Category Archives: Programming

What I do all day

The Jetpack Debate

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I’ve generally found Jetpack to be pretty cool. It’s easier to develop and I’m fairly familiar with both “traditional” extension development and jQuery so it seems natural to me. However I generally agree with Daniel Glazman’s blog post on Jetpack. I’ll even agree that closures can make code more difficult to read, though I think I’ve mostly adapted to it at this point.

Jetpack reminds me more of building JS “widgets” than extensions. I’m not sure I see the advantage of moving away from XUL which really isn’t “hard” for 98% of things (though XUL <wizard/> has admittedly made me say WTF a few times) to HTML unless some sort of portability were gained, but that doesn’t seem very likely at least right now. I haven’t seen any indication of intent either. XUL has the advantage of making good UI seemingly easy while HTML really doesn’t, though I’ll admit HTML5 is changing that.

The biggest problem I see with Jetpack is that too much of it is designed around existing needs. The problem with this process is that it’s always playing catch-up. The best extensions are disruptive and do things nobody ever thought of, or even thought possible. Looking at the Jetpack JEP list I see pagemods and toolbar. The kicker is these are “implementing” and “planning” respectively right now.

Things like jetpack.slideBar, jetpack.music and especially jetpack.lib.twitter make me feel a bit concerned. Why? Because they encourage too much conformity, and too many twitter client Jetpacks.

When developers are given such a sterile environment that’s intended to promote experience and stability it ends up inadvertently creating monotony and stalling innovation. If you want proof look at the iPhone. There are indeed some great apps and I say that as an iPhone user myself, but for each great application there are 1,000 that aren’t worth the price (which is often free). Many are just cookie cutter apps with a companies logo on them. Google used one undocumented API for a feature Apple didn’t think of providing a documented API for, and it was news worthy. While Jetpack distribution isn’t limited in the same way that iPhone apps are with the App Store the design questions still remain.

To quote Adblock Plus author Wladimir Palant:

…Jetpack has to support Adblock Plus, not the other way around. As it is now, Jetpack isn’t suitable for complicated extensions.

That’s the wrong order.

The Programmer, Like The Poet

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So poetic in itself…

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

- Fredrick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Ch. 1)

Z2k9 Bug Strikes The Zune

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From the company that brought you Windows ME, and Windows Vista, Microsoft Corporation today introduced the world to the Z2K9 bug. Apparently all 30GB Zune’s reboot and freeze due to a bug in the date/time drivers. Classic. Microsoft’s solution is to simply wait until 2009 (a few more hours). Even more classic.

This does bring up one of every programmer’s biggest pet peeves: date/time code. I’ve mentioned my hatred of time before. It’s one of the most obnoxiously complicated things to work with due to all of the complexities from leap seconds to leap years. If you need to do something involving old dates, it gets even more complicated. Remember Julian Thursday, 4 October 1582 was followed by Gregorian Friday, 15 October 1582. Yes you read that right. Also don’t forget that only certain countries (mostly those under strict influence of the Pope) switched on that date. There was dual dating for some time. Then you have timezones, which ideally would be geographically correct and 15° of longitude apart, but instead zigzag and not even along territorial borders. Worst of all is daylight savings time. Not everyone participates in that, and sometimes just not every year, or at the same time. Even states are split, just check out the chaos in Indiana.

Griping aside, none of these likely caused the Zune bug. Since it’s a freeze, I’d guess it’s nothing more than an infinite loop or some other trivial programming error on a leap year.

Everyone remembers the infamous Y2K bug. Many uneducated folks still claim it was nothing to worry about and overblown, but it still cost between $300-600 billion dollars depending on whose estimates you believe (3.596 billion from the US military alone). Since a large portion of the cost was in the private sector, there’s no true tally.

The next big day to keep in mind is January 19 2038 3:14:07 GMT. That’s when the 32 bit computing will officially freak out since most Unix-like computers store time as a signed 32 bit integer counting the seconds since Jan 1, 1970 (Unix Epoch). After that we go back to 1901. There will likely be some 32 bit computing left in 2038 considering how long embedded systems can be ignored and silently slaving away in the background. For reference the B-52 Stratofortress entered operation in 1955 (they were built until 1962). They are expected to be taken out of service in 2040. This is the exception for US military aircraft, but don’t think this is the only old hardware out there. The Hubble Space Telescope has a 32 bit 486 processor and launched in 1990 and assuming the backup computer is functional it will be serviced soon to extend it’s life by another few years making it’s service life 20+ years. It’s unlikely Hubble will make it to 2038 but Hubble shows how long expensive systems can survive in active use. This date is only 30 years away. This will cost the world some serious cash.

On the upside according to Wikipedia 64 bit systems will be good until Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596. Odds are that won’t be a concern for most people alive today.

Reassuring? Yes. But your Zune is still fried for a few more hours.

