I’ve been doing a bit more data visualisation work, with a focus this time on my web browsing. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome (not Opera, as they don’t provide this data), then it turns out that your local history also contains referrer data i.e. you have a history record of not just where you’ve been, but how you got there…

Why is this interesting? Well, because it shows a slightly different view of the web. There’s an awful lot of hyperlinks out there, especially when you get to heavily interconnected places like Wikipedia, but in a way that’s far too much data. Instead, we’ve got some data that shows how you interacted with the web, and if we’ve got a reasonable visualisation tool, then we can learn a few things. Read more…

A fold is a higher-order function familiar to many programmers. It’s a function that takes some structure as input, and some function that converts part of that structure into a value. Evaluating the fold then recursively applies the given function to the structure, resulting in some return value. Variants exist which supply an initial “seed” value, or just use the first element of the structure as seed. For instance, given a list of numbers #(1 2 3 4 5) , and a folding function #+ , #(1 2 3 4 5) inject: 0 into: #+ will calculate the sum of the numbers.

Perhaps less well known is the unfold, at which we are going to look today.

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There are two things that I keep seeing when I come across open source projects, admittedly mostly on GitHub.

1. Code which is intended to be open-source but which doesn’t have any licence on it.
2. Attribution and copyright around contributions is lacking.

These two issues have bothered me with enough frequency lately that maybe it’s worth explaining in long form. One of them might be seen to be amateur copyright lawyering, at least, although I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer on the issue of contributions. The attribution part is important, in either case, and it’s linked to the copyright.

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A few years back, needing decent authentication and key management for Mercurial repositories, we wrote mercurial-server. Recently, we were in the position of wanting to use this with one of our clients, but this time it would need to run under Windows. This was a bit of a problem as it was designed for a Unix-type environment. On the other hand, it’s mostly written in Python, and we could use Cygwin, so how bad could it be?

As it turns out, not too awful. I needed to make a few small modifications, and we’ve now managed to deploy a working mercurial-server under Windows. Read more…

I recently helped a client take ownership of an application stack produced by a third party. There were various components to this, but the most interesting aspect allowed users to interact with each other by manipulating images in a browser. This was achieved using a small and simple NodeJS application to send events between the browsers.

We were aware of a few severe problems shortly before our involvement, and during the handover meeting I asked the developer how he had fixed them. He replied that if two or more users tried to manipulate the same object at the same time, it would cause the browser code to crash as multiple conflicting change events would be sent. He therefore added a new event type that was sent out when an action started, e.g., on mouse down. This indicated that all the other browsers should lock their copies of the object in question until the action was finished.

I gently suggested that this might not work well over a network, to which he responded that in testing the lock events took less than 10ms to arrive, so the odds of two people trying to do the same thing within that period were so small as to not be worth worrying about.

Again, I very gently suggested that the benchmark was unlikely to hold across the Internet. He told me that he had tested it on several networks including over the public Internet with someone in the US and it was still good. I gave up at this point, and just noted to the client that this was something that would need attention fairly promptly.

This assertion that there was a latency of 10ms between the UK and the US is clearly false. Even if you could set-up a perfect vacuum between London and New York, it would still take 19ms for light to travel that distance. However, the numbers are irrelevant – there is latency and it must be considered when trying to build a reliable distributed system regardless of magnitude. This and seven other issues were famously covered in the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”, assembled by Peter Deutsch, James Gosling and others.

Anyone building a distributed application should have these fallacies in mind, and this paper has a good explanation of them with a very readable commentary. NodeJS made this shared browser experience extremely effective and enticingly simple to construct, but even NodeJS apps are not isolated from the effects of the infrastructure they utilise. In fact, until TCP over entangled photon pairs hits the shelves, these fallacies will be relevant regardless of your framework.

We saw in a previous post a kind of transformation of complex values, a Möbius transformation. It turns out that we can decompose any Möbius transformation into a series of four separate transformations – a translation, an inversion, a dilation/rotation, and a final transformation. From a UX perspective, we saw that using input fields and a button to modify the transformation was not slick. Today we’re going to make things more slick.

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When we’re doing C# work, we’re fairly big fans of NAnt, as it’s a very good build system for .Net. However, it’s got a few small flaws, the main one of which is that you often end up repeating yourself a fair few times, and applying any sort of DRY thinking in it is quite hard.

Enter NAntScript. Originally from some folks elsewhere, but languishing and somewhat abandoned and in need of some work. The core idea being that you can write new tasks for NAnt using existing tasks (it is in fact also possible to write new NAnt tasks using C# or various other languages, but that’s a pretty messy way to work) Read more…

One of the best ways to develop intuition in mathematics is to look at pictures. We often use graphs – visual representations of functions – showing the relationship between the domain of a function and the range of a function. With real-valued functions of one variable this is easy: the graph is nice and flat. What about complex-valued functions? What kind of pictures would help?

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In recent times, there’s been a lot of changes to the Gnome environment with the 3.x releases, including the introduction of the Gnome Shell and things like the GObject introspection stuff going on in the background. However, the Shell is a bit on the unstable side (even if you’ve got a good graphics card), and so I’ve been sticking with the “fallback” environment which still uses the standard panel layout.

Well, that’s what it looks like at first glance. Once you start digging around, it turns out that the panel you’re now seeing is superficially similar to the old one, but it’s built in a very different way under the hood, and that makes writing applets for it a somewhat different problem. Primary among the changes for the panel is the removal of Bonobo in favour of D-Bus, so we’re going to have to build the services needed for applets in a new way. Read more…

Ruby excels at “embedded” DSLs – domain specific languages that are simultaneously plain Ruby and yet distinctly their own. RSpec springs to mind as an excellent example. At any rate, I have a DSL that recently underwent a fairly invasive change, and I wanted to automate moving model descriptions from the old format to the new.

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