Duncan's Blog

Mission Accomplished

Wed, 05 May 2004 05:32:19

As I was leaving the office at 2am, I sent Miguel and Erik an SMS:

I'm no George W. Bush, but MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Today (actually yesterday), we shipped the first step to Mono 1.0.

Workaholic

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 03:03:06

It's past 2:30 in the morning. I'm still at the office. I'm getting ready to leave though. It's been a long day.

We will be shipping beta 1 of our product on Tuesday. I just finished putting it together tonight. Tomorrow, we will be testing the packages I put together and make sure there are no major flaws in them. After that, I'll be making the set of final packages for this beta release. If all goes on schedule, we will meet the beta 1 milestone.

There will be beta 2 next. After that will be the grand finale -- Version One Point Oh.

I met David A. Smith and David Reed at XDevConf this afternoon. I got to see a live demostration of Croquet. It was cool. See Federico's notes for more.

School: Over, Work: Starting

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:13:43

So I took my last final this morning. I'm done with this semester now. This marks the end of my 3rd year in college. I still have 1.5 to 2 more years to go (Northeastern is a 5 year school, and I'm working on 2 degrees)

That means I'll be working full-time starting Monday.

There is still a lot of paperwork to shuffle around until I can get my working permit ready, though. Until then, I'll still be working. There is lots to do to get us ready for the 1.0 release.

I started writing on LiveJournal. Just to record bits and pieces of my daily life. I'll write my personal stuff over there and keep this blog for technical, work-related content.

I might write a bit on the work I've been doing with the Graphics class in GDI+ this weekend, so stay tuned.

Until then, same bat time, same bat channel...

updatedb is the signal that i should go to bed

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 03:57:50

I haven't really been active on my blog. I figured I'll write something tonight.

First of all, a big thank you to all those who wrote me about the mid-term exam for my Algorithms class. I took it Friday afternoon and made it out alive.

Before going to bed Thursday night, I got a few e-mails from some #mono regulars on my mid-term. I thought to myself, "WTF do they care about my mid-term? How did they find out about this?" I didn't think about it much and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning and found more messages about my exam in my Personal vfolder. Briefly, I panicked, totally freaked out. Who told them? Before heading to school for the final, I checked the Mono website to fix some broken links on the download page. That's when I really read the Release Notes and saw Miguel's little note.

Thanks again.

Movies:

Ever since I got my Greencine subscription, I've been running my own French/Japanese film series with some friends at school. Here are some of the highlights:

All About Lily Chou-Chou: Saw it in the theatre in Hong Kong maybe 2 summers ago. Watched it again recently. Still very good. Sad, sad movie.

Late August, Early September: Short little movie for the afternoon. I'm a big fan of Virginie Ledoyen.

An Affair of Love: Watched this Friday night. Very good.

Saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Miguel, Maria-Laura and Martin tonight. It was very good, highly recommanded. I'm going to buy the songtrack tomorrow.

Coding

Staying on topic here, this is what I've been up to with work:

With the help of Dan Mills, we're slowly transitioning the building and packaging stuff to our colleagues in Bangalore. Once this is done, hopefully we'll be running continuous builds and testing cycles for Mono. Having that will be awesome.

After meeting Jordi and Peter in person, we worked out the responsibilities for each of us. I'm hoping to get to finish most of the missing bits in the Graphics class and GraphicsPath.

Right now, I'm looking into fixing the DrawArc implementation. Something is not quite right, we're chopping off the last bits of the curve. I also noticed that DrawPie is totally off, because I forgot the algorithm only handles angles < 180. Those shouldn't be too hard to fix.

Of the remaining drawing operations, DrawCurve and DrawClosedCurve are still unfinished. Unfortunately, Cairo has no native implementation for drawing Cardinal Splines. I think I found an algorithm online that decomposes that into a series of Bezier splines. I'll have to finish coding that up to see if it works.

Even though I've never been very keen on doing math, working with GDI+ and learning about 2D geometry and graphics has been a lot of fun. I tried to talk to the professor in school specializing on Computer Graphics to give me some impromptu math lessons, but he's been very busy lately. Once I have some free time, I should head to the library and pick out a book on this.

Beep beep beep beeeep!

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 00:35:19

So, I came home tonight, hoping to finish writing my weekly summary paper for my Linguistics/Syntax class.

I walked into the building and I heard this constant beeping, and some people chattering from upstairs, on the 3rd floor. I walked into my place and thought oh well, someone is taking care of that.

I walked inside and took off my coats and what not. The beeping wasn't so bad in the hallway, but in my room, it's just loud enough to hear it and it's coming from right above me.

I couldn't stand it anymore and I had to find out what's going on, so I took my keys and went upstairs. I saw a bunch of people loitering around my upstairs neighbor's (the crazy one) apartment.

Now, my upstairs neighbor is kinda wonky -- he's always on the phone, talking very loud, loud enough for everyone to hear. He especially likes to talk by the front door, which is right below my place. I hear him give relationship advices all the time. The girl from upstairs just told me that she heard him cuss about hot chocolate the other day: "If you don't fucking like hot chocolate, that's your problem!" -- something like that.