Update [1/5/2009]: Here’s some pretty detailed confirmation that it was indeed an infinite loop error. I know my crashes ;-) .

Object-Oriented Masturbation

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Doing some research for an upcoming installment of an infamous series of blog posts (to be released at an undetermined date) I’ve come to notice this annoyance. In general I like object-oriented programming. I think it allows you to take a complicated problem and produce simple, more reusable and easier to maintain code. Assuming the programmer is sane individual, and that sometimes is a leap of faith.

I’m not sure if there are programmers who feel the need to complicate things just for the sake of showing off (oh, look at me!), or if they legitimately don’t know any other way. I suspect a little of both. Perhaps the programmer thought it was possible the code would grow in complexity in the future, and just wanted to prepare in advance. I don’t know. But it annoys me.

I consider this abuse of Object-oriented programming to be Object-oriented masturbation since the only one who gets any enjoyment out of it is the developer who does it. Here’s a slightly exaggerated (though not far off) example of Object-oriented masturbation typical of what I’ve seen many times before:

Objective

Sum two numbers and print the result in the format “The answer is: X” where X is the sum of the two numbers.

Correct (sane) Answer

// This is the simple, obvious answer
function sum(x,y){
    document.write(‘The answer is: ‘ + (x+y));
}
 
// To run:
sum(1,1);

Arguably, you could do the math and store in a variable if you are squeamish to doing math in any line containing an output method. Regardless, this is dead obvious and simple. And yes, this technically still does use OOP since it uses document.write().

Insane (masturbatory) Answer

function MathLib(){
    this.answer = null;
}
 
MathLib.prototype.sum = function (x,y){
    this.answer = x + y;
}
 
MathLib.prototype.getAnswer = function(){
    return this.answer;
}
 
function Printer(){
    this.preText = ”;
}
 
Printer.prototype.setPreText = function(str){
    this.preText = str;
}
 
Printer.prototype.out = function (str){
    document.write(this.preText + str);
}
 
// To run
var math = new MathLib();
var print = new Printer();
math.sum(1,1);
print.setPreText(‘The answer is: ‘);
print.out(math.answer);

I did the exact same thing in 1 logical line of code (3 if you include the function itself) up above. What was gained from the object-oriented design? I argue nothing. Rewriting the first example would take a minute should something need changing. If there were a need to localize that string, I could pull it out and either make that a 3rd parameter, or some global string the function can use. There’s no benefit here. This is over engineering. There’s nothing truly reusable here. The closest is the Printer.out() method, and in reality it’s a wrapper for document.write().

The bonus joke is that the object-oriented implementation is significantly slower.

Run 1: 0.0266, 0.0451
Run 2: 0.0314, 0.0464
Run 3: 0.0329, 0.0462
Run 4: 0.0268, 0.0468
Run 5: 0.0274, 0.0475
Avg: 0.02902, 0.0464

The first example is also 62.5% faster in Firefox 3.0.4 since the all that overhead is gone. If you have FireBug installed you can check that out here.

object-oriented masturbation
ob-jikt | o·ri·ent-ed | mas⋅tur⋅ba⋅tion

  1. the stimulation or manipulation of one’s own ego by way of using object-oriented code in places where it has no advantage instead resulting in unnecessary complication and bloat.

If your guilty of doing this, please cut it out. It’s annoying. Thank you.

No I will not single out links to the pages that inspired this, but rest assured it litters the web.

PHP Namespacing

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The PHP folks have finally announced that PHP will get namespacing in the form of ‘\‘. The universal escape character. They really should have went with the standard ‘::‘ or ‘:::‘. Using ‘\‘ is going to work well.

I was thinking something like this would be more appropriate (background on compatibility here):

......................................__................................................
.............................,-~*`¯lllllll`*~,..........................................
.......................,-~*`lllllllllllllllllllllllllll¯`*-,....................................
..................,-~*llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll*-,..................................
...............,-*llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.\.......................... .......
.............;*`lllllllllllllllllllllllllll,-~*~-,llllllllllllllllllll\................................
..............\lllllllllllllllllllllllllll/.........\;;;;llllllllllll,-`~-,......................... ..
...............\lllllllllllllllllllll,-*...........`~-~-,...(.(¯`*,`,..........................
................\llllllllllll,-~*.....................)_-\..*`*;..)..........................
.................\,-*`¯,*`)............,-~*`~................/.....................
..................|/.../.../~,......-~*,-~*`;................/.\..................
................./.../.../.../..,-,..*~,.`*~*................*...\.................
................|.../.../.../.*`...\...........................)....)¯`~,..................
................|./.../..../.......)......,.)`*~-,............/....|..)...`~-,.............
..............././.../...,*`-,.....`-,...*`....,---......\..../...../..|.........¯```*~-,,,,
...............(..........)`*~-,....`*`.,-~*.,-*......|.../..../.../............\........
................*-,.......`*-,...`~,..``.,,,-*..........|.,*...,*...|..............\........
...................*,.........`-,...)-,..............,-*`...,-*....(`-,............\.......
......................f`-,.........`-,/...*-,___,,-~*....,-*......|...`-,..........\........

