Republic I and II). Mass Effect raises the bar again with its immersive dialog system: it looks like it’s going to absolutely blow everything out of the water when it comes to character interaction in games.

  The tactical squad-based combat looks pretty cool, too: it looks like BioWare are taking some of the tactical aspects of D&D-style combats over to an FPS game. (No, really, D&D does have some tactical combat. Putting Mages In the Back and Fighters At The Front takes lots of brains, I tell you.)

• BioShock (developed by Irrational: the X06 and Developer Walkthrough HD trailers are both great, although be warned that both of them really are mature content). Man oh man, Irrational were spot-on when they claimed that BioShock will be the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. It’s clearly Shock 2-influenced to the nth degree: the splicers in BioShock highly resemble the deadly Cyborg Assassins in Shock 2, for example. However, BioShock looks even more disturbing than its predecessor, more moralistic, and scary as all hell. Having mere monkeys and protocol droids scaring the crap out of you in Shock 2 was bad enough, but with Big Daddies running around in BioShock, I wonder if I’ll actually be able to play this game at night at all. The water effects, 1950s influence and mature target audience make for an atmosphere that will leave even Shock 2 for dead.

With Jade Empire PC, Command & Conquer 3, and Unreal Tournament 2007 coming out next year, 2007 is looking like a pretty tasty gaming year indeed for those of us who are stubbornly staying off console games.

In the last month, I’ve had to dick around with (Linux) fdisk, gparted, lvm, mke2fs, tune2fs, the menagerie of RAID tools, and (Mac OS X) gpt, fdisk, pdisk, asr, diskutil and hdiutil.

I, for one, truly welcome our new ZFS overlords.

I’m not too sure that I can go much farther
I’m really not sure things are even getting better
I’m so tired of the me that has to disagree
I’m so tired of the me that’s in control
I woke up to see the…

Sun shining all around me
How could it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I can’t take any more
Had to ask myself,
… what’s it really for?

Everything I tried to do, it didn’t matter
Now I might be better off just rolling over
‘cos you know I try so hard but couldn’t change a thing
And it hurts so much I might as well let go
I can’t really take the…

Sun shining all around me
Why would it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I no longer believe
Can’t help telling myself
… it don’t mean a thing.

I woke up to see the…

Sun shining all around me
How could it shine down on me?
Sun shining all its beauty
Why would it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I can’t take any more
Just had to ask myself,
… what’s it really for?

—Yoko Kanno and Emily Curtis, What’s It For

Trust in love to save, baby. Bring on 2007!

Build 3036 of Parallels Desktop has been announced for all you Linux-on-Mac and Windows-on-Mac fans, and it comes with two very cool new features:

• You can use your Windows XP Boot Camp partition directly in Parallels. No more disk-space-killing installs of Windows XP as a Parallels disk image alongside Boot Camp! This will save me a good 8GB or so of disk space, which is badly needed on a laptop. A side-effect of this is that it should speed up Parallels’s I/O performance, since it now uses a raw block device for its virtual disk access rather than simply using a large file on a partition.

• Coherency: Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. I’m guessing that Parallels can overtake Windows’s window manager and somehow displays the window as a native Aqua one. There are some pretty cool screenshots of this feature around.

There’s a ton of other cool new features as well. Delicious!

CNN do a quick 3-minute review of Microsoft’s Zune, and they didn’t like it at all. I love the bit where the female presenter says “May I show you my new Shuffle?” toward the end, and pulls one of the gorgeous new iPod shuffles. The design contrast between the two devices is night and day. I think that review will probably sell more Shuffles than Zunes.

You know, I really do wish the iPod had a kick-ass competitor. While there are plenty of geeks who’ll say “Well I have an iRiver and it’s much better than an iPod!”; I mean I’d like to see another device that has 30-40% of the MP3 music player market instead of Apple owning such a massive chunk of it. A single company holding such a large percentage of a market just isn’t good for consumers in the long run. Creative, Samsung, Microsoft, and every single other large electronics company have had how long now and how much resources to put out their so-called iPod killers? Get with the program!