One time, late spring last year, I was playing some music in my room, the volume set at around 3 or so, while I was cooking in the kitchen. There was some iterminant loud thumping from upstairs, sounded like someone bouncing a basketball. It was still early in the night (around 9) and I was hungry, so I didn't pay any attention.

As I was cooking, I heard this big thump of a door, and then loud clacking from the stairs. Suddenly, there was a big thump on my door, and someone's knocking on my door violently.

I opened my door, and there he is.

"Don't you know that people need to sleep! Don't you need to get up in the morning!"
he shouted at me.

He complained about how loud the music is, and how loud the bass is, even though I could barely hear it from my kitchen (and believe me, my place is tiny, it's a studio). After telling him to go home and closing the door, I was really freaked out and turned the music off immediately.

For the next 4 months, I lived in with a phobia of putting music on at my apartment.

Now, back to the present...

After half an hour, after the firemen came and determined that there was no one inside the unit and that it's not dangerous and left us dumbfounded with the beeping still going on; after the management company finally called us back and told us they don't have the keys to that unit, after all that...

It finally stopped. The battery died I guess, or someone found out a way to get it shut off.

I need to go finish my paper now.

Postscript: I was wrong. It's still going strong. I'm wearing the earplugs United kindly gave me now.

Boundaries

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 02:48:36

I went to the afternoon sessions of the Lightweight Languages 2003 (LL3) conference last Saturday. Of all the talks, I thought the one on FrTime is the most fun, and the Lua one the most interesting. With hindsight, I wish I paid more attention to Roberto's talk on Lua, instead of just checking mail.

The final talk of the conference is Boundaries. Even though it is a very interesting topic, I didn't find the talk to be all that insightful.

It was fun to connect with the people I met at last year's conference. I got to see Anton, Eric Kidd and Guillaume again. I also met Pedro who is working on dot-scheme, and Ryan from the AI Lab. Hopefully we'll soon be able to get a Scheme implementation working on Mono. I have talked with Prof. Clinger about trying his project to work on Mono a few weeks ago too.

However, the reason that made me post a blog entry this late is not because of the conference, but because of the latest awesome blog-article from Chris Brumme.

During the Boundaries talk, I mentioned reading an interview with Anders about versioning, and that good support for versioning is one of the things we can do to help ease the pain of dealing with broken interface contracts, instead of just saying "well, there is no way out of it, life sucks." Unfortunately there wasn't any good response from neither the speaker nor the audience.

In Chris' new article, I think he gives an excellent overview of what the folks at MS are thinking about dealing with keeping compatibility with aging contracts. It is a Must Read.

As for today, it was a strange day at work. I got some packages built, and more will follow tomorrow. I look forward to getting back to writing code after this release.

Incidentally, for fun, I finally wrote my first simple Web Service using asmx (it adds numbers). It was surprisingly easy. I plan on writing a simple HOWTO soon.

Oh, Mr Electrician is coming at noon. Wish me luck.

Rest In Peace, Chema

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 01:30:12

I am sitting in my cube right now.

From the corners of my eye, I remember how I used to see Chema, in the cube in front of mine, bobbing his head with his black headphones on, working late in the office night after night.

Thanks for all the advices and insights you have given me, Chema. I will miss you.

Comments

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 22:29:53

Turns out people have been spamming my comments stuff here. Cleaned it up. I wonder if there's a way to handle this automatically. I like the comments...

Because... RicoM posted to my blog!

Okay, okay... paper time!

Picasso

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 22:20:52

I have been busy lately. Lots of homework, lots of things to do.

I have been implementing System.Drawing. Got a lot of the drawing primitives implemented using Cairo.

I have been trying to learn the math needed to understand elliptical arcs and get DrawPie to work properly. Right now it's really broken.

Currently, it looks like this:

On Windows:

I wrote the Forms app using Visual Studio. It's nice. I'm starting to like it. Intellisense is addictive.

I spent some time with the Dean this afternoon and we got some of the math figured out.

Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow to work on this. This is fun.

Now time to go home and write a paper.

Source code below...

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;

public class Draw  {

        static void Main ()
        {
                Bitmap b = new Bitmap (375, 175);
                Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage (b);

                Pen p = new Pen (Color.Red, 4);

                Rectangle r = new Rectangle (25, 25, 325, 125);

                g.DrawRectangle (
                        new Pen (Color.Yellow, 1), r);

                g.DrawEllipse (
                        new Pen (Color.Green, 3), r);

                g.DrawPie (
                        new Pen (Color.Red, 3), r,
                        30, 90);

                b.Save ("foo.jpg", ImageFormat.Jpeg);
        }
}

Phone vs. AIM

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 18:40:40

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

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 18:33:10

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!

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 22:11:30

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

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 10:38:06

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

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 20:03:14

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

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.
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

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 19:24:32

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.