Benchmarking And Testing Browsers

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When people talk about open source they often talk about the products, not the process. That’s not really a bad thing (it is after all about the product), but it overlooks some really interesting things sometimes. For example open source tools used in open development.

A few months ago Jesse Ruderman introduced jsfunfuzz, which is a tool for fuzz testing the js engine in Firefox. It turned up 280 bugs (many already fixed). Because the tool itself is not horded behind a firewall it’s also helped identify several Safari and Opera bugs. It’s a pretty cool way to find some bugs.

The WebKit team has now released SunSpider a javascript benchmarking tool. Something tells me this will lead to some performance improvements in everyone’s engine. How much will be done for Firefox 3.0 is a little questionable considering beta 2 is nearing release, though you never know. There’s been some nice work on removing allocations recently. So just because it’s beta, you can’t always assume fixes will be minor in scope.

Another test that many are familiar with is Acid 2 which essentially is checking CSS support among browsers. Ironically this one too was released when Gecko is somewhat late in the development cycle.

Efforts like this really help web development by allowing browser developers to have a baseline to compare their strengths and weaknesses. Having a little healthy competition as motivation can be pretty helpful too ;-) .

Coda Coolness

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So I downloaded and tested out Coda a little bit today. My initial impression is that I’m very impressed. It could be the new standard. A few like Alex King point out that it uses Safari as the default engine. I don’t think that’s so bad. Nothing stops you from using 2 windows one being Firefox (obviously running Firebug). I think the editor itself is rather well polished and very refined. The use of Bonjour to allow for collaboration makes it perfect for multi-developer environments. And yes, you can have more than two developers collaborating in 1 document.

My typical workflow is very abrupt. I tend to have Firefox, IE, and an IDE open at all times when coding pages. Not to mention a KVM switch to go between platforms. This still consolidates several things, and with a much nicer UI.

I’ll need to try it (for actual development purposes) for a few days before I could tell if it really works as well I hope. Panic is one of my favorite Mac developers. Really well polished products are their specialty.

Time Sucks

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One of the hardest things to program is the Date and Time. This is especially true when your doing it on the web. Why is that? Using a unix timestamp is immensely helpful and resolves many of the complexities, but it does have some issues (besides the Y2K38 bug). Well lets take a look at some of the “typical” things you need to be aware of:

  • Your server is in one timezone, your users are in 23 others.
    Users don’t care what the time is at the site. They want things in their time.
  • Does your server even know your users timezone?
    You could do this with JavaScript, and send it to the server, but that’s a mess. Or send a timestamp to the client, and let JavaScript print it out. But that’s still messy.
  • Timezones aren’t obvious (think Indiana).
    Did you know some even use :30 such as UTC-3:30 for Newfoundland Standard Time.
  • Looking back in time (or forwards) is difficult (how many hours between X and Y accounting for leap years, and DST changes)?
    This is a mess, enough said. And just in case you have a formula, did you account for the conversion between Julian and Gregorian calendars? Don’t forget not everyone switched in 15 October 1582 / 4 October 1582. Going forward remember we’ll eventually have another leap day, since the Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect.
  • Your server observes DST. Does your user? When?
    Get the picture? Remember most states do, except for Hawaii (yea, that’s another Timezone) but Arizona doesn’t either, except for Navajo Nation. Again Indiana!
  • The Politics of Time…
    If you call UTC+2 Israel Standard Time, you upset visitors from Muslim nations like Egypt. Call it Central Africa Time, or Egypt Standard Time and your considered anti-semitic. Same goes for UTC+8, is it Chinese Standard Time or Hong Kong Time? Most avoid this by just listing UTC±N. Unfortunately this confuses people, especially Americans who only refer to timezones as “Eastern” (UTC-5), “Central” (UTC-6), “Mountain” (UTC-7) “Pacific” (UTC-8). Note these American names aren’t so common in all of North/South America.
  • Daylight Savings Time for 2007+
    Then you have a bunch of clowns who voted for the Energy Policy Act of 2005, creating the Y2K7 bug. The idea was an extra hour of daylight in the evening would reduce electrical use. What they didn’t realize is that it cuts daylight from the morning. My guess would be a follow up bill may fine the sun for failing to provide adequate light, and eventually include economic sanctions. :-P

I thought a while back this could suck. Think about all the time/money that goes into updating and testing systems for these few extra weeks of DST. What a drag.

Swatch Internet Time was an obvious bust, but perhaps we could all just use UTC?