Duncan's Blog

Phone vs. AIM

I didn't have much to do last Thursday night, so I decided to stay in the Pit at school and hang out with the Crew kids.

On my way home, I told Pete how living without a net connection makes me feel really isolated sometimes, especially on the weekends.

Even though I have a phone, it seems like being on AIM is really an important presence for everyone. I realized that a lot of social engagements are now organized over AIM; the phone call is used simply as a way of confirming the time and location. People just don't call each other up to say hi anymore.

The winter is here, or it's on its way coming already. The electrician is coming on Monday. I want cable.

Thinking about Performance

Last night, while reading Brad Abrams's blog, I came across this entry on the performance of managed code. I thought Rico Mariani's talk on perf-related things to remember when writing code was pretty good.

I think he is very right that, with Managed code, when so many things is so easy now, people don't associate performance cost with this newfound ease of use.

Immediately after watching the feed, I went to the monodoc generator tool and found a nested foreach loop that I wrote. I remember vague feeling a bit queazy when I wrote that. After watching Rico's talk, yeah, alloc'ing so many IEnumerators does seem a bit wasteful.

I wrote a patch and replaced it with two for loops. That made me feel a little better.

But if I were really doing my homework, I really should do some measurements. I'll see if I have time for that.

Show me the money!

I received my copy of Paul Krugman's book, The Great Unraveling, earlier the week. It's been my bedtime reading for the past few nights.

It's pretty scary reading.

Sometimes, his writing has this I told you so, or see, I was right, and he was wrong tone that feels a bit egotistical; however, I do understand why he needs to do that - sometimes it's necessary for a bit of this to convince the public that things are really getting pretty bad.

The part in the introduction about Henry Kissinger's paper on Revolutionary Power is particularly eerie.

I have always had problems with big numbers. I attribute this to growing up bilingual in Chinese and English. In Chinese (and other Asian languages), we have a word for ten thousand, wan. So instead of a hundred thousand, we say ten wans. From that point onwards, everything is out of sync.

Luckily, I just found this page: A Little Perspective on $87 billion. Having read that, I'm going back to reading Krugman with my new sense of scale.

Update: Found a nice link: a list of all of Paul Krugman's Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times.

Red Sox

The Red Sox won their game against the A's last night, at around 11pm. I was eating dinner at the time, and suddenly, I started hearing people screaming and yelling from the park in front of my house. I called some of my friends, trying to find out what's going on. Deanna told me she wasn't hearing anything. I then called Anthony, my de facto baseball expert. Just as I started talking to him, a parade of people started marching up Park Drive, screaming and yelling and cheering.

It was quite a scene. This went on for a while until around 12:30.

Different types on Blogs

I was reading How to be Alone on the T today, I realized that there exists two types of blogs:

1. A blog of essays. Examples: Chris Brumme, Adam Bosworth. The entries tend to be long and information-packed. All the entries fall under some general central theme. People generally don't make fun of these blogs.
2. A blog of short postings. Example: most blogs found on LiveJournal. Entries tend to be short and personal, like a public diary. When people make fun of blogs, they make fun of this type of blogs.

I used to keep a blog when I was in high school, a diary kind of blog. I liked it because it was easy to write and easy to post. I liked it because my parents can read it and keep up with what I was up to, so I don't need to explicitly write them e-mails about my life. Writing was easy because there is no explicit audience, I just posted my thoughts in mostly grammatical entries. The entries were mostly for me, they just happen to also be public.

It also got pretty boring quite soon. Anthony once said to me, right around the time when I stopped writing on my blog, "Duncan, you even blogged about your jeans."

As I page through the entries listed on Monologue, I see syntactically highlighted code examples, snippets of XML documents. Most Mono bloggers are striving to be the first type of bloggers. I, on the other hand, having been doing much. I don't have code snippets to show. I built packages for Cairo this weekend, and I'm slowly working my way to update our C# bindings.

This blogging thing is addictive though. I feel like I should be posting more new entries when I sit in front of my laptop. Short, often meaningless, spur of the moment entries.

I hope people won't make fun of me.

Evolution and Pachyderm

I left my power adaptor and cord at the CRL this past weekend; I don't have classes today, so figured I'll head to Cambridge and fetch it.

Along the way, I took my Edward Tufte poster and Constancia thank-you note certificate thingy from GULEV and got them framed. While searching for the poster, I found an old Netscape poster I stole when I visited their campus in the spring of 2000 at home. I found some gummy stuff and it's up on one of the walls now.

But this article is about Pachyderm, a mail system designed at DEC, not about my posters.

On my way out out the CRL office, after getting my power dignus, I casually told Jim Gettys that he had once told me that Evolution got it wrong, but never explained to me what was wrong with it.

Jim suddenly got really excited and told me to follow him to his office. He said he'd love to give me a demo of how Pachyderm worked.

Here are the main points I got out of his demo:

• Pachyderm has two front-ends, a plain HTML one (lame, but functional); and a slightly nicer Java client (powerful, but really quite ugly). With this you can access your mail from any computer connected to the Net with a web browser. Pachyderm also keeps track of what you're doing to it, so if you start composing a message at work, leave it undone and go home, you can re-login and see you half-composed message at home. That's pretty nifty.

