Amarok Blog - muesli

Things that make me go "wrah-you-moron"

nospam@example.com () — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:37:08 -0400

...people who scrobble podcats & radio streams. A podcast != music. Last.fm is the social music revolution, not the social data-garbage revolution. Podcasts belong in a separate database. Lost podcast #121 is not similar to Britney Spears. It's not similar to any artist. Period.

...searching for an artist on google.com and the first twenty results being the same Last.fm page... just in twenty different languages.

...Orange sending me a text-message, welcoming me when I'm abroad. Every fucking 30 minutes. I get it. I'm in Germany currently. Yes, thanks, shut up Orange.

...missing a flight because of bad weather and a now-one-lane motorway.

...having GTA IV waiting for you back home, but not being able to play it because of... well... missing a flight because of now-one-lane motorways?!

Mary Jo Foley embarrasses herself once more...

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 03:05:51 -0400

Wow... Mary Jo Foley must be the world's dumbest techwriter. Or she was just really really drunk. For fuck's sake, I hope someone just hacked her account and wrote that article for her. Otherwise I hope ZDnet has some balls and finally shows this grandma the door. What happened? Well, if you enjoy a laugh, just go ahead, waste 5 minutes of your life and read her "Leopard looks like ... Vista" story.

Let me address and dismiss all of her points very quickly:

"1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar."

Well here's the first and biggest problem with you: You should be a designer, not a techwriter. You don't judge features by its looks. Admit it, you just saw the desktop wallpaper, right? But you obviously missed the stacks for example. Besides that: Vista must be just like Windows 98 then. Still looks the same to me, after all.

"2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search” in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me."

Smart searches in Windows Explorer? Yeah right. You don't even know what a Smart Search is, admit it. And Flip 3D? The one which looks almost identical to something Apple introduced in iTunes before Vista came out, right? Wait a second, what was the name again? Ah yeah right, Coverflow it was called. Oh wait, but that would mean Vista just copied that from iTunes and not vice versa.

"3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista."

Sweetie, you didn't really attend the Keynote, just admit it now. Show me just one of the QuickLook features that Apple showcased in your beloved Thumbnail. Good luck finding them.

"4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems."

Again, I just don't understand how you ever got your job? Didn't people at ZDnet notice that you've actually just ran into the wrong interview and were supposed to become a gossip reporter? Almost all new computers you can get nowadays come with a 64bit CPU. (Intel Core2Duo e.g.). All Apple machines you can buy today are 64bit machines. And contrary to Windows you just boot up a 64 bit Leopard / Darwin kernel and are able to mix 32bit and 64bit applications in userspace.

"5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality."

Oh my god. CoreAnimation is an API not an application. What they showed was just a demo, so developers get a clue what they can do with this Framework. This demo had nothing, not the slightest thing, to do with Microsoft Max photo-sharing. I bet this demo application won't even be shipped with Leopard, because anyone could write it in a couple of days with CoreAnimation. That was their entire point.

"6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games."

Well of course they are. What's your point, though? They just showed Solitaire to prove that Windows actually runs fine on the machine. Would you have wanted them to showcase all new Vista features at the Apple Keynote, too?

"7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it."

Because the audience (developers, remember?) knew that since January already. Whereas your knowledge, once more, seems absent. Besides that it existed on Unix/Linux desktops since a decade... and I can tell you it's a damn good feature to keep your desktop clean and speed up your workflow.

"8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?"

SIGH... I'm really getting fed up with you now. Where have you been the last ten years, god damn. Vista's Gadgets are a copy of Dashboard, which already existed since Tiger and came out long before Vista. They just improved it big time for Leopard... or where are the widget scissors in Internet Explorer?

"9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater” capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View” (code-named “Tahiti”) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems."

I must admit, this time it's me lacking the knowledge - I never tried / seen Vista's Meeting Space. So let's give you a point here and just assume you're right (even though I bet you even cocked up this point and some commenter will be able to prove it).

