GF(232-5)
In which our heroes make P2P applications several times more efficient using the mathematics of finite fields and some careful thought on what is efficient on today’s processors
Continue Reading Add comment November 29th, 2006 Paul Crowley
Archive for November, 2006
Keeping Trac of Bugzilla
It’s hard to believe only a week has passed since we’ve integrated the project blog into Trac - with the Timeline view now displaying both source code changes and blog entries, it now became really convenient to just keep Trac open and refresh it every time we want to get an update on the state of the project.
I still found myself switching between Trac and Bugzilla all the time, and that can be very frustrating - so frustrating it can ruin even days like this, when the weather is so fine. Something had to be done - it was time to integrate our project’s bug-list from Bugzilla into Trac.
Continue Reading 4 comments November 27th, 2006 Tom Berger
Keeping Trac of the Project Blog
Trac is the best thing that happened to humanity since the cultivation of chik peas. Finally software project management has a centralized hub almost anyone can use to make the process more effective. It is beautifully designed and implemented. Extending it is easy and there’s a strong community of developers and users. I decided to see how difficult it would be to extend Trac to grab feeds from our project blog and display them in the timeline view.
Continue Reading 9 comments November 20th, 2006 Tom Berger
Web Development with Python
For a new web project we’re working on, we wanted to use a dynamic environment. We’ve resolved to use Python, a language we feel very comfortable with, and I went to test several pythonic web components, in particular the stuff that gets bundled with TurboGears and web.py.
Continue Reading 18 comments November 15th, 2006 Tom Berger
We want to recruit you
LShift need to recruit a number of senior developers. If you want to join one of the most skilled and interesting technical teams around, how about submitting a CV and some code samples? See this page for details.
Add comment November 15th, 2006 andy
An AJAX Erlang Jukebox
Sometime around the beginning of July I rewrote our internal jukebox
in Erlang. It’s taken me four months to get a round tuit, but new
stock has just arrived: here’s the code for our AJAX jukebox
web-application, as a tarball. (There’s
also a darcs repository:
darcs get http://www.lshift.net/~tonyg/erlang-jukebox/.)
Click on the image for a screenshot.
To run it, you will need Erlang, Yaws (the Erlang webserver), a modern browser, mpg123, ogg123 (from vorbis-tools), and some MP3 or OGG files to listen to.
I’ve made a start on a bit of documentation and design rationale. Here are a few highlights for the curious:
You point the jukebox at one or more root URLs, which it then spiders, collecting URLs for MP3 and OGG files, which it puts into a simple flat-file database. Just expose, say, your iTunes folder via Apache, point the Jukebox at it, and you’re away.
It relies on mpg123 and ogg123’s support for playing HTTP-streamed MP3 and OGG files, respectively, rather than retrieving or playing the media itself.
The user interface is completely written in HTML+Javascript, using prototype for its event binding and XMLHttpRequest support.
The server side of the application communicates with the user interface solely via JSON-RPC.
Erlang made a great platform for the server side of the application. Its support for clean, simple concurrency let me design the program in a very natural way.
As part of the development of the program, I built a few stand-alone modules that others might be interested in reusing:
the execdaemon and its associated Erlang controller module is a filthy hack I threw together to get better than the built-in support for POSIX process control and signalling from Erlang.
jsonrpc.js is a tiny, simple layer atop json.js and prototype that supports basic parsing of Simple Method Description (SMD) files, generating Javascript client proxy objects for each JSON-RPC service described by an SMD.
[Update: fixed an issue with json.js, tweaked the use of screen real-estate, and now seems to work with Safari, IE6, and Opera. I’ve changed the tarball link above to point to the new version.]
[Update: fixed a couple of links that had broken over time as the darcs repository evolved.]
17 comments November 6th, 2006 tonyg