Archive for June, 2007
June 8, 2007 at 12:49 pm · Filed under General
I love Firefox, but lately I’ve noticed a few showstopper issues.
On Windows, Firefox leaks quite a lot after a day’s use. I start noticing the performance issues when it
gets to be about a 500 meg image in the process list. Why does a browser need so much memory? They
really need to solve the memory issue.
On a Mac, the browser eventually gets to a point where the event loop hangs every 10-15 seconds.
When you try to drag the window, it will stall for a few seconds with the wait cursor and then suddenly
start moving again. I’m running on a Dual G5 PowerMac with a ton of memory and the latest OS updates.
This should not be happening. A recruiter at Mozilla contacted me over a year ago to see if I would be
interested in working on the Mac port of Firefox. He mentioned they had a few issues that really needed
some attention. No kidding.
Again, all of this is on the latest 2.0 of Firefox with really nice hardware. If the right engineer
was given the right tools, I bet both issues could be solvable in 1 month.
June 6, 2007 at 12:42 pm · Filed under General
Wow - more signal indicating we are in a bubble.
Expensive ad-campaigns of women with swords
June 6, 2007 at 12:12 pm · Filed under General
The other day, I came across this interesting post by Tom Moertel.
The blog post is called
“A simple directory-tree printer in Haskell”.
Haskell is interesting and this kind of programming exercise would really show how Haskell deals with real-world resources (the filesystem)
as well as rendering the output in a nice human readable representation.
Here is some sample output:
.
|-- haskell.hs
|-- test.rb
|-- tree.rb
`-- tree.rb.html
His post was well written and I really liked how concise the resulting Haskell code was. I also liked the way he dealt
with tree printing. I had never seen a tree printer algorithm like this before since I’m used to graphical versions
which generally end up having a lot more code. For example, if I was doing this, I would have built
a generic tree printer class and passed a lot more state around to each node (like the depth, sibling count, layout algorithms, etc.)
Tom’s method is a great little pattern for console style tree output (like pstree) with only a few lines of code. For some
past projects, such a simple routine would have come in handy.
So last night, I wondered what the Ruby version would look like. I tried to keep the example in the same functional style… just
like his first example. The Ruby code stayed pretty concise.
Here is my Ruby version of Tom’s Haskell version:
1
2 require ‘pathname‘
3
4 $ArmMap = Hash.new("| ")
5 $ArmMap[""] = ""
6 $ArmMap["`"] = " "
7
8 def visit(path, leader, tie, arm, node)
9 print "#{leader}#{arm}#{tie}#{node}\n"
10 visitChildren(path + node, leader + $ArmMap[arm])
11 end
12
13 def visitChildren(path, leader)
14 return unless FileTest.directory? path
15 return unless FileTest.readable? path
16 files = path.children(false).sort #false = return name, not full path
17 return if files.empty?
18
19 arms = Array.new(files.length - 1, "|") << "`"
20 pairs = files.zip(arms)
21 pairs.each { |e| visit(path, leader, "– ", e[1], e[0]) }
22 end
23
24 ARGV << "." if ARGV.empty?
25 ARGV.map{ |path| visit Pathname.new("."), "","","",Pathname.new(path) }
26
27
June 5, 2007 at 10:47 am · Filed under General
Over on the right sidebar, I have now added a link using FeedBurner er. Google
for my blog’s feed. I’m going to try it out for the next few months.
You can switchover to that feed if you like.
Let me know if there are any problems or issues.
June 3, 2007 at 9:20 pm · Filed under General
Thought provoking video of Linus on GIT.
Pretty compelling.
I got burned a while back when I discovered the huge merge bug in Subversion (the fact that you can only do it once).
I started looking around a while ago and transitioned to SVK over a subversion repo. At work we are using Bazaar. I still like
SVK and Bazaar, but I’m always interested in new and better technology.
Basically, it looks like GIT and Mercurial are the systems to watch.
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