Last year, FLOSS Weekly interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. I put up a blog post on this, noting that it was interesting with a scalable parallel program written in Erlang, a true concurrent language. The interview was interesting, but not very deeply technical. Now, almost a year later, the StackOverflow podcast, number 59, interviewed the founder of the project, Damien Katz. This interview goes a bit more into the technical details and what CouchDB is good for and what not, as well as some details on the use and performance of Erlang.
Category: desktop software
Stuff about PC software packages.
Off-Topic: Vista, Laserwriter 12/640 PS, and FoxIt
I have an old Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS network printer at home that I bought back in 1997. In those days, I had a PowerBook G3 at 266 MHz, Windows NT was new, and my work computer was one of Sweden’s first 300 MHz Pentium II machines… since then, my home machines have moved from MacOS 8 to Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000 to Windows XP and now Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit. But the trusty LaserWriter remains, keeps printing, and is still on its first toner cartridge!
However, moving to Vista has made the printing bit harder.
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Questioning the Choice of C++
In FLOSS Weekly issue 57, about 20 minutes into the show, Randall Schwartz and Leo Laporte express genuine surprise that the XMBC media player application is all in C++. That is pretty telling, some parts of the computing world are indeed moving on to more modern pastures like Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Objective C (for the Mac people). And quite a contrast to the EDA world where C++ is still considered the new shiny thing, as I have lamented before… thanks for that small but golden genuine surprise, Randall and Leo!
Off-Topic: Hilarious: MS Songsmith
Since I am slow to follow Internet fads, I am probably the last blogger on the planet to write about this… but it is too good not to mention. Microsoft research has created a brilliant or nutty piece of work called Microsoft (Research) Songsmith. The idea is pretty cool in theory, just sing into a microphone and the program creates background music matching… except that it does some pretty hilarious things when put to the test.
Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works
Edited on 2009-Feb-01, to include the link to the illustrated guide that really helps you get there faster. Thanks Simon! Also, promoted to front page, original post was put up on 2008-Nov-09.
Thanks to Simon Kågströms post (and the even better second-generation with screenshots) about using Eclipse for the Linux kernel, I have a much nicer work environment now for my ongoing work in learning Linux device drivers on PowerPC, which has helped me work my way through several hard-to-figure-out system calls. Continue reading “Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works”
Off-Topic: Office 2007 Weird Windows Explained
This is a short note about an “aha” moment: ArsTechnica just explained why Excel 2007 windows that look like being documents are not quite that, and how I sometimes manage to start multiple Excel processes by mistake. It seems that Excel is not truly a multi-window app like Word is… but still an MDI app that fakes windows in a way that makes the Windows task bar and Vista task switcher fairly confused. Thanks for the explanation.
Off-Topic: Getting the good Vista Screen Capture Tool
I have heard some rumors that Windows Vista had a good screen capture tool built into the operating system itself. So when I needed to do some capturing on my home machine, I started looking for it. Turned out that it is an optional install on certain versions of Vista only, but Home Premium is one of those versions. The tool is called “Snipping Tool” in English versions, or “Skärmklippsverktyget” in Swedish versions.
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Off-Topic: Moving an iTunes Library to a New Machine
I just got myself a new home PC, to replace my no longer very trusty five-year old Athlon-based PC. In the process, I realized I had to move my iTunes library from the old machine to the new. Reading on the web and the Apple support area made me somewhat skeptical as to the feasibility of this operation… would all my cover art, podcast subscriptions, playlists and ratings survive the move? There are many stories of failed moves and lost data out there… and moving from Windows XP to Vista 64-bit did not make the dread less.
In the end, it turned out it was really dead easy!
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Off-Topic: Toddlers Rotating the Screen in Windows
This is really quite funny: it is now twice that slightly panicked family members have called me to ask how to rotate the screen in Windows XP back to normal after toddlers of about six to eight months of age have managed to rotate it to 90 degrees or upside down by just banging on the keyboards of their computers, as small children tend to do.
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Off-topic: Outlook 2007 Zoom Bad GUI
It is a symptom of bad UI design when things just happen, and you have no why, and no visible indication to help you figure it out. Last night, I noted that the text in Outlook when composing email suddenly was way larger than normal. I put that way as a fluke, but today, the effect was still there, all the time. Strange. So I went in and checked my font settings, which were all fine. This being Office 2007, I suspected some kind of zoom effect, but there was no zoom indicator in any Outlook window. I tried ctrl-+ and ctrl– to see if Outlook respected the web-style view size shortcuts. But no effect.
SonyEricsson G900 ActiveSync and PCSuite – Solved!
I should have known to expect trouble when I tried out DataViz ActiveSync on my new G900… the first thing it said was that “in order to avoid problems, we will deactivate the synchronization towards PC Suite”. Ah well. I assumed you could get it back…
But that was not so easy. I quickly realized that ActiveSync was pointless for me, since the setup I have for my data is not “everything on the corporate server, period”, which is the usecase ActiveSync is built for. But when I told ActiveSync to stop synchronizing certain categories of data, that lock it had put up still applied it turned out. With no way I could find to turn it off. So suddenly my phone just did not want to synchronize with my PC.
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Google Chrome and Parallel Browsing
Everybody seems to think the launch of the Google Chrome browser is very important and cool. Probably because Google itself is considered important and cool. I am a bit more skeptical about the whole Google thing, they seem to building themselves into a pretty dangerous monopoly company… but there are some interesting architectural and parallel computing aspects to Chrome — and Internet Explorer 8, it turns out.
Lego Racers Boardgame — and why Old is Better in Software (mostly)
This might appear as a stretched analogy, but it struck as me as obvious when I tried playing the Lego Racers boardgame with my 3-year old this weekend. The game is ranked pretty low on Boardgamegeek, and deservedly so. The promise and premise is great: use Lego cars to race around a track and pick up new pieces to modify the powers of your car… sounds like great fun. Right? But it is not, and that’s where my analogy with the age of software comes in.
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CouchDB: A Parallel Program in a Parallel Language
I just listened to another Floss Weekly show, Number 36 where they interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. CouchDB is very interesting, in that it is a database designed for replication, redundancy, and thus massive parallelism. It was initially written by Damien Katz on his own, but now it is an Apache Foundation project sponsored by IBM. The most interesting thing is that Damien decided in 2006 to rewrite the C++ prototype he had in Erlang, and did so in just a few months if I understood my Erlang friends right. So here we have a really good parallel program written in a true parallel language.
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Off-topic: Excel to Wiki Table Converter
I work quite a lot with Wikipedia systems (mostly mediawiki-based) to structure data and make it accessible to other people at my job. Since I happen to love tables as a way to provide overviews and summaries of complex information, I keep creating wiki tables. Editing tables in a wiki is pretty painful, especially when it is time to do things like add columns. Excel is a much superior tool for this purpose, and I have been looking for a tool to let me create tables in Excel and then get a wiki rendering of them for insertion into a wiki. Finally, I have found it! Here, you can find a pretty good Excel VBA macro that lets you select a range of cells and then get a wiki table code corresponding to it on your clipboard, ready to paste into the wiki site. Thanks a million times to the creators of that tool, it is really useful. Note that in Office 2007, you must save documents in .xlsm, macro-enabled, format to be able to save the macro with your file.