  Jim said, "Universality as just as important as a pretty UI." I think I have to agree with him on that one.

• Queries in Pachyderm default to searching on all available mail backends. In Evolution, we can only search on one mail store at a time. We can set up VFolders on multiple mail stores, but we can't just do searches on them. This should be easy to fix.
• You can limit the number of search results. This is really useful in the HTML frontend, esp. on a slow connection. I tried to do a search in Squirrel Mail when I was in Spain, it wasn't usable at all.
• The query language of Pachyderm is typable. Even though it was very evident (for the both of us) that Evolution offers a much nicer dialog for doing searches (well, vfolders) than Pachyderm, it is also nice to be able to quickly type queries, instead of selecting items from a drop-down list. One thing I really like about Evolution is the time-based search options (search critiria based on a specific time or time relative from now), searching based on time is pretty unnatural in Pachyderm.
• Labels. In Evolution, we have the read/unread flag, the important flag, and we can set 5 colors for labelling. In Pachyderm you can create text labels and messages can have unlimited number of labels. Jim says he uses this feature for forming TODO lists, and I think I would too. I've used a combination of the read/unread flag and the important flag to tag messages in the past, but it's not granular enough. I always end up forgetting to reply to something. This feature, it allows messages to be filtered based on some additional properties that are not inherit to the message, and that's completely missing from Evolution.

Jim said there were also little niceties here and there, but I think the five points above capture what makes Pachyderm different from Evolution.

Update: I just talked to Ettore about what I learned this afternoon. He said he is interested in those features too.

Jim told me Andrew Birrell is one of the guys who did Pachyderm. He said Birrell also did the world's first distributed mail system (Grapevine). Like a lot of other cool researchers, Andrew Birrell is now working a MSR.

From Andrew's site, you can find Pachylet, which seems be an open-source version of Pachyderm. I don't have a server, so I can't test it out. Besides, the link to the source code seems to be down.

Update 2: As Jim and Iain (from the comments) pointed out: Pachylet is not open source.

The rest of the day

Spent the rest of the day at the CRL, hanging out with everyone at the conference / meet-up. Met Moray Allan from the UK, who is a friend of Alp; and also a bunch of other folks. Got to see George France again. I first visited the CRL 3 years ago, with Anthony. It's nice to see him again and catch up with what he's been up to.

Went to Harvard Square afterward looking to buy a pair of shoes for the winter. Didn't find anything that fits. Got a copy of How to be Alone at Wordsworth.

Came home and cooked spaghetti and meatballs. Saw Underworld on my own. It was a fun movie to watch.

handhelds.org event

I woke up a tad bit late, but here I am, at the Cambridge Research Lab. Keith Packard and Carl Worth are talking about Cairo.

After Russell did his Python/Glade talk, I got to squeeze in a bit of my C#/Glade talk at the end. I did a 5 - 10 mins version of the talk I did in Mexico, and it went well. It was fun to show off the nice little features we added to Glade# (Attribute-based autoconnecting and packing glade files into assemblies).

Somebody forgot to turn on the heat

I had an 8am Structures of Spanish class this morning. It was really cold this morning, but eventually, I made it to class.

Today is definitely the first day of noticable temperature drop. It hovered around 50F or so the whole day. I wore my leather jacket today, it was definitely a good idea.

I'm about to go get some dinner, then head off to see the Johnny Depp movie with Miguel & co.

Mom wrote me an e-mail right after I blogged about Madrid asking me why I don't like living in Boston. Here's a list of things I like / dislike about Boston:

Things I like about Boston:

• I've been here for 6 years, I know the place pretty well.
• I really love my apartment in Fenway.
• My friends are pretty much all here.
• I really like going to the suburbs (Concord, MA) once in a while. That's where I went to high school. It brings back memories, and the scenary is superb.
• I like the spring season here. Spring in Hong Kong always sucked. Spring here is nice, because the winter was really so cold, during springtime, you really see a marked difference in the weather. The trees and birds and whatnot are all coming out again, out from the winter cold. That's nice.
• School's here and there are interesting things to do, people to meet. The office is here too. More interesting things to do.

What I don't like about Boston:

• I hate that the stores all close so early. The nightlife here is pretty much non-existant. I guess by next year, when I'm 21, I'll finally be able to go to bars (and not be such a sore-thumb all the time), but with the general American drinking habit... that's a whole different entry.
• Food is expensive here. Expensive and bland, most of the time. The good places are really expensive. There is simply not enough choices.
• The T works, but it really sucks. I miss a modern subway system, like the MTR, or Metro de Madrid.
• So you end up taking cabs. Very Expensive, much cheaper in Madrid, and even cheaper in Hong Kong.

Squeak in Spain

I fell in love with Smalltalk after taking Prof. Lorenz's Object Oriented Design class (it used be called COM 1204).