10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.

Backup applications like Vista's exist since the very first computer I ran (an ITT 3030 CP/M system) obviously and didn't improve much over the last 20 years or so. Again, I just can't believe you've seriously been watching the entire keynote. Otherwise you would have noticed Time Machine's seamless integration with the Finder and the way it logs 'states' and changes for every folder on the disk.

Mary Jo Foley, do us all a favour please and quit your job tomorrow. You seem to be resistant to technical knowledge, logic and truth, so just go ahead resign and stop this awkward embarrassment. Also your grand-children might not have to ask you why everyone's pointing and laughing at you in the future. It'd be a win-win really.

Kind regards,

Chris

Fight spam while digitizing books

nospam@example.com () — Fri, 25 May 2007 02:19:47 -0400

You know CAPTCHAs? Those annoying, weird, funky, little letters that you have to enter everywhere nowadays to leave a comment or sign up for an account. They're just there to prevent spamming and bots signing up, by verifying that you're a real human being.

Now, wouldn't it be nice if this annoyance would at least provide some benefit? That's exactly what reCAPTCHA is about. The difference to a normal CAPTCHA: it presents you two words instead of just one weird five-letter combination. The one word it already knows about and again, it is there to verify you as a real user. The other one, though, is a scanned picture from an old book which is currently being digitized, and the CAPTCHA system doesn't know what the word actually reads. But it's really easy for you to identify, so you help out by also entering the second word, which gets stored and helps recovering and digitizing old books. Awesome.

Was ich schon immer mal sagen wollte...

nospam@example.com () — Tue, 15 May 2007 17:27:45 -0400

Hubertus is schon n laecherlicher Name eigentlich. Ich stell mir vor ich wuerde so heissen. Vermutlich wuerde ich alles tun um zu verhindern, dass der Name an die Oeffentlichkeit kommt.

Wahrscheinlich wuerd ich mir nen Kuenstlernamen aussuchen und mich Atze nennen, oder so aehnlich. Klingt zwar auch Scheisse, aber wenigstens nich so daemlich wie Hubertus.

libketama - a consistent hashing algo for memcache clients

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:39:59 -0400

We wrote ketama to replace how our memcached clients mapped keys to servers. Previously, clients mapped keys->servers like this:

server = serverlist[hash(key)%serverlist.length];

This meant that whenever we added or removed servers from the pool, everything hashed to different servers, which effectively wiped the entire cache. We add (and sometimes remove) servers from the memcached pool often enough to warrant writing this - if your memcached pool never changes, you can probably stop reading now

Ketama is an implementation of a consistent hashing algorithm, meaning you can add or remove servers from the memcached pool without causing a complete remap of all keys.

Here's how it works:

- Take your list of servers (eg: 1.2.3.4:11211, 5.6.7.8:11211, 9.8.7.6:11211)
- Hash each server string to several (100-200) unsigned ints
- Conceptually, these numbers are placed on a circle called the continuum. (imagine a clock face that goes from 0 to 2^32)
- Each number links to the server it was hashed from, so servers appear at several points on the continuum, by each of the numbers they hashed to.
- To map a key->server, hash your key to a single unsigned int, and find the next biggest number on the continuum. The server linked to that number is the correct server for that key.
- If you hash your key to a value near 2^32 and there are no points on the continuum greater than your hash, return the first server in the continuum.

If you then add or remove a server from the list, only a small proportion of keys end up mapping to different servers.

The majority of the code is a C library (libketama) and a PHP4 extension that wraps it. I've also included a class from our Java client. (Java Collections makes it rather easy). We use a single-server memcache client wrapped with a native php class to make it multi-server capable, so we just replaced the hashing method with a ketama_find_server call. (should be easy enough to plug this into libmemcache if need be)

http://static.last.fm/ketama/ketama-0.1.1.tar.bz2

We've been using this in production for all our PHP installs and Java services at Last.fm for around 10 days now. We deployed it just in time to smooth over moving loads of webservers between datacenters.

