[SLUG] Erlang and Concurrency talk slides
Hi all, I've finally posted the slides and links for my talk on Erlang last Friday online. You can grab the info from here: http://www.algorithm.com.au/mt/talks/erlang_and_concurrency.html For those who missed the talk, it's about a programming language named Erlang and also about concurrency. Here's a short abstract: For those who haven't heard of it, Erlang is a programming language based on the functional programming paradigm that's targeted at solving one major problem: concurrency. It has a number of very cool features that makes it extremely compelling for writing large servers that are required to be high-performing, have ridiculous availability (99.999% uptime or better), can scale well to deal with huge load, and can be distributed (even geographically). In addition, since it has an industrial focus, it has quite a reasonable standard library that a lot of other more academic languages lack (such as Ocaml and Haskell), including things such as a full SSH implementation. I'll also be covering issues about concurrency and why it's going to be a massive problem for programmers in the next ten to twenty years, and briefly cover some issues about the Jabber and XMPP instant messaging protocols and how you can use Jabber chat clients and servers as an application platform. Cheers, and please feel free to email back the coders list or email me privately if you have any questions at all! (I'm not on the main SLUG mailing list at the moment.) -- Andre Pang Software Engineer --- m. +61 411 882299 [Sydney, Australia] [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Rising Sun Research p. +61 2 9338 6478 - f. +61 2 9338 6401 www.risingsunresearch.com -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Writing Mozilla extensions to handle a MIME type
Hi guys, If any of you have experience writing Mozilla extensions (XUL/JavaScript/XBL/XPCOM and all that), I'd be grateful for a bit of help -- I'm wondering if it's possible write an extension which can be registered as the main way to interpret a particular MIME type downloaded from a web server. An example scenario: say I have a new MIME type, text/x-rot13-html, (with an extension of .htmlr13 or something). What I'd like is to be able to write a Mozilla extension whose, say, JavaScript gets triggered when the browser detects that particular MIME type, and perhaps the JavaScript can un-rot13 the HTML and display it to the screen. It's very much similar to a classic Netscape plugin in that the extension is designed to work on particular MIME types, except that I really don't want to dive into writing native-code in C or C++, since it's orders of magnitude harder than it needs to be. Does anyone know if this is possible to do with a Mozilla extension? All the research I've done so far looks like I'll have to go the native-code route with a proper plugin, rather than a lightweight extension. -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Win4Lin or Wine?
On 15/07/2004, at 5:03 PM, Howard Lowndes wrote: I'm desparately trying not to run Windows, just Windows apps, specifically MYOB, and even single user at that. I don't want to take a chance on the user seeing anything else that Windows has other than the specific app. If your application works in Windows 98, I highly recommend Win4Lin: I've used it to run plenty of Windows applications (such as MS Office two/three years ago, when wine and StarOffice were both pretty crap). It does require you to use a custom kernel, but they provide patches if you're one of the many people who compile their own kernel. I can't speak for wine. -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Win4Lin or Wine?
On 15/07/2004, at 10:53 PM, James Gregory wrote: I just had another thought -- there's a version of MYOB for OSX. If it's just Windows you're trying to avoid, you could install OSX inside pearpc to do what you want. There might even be someone on this list who could help you setup OSX to just start MYOB (There's gotta be a way to do that, right?) If your idea of running MYOB involves an hour waiting for the window to open, spending money on Mac OS X (because, you know, it's not free as in beer), waiting for the Mac OS X Finder booting up successfully around 50% of the time (which only takes a whole 10 minutes or so), and buying a copy of MYOB for Mac OS X, then sure, that might be a solution. For everyone else who just want to run MYOB, then Win4Lin, wine, or VMWware is a slightly less insane option. -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk
On 04/07/2004, at 2:15 PM, Rick Welykochy wrote: I've put up slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk at: http://www.algorithm.com.au/mt/archives/talks/ beyond_c_c_perl_and_python.html I'm happy to discuss any aspects of it on-list or off-list. I was actually intending to write up some additional references and discussion on that page, especially for topics that I wanted to cover but didn't have time for (e.g. garbage collection and meta-programming), but I figured that if people are actually interested in all that, they can ask me and I'll add to the page later :). Simply fascinating. As a programmer who's been through C then C++ (still a fave!) then on through scriptors like perl, I found the paper very enlightening. I've dabbled in Haskell and found out my onw programming limitations ... need more work in the ML/functional area. I could probably do with a good dose of Lisp as well. Thanks for the feedback Rick. Unfortunately the presentation didn't cover anywhere near as much as I really wanted to cover: I basically spent the entirety of the talk going on about type systems, which wasn't my original intent, but I think it worked out OK. I guess I can cover everything else in a future talk, if people are so inclined ... Any references you have on these topics most appreciated. References, hmmm ... a big, big problem with Haskell is that most of the references you can find are papers; not books or easy-to-learn tutorials. That wouldn't be too bad, but the papers are usually targeted at people who already know the language: a lot of Haskell development right now is involved with advancing the language, and is no use to the beginner and is completely overwhelming. I've found that any introductory books on Haskell are usually targeted at somebody who's completely new to programming, or assumes that you have a functional programming mindset already. (Keep in mind that a lot of the Haskell language designers and implemenators are _really_ smart, and they tend to live in ivory towers rather than try to figure out what the masses are up to :). I don't think the language is actually that hard to learn, but I haven't yet found a book or tutorial that presents the ideas in a digestible way to someone who's new to the language, but is already an experienced programmer using imperative or object-oriented languages. That said, probably the best bet for learning Haskell is Hal Daume's Yet Another Haskell Tutorial: http://www.isi.edu/~hdaume/htut/ I find that the start's pretty slow, and presents things in an order I wouldn't choose if I were to help someone understand the language, but lots of other people have liked it, so hopefully you might too. Another tutorial you may find useful is Tom Moertel's Haskell for Perl Hackers talk: http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/Talk+-+Haskell+for+Perl+Hackers Which covers the basics quite well, but unfortunately doesn't have the time to dive into why the basics are the way they are, and IMHO doesn't really whet the appetite for functional programming. e.g. he explains what higher-order functions are and gives an introduction to Haskell's very powerful type classes, but doesn't explain how make programmer better by showing real, concrete advantages over similar ideas in OO languages. Still, it's a good talk, and most likely he couldn't get deeper into those topics because of time constraints. One tutorial I can highly recommend is Merjis's one for learning O'Caml: http://www.merjis.com/developers/ocaml_tutorial/ch1/ which guides you through the language from the viewpoint of someone reasonably familiar with C++, and even goes into fun stuff like walking through an O'Caml compiler's generated assembly code to show you what's happening underneath the hood, and how it can compete so well with imperative languages like C. I don't know Lisp very well apart from it has macros, and macros are schweeet, so I can't really recommend anything to do with that. Lisp/Scheme are on my list of things to learn more thoroughly by the end of the year :). P.S. I don't mean to sound like an armchair critic and throw stones at the functional language community for the lack of tutorials, but it _is_ hard to get into it if you're already an experienced programmer and don't have three months to learn slowly by osmosis. For me, the reward was more than worth it: hopefully I'll sit down some time and write a tutorial of my own which everybody else can criticise ;). -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk
On 04/07/2004, at 6:40 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 18:24:57 +1000 André Pang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: which guides you through the language from the viewpoint of someone reasonably familiar with C++, and even goes into fun stuff like walking through an O'Caml compiler's generated assembly code to show you what's Does O'Caml compile to a native binary or are you talking about the assembly language for some sort of O'caml VM? O'Caml actually does both. You can compile to a portable bytecode format if you want to (like Java/Perl/Python) with ocamlc, or you can compile to native code with ocamlopt (but only on platforms where ocamlopt is available: I think x86, PPC, and Alpha). -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk
On 04/07/2004, at 7:49 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 19:45:31 +1000 André Pang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: O'Caml actually does both. You can compile to a portable bytecode format if you want to (like Java/Perl/Python) with ocamlc, or you can compile to native code with ocamlopt (but only on platforms where ocamlopt is available: I think x86, PPC, and Alpha). So which one is it that was winning the (so called) language speed shootouts? According to http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/craps.php, O'Caml optimised to native code placed 4th (score of 40.9063, implementation name is ocaml), and O'Caml compiled to bytecode placed 16th (score of 16.2858, implementation name is ocamlb). Note that that's a pure speed comparison: no memory usage or lines of code factored in. One interesting thing I didn't expect is that Clean, a very close relative of Haskell which implements the linear types thing I touched on briefly in my talk, is quite fast (placed 5th, just after O'Caml): I guess it goes to show that even a purely functional language (which O'Caml isn't) can be pretty damn quick. I'm fairly convinced that linear types alone account for a huge part of that speed increase vs Haskell's performance given in the ghc benchmarks; it really makes me wish linear types were implemented in a Haskell compiler. There's also been quite a few posts to the Clean mailing lists in the past week which point to some patches to Clean that gives greatly improved performance in some tests; e.g. they claim a 8x speed-up on the Reverse File test after enabling that buffering thing on stdio :-). For what it's worth, I think that language shootouts are a load of crap: see http://xrl.us/cada on a post I made about why. -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk
Hi all, I've put up slides for my Beyond C, C++, Perl and Python talk at: http://www.algorithm.com.au/mt/archives/talks/ beyond_c_c_perl_and_python.html I'm happy to discuss any aspects of it on-list or off-list. I was actually intending to write up some additional references and discussion on that page, especially for topics that I wanted to cover but didn't have time for (e.g. garbage collection and meta-programming), but I figured that if people are actually interested in all that, they can ask me and I'll add to the page later :). Enjoy! -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