When I was in Spain, I found out the fine folks in Extremadura is working on deploying Squeak on all their Linux systems. They have been translating both the Squeak image and all the associated documentation to Spanish and are now working on creating localized content and training their teachers to use Squeak in their cirriculums. They have been using a SWiki (a Wiki powered by Squeak) to keep track of their progress.

This is massive and it is very cool. In your face, Teach Scheme! ;-)

Moving to Spain

The packages are being assembled now. There's a chance that the 0.28 release will be done before midnight. Yay.

While I wait for the little laptop to go thru the files, I just want to say that after graduation, I'm pretty sure I wanna leave Boston. When I was in Madrid, Spain last week, I downloaded an interview of Paul Krugman by Chris Lydon. Watching that stuff really makes you think hard about the future of the US.

Oh, and Madrid at this time of the year is just oh so perfect.

Mexico

I was in Mexico two weeks ago. Left Boston on Tuesday afternoon and got to D.F. that night, after spending the night at Miguel's, all of us took a bus from the central bus station and headed to Veracruz for the GUL3V Congreso.

On my way back to Boston, via Atlanta, I wrote up some of my thoughts on that trip. I didn't get to write down everything because I ran out of battery (the stupid lady at the security checkpoint woke up the laptop, and then the laptop was sitting in my backpack for the whole flight, draining the battery).

I want to write another bit on my last week in Spain too, hopefully I'll get to write that down tonight, before I start forgetting the experience.

9/20. On Delta flight back home. From ATL to BOS

I like writing notes on the plane. It's a nice place for writing.

Going to Mexico has been something I wanted to do for a long time. Having spent some much time with Miguel in the last 2 years, I have wanted to see how he is in his native country. Miguel at home. He has told me so many things about Mexico, about its people, its culture, its food and its history. This time, having spent 5 days in Mexico. I think I got a quick taste of what he's talking about.

It's a country of mixes. A country originally of Aztecs and Mayans, then a period of Spanish colonization; recently, an influx of immigrants from Lebanon and the Middle East. Unlike Hong Kong and the US, the people of Mexico are truly diverse. Mexico has none of the homogenity of Asia and of Hong Kong, nor the segregation of different races and ethnicities in the US; the people of Mexico are all part of a gradient between the old (Aztec and Mayan), and the new (Spanish, Lebanese, etc).

What surprised me the most is how recognizable it all is. Although I do not speak or read Spanish well, so much of the country that I saw, Mexico City D.F, and Veracruz, remind me so much of home, of Hong Kong and of China. D.F. is yet another modern metropolis, however different from Hong Kong. Despite all the differences, cultural and historical,
the smog, the density of the city, the traffic, the dusty and smoky particles in the air, brings me immediately back to Hong Kong.

My talk didn't go too bad at all. All that I wanted to say and show was said and shown, and along the way, I've learned a little more about doing presentations and talks. It is what had happened after my talk that surprised me the most. The people of Mexico, in fact rather similar to the Chinese people, too, have a tendency for 'idol worshipping'. The subsequent demands for autographs and photos was a shocking and weird first time experience for me. That it happened again on the Friday, the last day of the conference, in a bigger and
more intense manner was even more surprising. On a certain level, it was very gratifying and fun and exciting and ego-pleasing; I think my lack of understanding of Spanish also helped me quickly realize, just like the fads in Hong Kong, that this is simply a fad. As Bdale told me over lunch, "no, this is just part of the job, you're not really a rock star, they don't really love you". In the end, it is just a dream.

While people came and asked me to take photos with me, I kept on asking in Spanish, puedes enviarme los fotos, non?, and they all replied, uniformily , the same way. Yeah, yeah, what's your e-mail address, I'll send it you. So far, I have received only 2 photos.

When I was in Veracruz, on the first night, we had dinner at the town square. Miguel recommanded that I order 'Pescado Veracrusano', fish cooked in a Veracruz style. The fish is cooked in a tomato and onion sauce, and was dished in its entirety, bones at all. That reminded me of how Chinese people steamed our fish and ate it with soy sauce and spring onions.

Other notes

* Mexican crafts and the Saturday artisan's market -> Globalization and Capitalism. A place to see the class differences in Mexico.

I wasn't even sure whether or not the crafts are truly authentic or not. So many of the things on display vaguely remind me of the similar crafts I saw when I was in South Africa last summer.

* How the Latin culture differs from Asian culture. The frequent hugs and the kisses, etc.

Doing a release

So, I don't have classes on Mondays and Wednesday this semester. That's pretty sweet, but that also means my schedule on Friday is brutal.

So, on my off day from school, what am I doing?

Sitting at Ximian Central, in front of my 2 desktops and my laptop, doing a release.

I thought I'd be done by now.

I've been here since noon and it's approaching 9pm. We're still not done.

Update: Nearly 11pm now, am uploading packages to Red Carpet.

Update 2: It's past midnight now, and Miguel posted the Release notes just before midnight. There's still a little bit left to do. As for the Windows build, sigh, I don't think I'll get to it tonight.

Blogging again

I'm blogging again.

I'm a student at Northeastern University and also a developer on the Mono team. At NEU, I study Linguistics and also Computer Science.