For further information, please refer to the README inside the tarball or these threads on the memcached mailing list:

http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/memcached/2007-April/003853.html
http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/memcached/2007-April/003834.html

VLC 0.9.0

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 08:02:24 -0500

"Good news everyone", looks like VLC is going to ship with a Qt4-based GUI in the future. That means I can finally fix some issues with the clumsy VLC GUI, that annoyed me for so long on OS X.

I would imagine VLC could become the Qt4-project with the largest userbase shortly. A larger userbase results in a better product (usually), helping Trolltech ironing out bugs and finding out what developers really need. I really hope more projects are going to pick up Qt4 in the long-term for exactly those reasons.

...muesli

Evolution vs Creation

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:24:25 -0500

As a further follow-up to my last blog entry, The God Delusion, here is an American TV documentary named "Evolution vs Creation". It is rather pro-creationism and pro-christian and is full of hilarious claims like the Bible being a book of prooven facts: "The Bible has always been lightyears ahead of science".

Fancy a laugh? Give it a try:

Evolution vs Creation

The God Delusion

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:28:32 -0500

Just tonight I found a few videos on YouTube, which sum up the thoughts of my last blog entry about God, Religion and History just perfectly. YouTube rocks when it comes to documentaries.

Douglas Adams on religion and god.

Richard Dawkins' God Delusion documentary: (also check out his book!)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

History Visualized

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:10:33 -0500

Stumbled upon two animations today, which I found quite fascinating:

1. The spread of religion over 2000 years.

Amazing how unimportant Christianity was for most of our history. Sometimes I wish we would have kept it like that. Then again I actually loathe most religions - they just attract too much hatred, superstition and extremism. One would assume that people in the 21st century should be a little too intelligent to fall for something like that. Don't get me wrong, I believe in ethics and logical thinking. But I don't need stories of water to wine, god(s), angels and Noah with his Ark to convince me that charity is a good thing and to make me not murder my neighbor.

2. 5000 years of history: Empires in the Middle East.

Don't think religions spread hatred and cause wars? Well, just have a look at this animation here. Want to guess how many of those empires were founded on (mis-)believe and hatred? How many deaths were caused in innumerable wars? I don't. Wake up, don't believe the lies and make up your own mind. The time for religions is long overdue.

Oh and please... don't even bother telling me about creationism - that's just ridiculous and an offense to your intellect. For me all those creationism-believers pretty much prove that we descend from apes indeed.

...muesli

Why DOS uses backslashes instead of slashes.

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:42:00 -0500

Larry Osterman tells the entire story: simply because slashes were already used for parameters before DOS even knew what a path or a directory is. Nice read and a trip down memory lane.

Reminder To Self

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:25:50 -0500

If someone should ever tell you about MySpace code again, he actually means HTML. Also try to teach him not to double-click on links.

Just waiting for MyWeb 2.0 ...

Let there be snow!

nospam@example.com () — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:52:32 -0500

It's snowing! First time I get to see that in London. And guess what? If you get to see snow only once in two years, then you're actually just as excited as you were as a little kid Maybe that's because I still am a little kid, though. Dunno.

Enjoy the whiteness!

Happy New Year

nospam@example.com () — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 14:17:52 -0500

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Keep on hacking and thank you all for your contributions to KDE this year. 2007 ought to be great

Now go and party till dawn!

Know C++, Maybe Even Love Qt4?

nospam@example.com () — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:38:12 -0500

Someone out there looking for a new job opportunity? Enjoy accessing a huge music-library? Even more important: always wanted a red user-icon on Last.fm?

There you go, start working at Last.fm as a C++ Developer. You will be working on the Last.fm Client, a Qt4-driven piece of software for Windows, Linux and OS X. Want more info? Click the link. It's worth it. Oh, and it's fun.

Now I wanna see you guys applying

cheers,

muesli

Oops...

nospam@example.com () — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:12:28 -0400

On my list of things I'd actually like to avoid: