Xarg blog Archive

What is RSS? A nice introduction to the various flavors of RSS by Mark Pilgrim at XML.com.

I finally fixed the rl_returnz code to do the correct output encoding (so Val d'Isère and any other iso-8859-1 style data should now display correctly). The patched code is available for the adventerous.

I spent a couple hours looking into why the cc_users view performs so poorly on postgresql. I narrowed it down to something in the genetic query optimizer but had not really been able to figure out how to get it to go fast no matter how hard I tried. I asked for help on on irc at #postgresql which was not terribly productive but I wrote it all up, asked on the pgsql-performance mailing list, and had the answer in less than an hour from Tom Lane who is the guy responsible for the optimizer. It turns out I was sort of on the wrong track since it was not really the generic query optimizer rather it's that the runtime parameter GEQO_THRESHOLD is also used in a heuristic to decide when to flatten subselects or not, but the answer is the same as I came up with which is to increase GEQO_THRESHOLD.

It always seemed like a kind of cliche when people claimed that's how things happen with open source and given the signal to noise in a lot of places I was not terribly hopeful I was going to get a real solution but I did. Now I feel like I could be in some sort of testimonial commercial about open source. Certainly compared to trying to figure out why my oracle queries were so horrible this is a refreshing experience.

I found someone who feels more or less the same as I do about Netscape 4. From Bitworking:

I really don't care about people using Netscape 4. As a matter of fact if I could find a sequence of tags that would cause NN4 to do nasty stuff like erase your hard-drive or shoot lightning out of the screen when viewing this site I would gleefully add them. Ok, maybe that goes a little beyond a don't care attitude.

Actually, I kind of feel the same way about IE and fortunately this is in fact possible in IE (the erasing the hard-drive bit, not sure about the lightning). There are half a dozen things you have to do to support IE that are annoying and stupid and it's hard to understand why they have not been fixed. The bug with reloading things sent with gzip encoding is one and the failure to properly handle transparent PNGs is another. The arrows in my context bar and the site logo are both transparent PNGs that look great in Mozilla but have white backgrounds in IE. I have decided to build my site using things I wish worked right everywhere and eventually hopefully when most people's browsers are standards compliant it will look about the same for everyone. Until then, people using IE will assume I am a knucklehead and I will continue to loathe IE.

There is a great article by Andre Torrez about building sites:

That's what's got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they'd like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don't make it too complicated. Don't spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site.
The only thing special about the code is that it was written. The only thing special about the sites are the users.

The OpenACS community suffers from a surfeit of ideas and not enough sites using the current code. I am certainly as guilty as anyone of talking about things but not acting, although I have made a real effort to get the code used on this site both out in the open and back in to the OpenACS code base. It would be great if more people working on the toolkit would try to run sites which actually provided some services to other people (and I fully intend to follow through with this, rather than simply write about it).

We have enough good ideas already. We need better documentation, more testing, and more bug fixes. But more than anything else we need people actually running services on OpenACS doing what it can already do and developing things further based on meeting peoples real needs. Launching openacs.org using 4.x has done more for the quality and functionality of OpenACS in a short period time than just about anything else we have tried. Running this site (with almost no services other than photos of my kids and a cvs log browser) has made me focus on problems with the toolkit I would have overlooked otherwise.

Interesting post on collective ownership and what has and has not worked for the Apache Jakarta Project by Andy Oliver

community code is a fundemental principal of community-based software development. If the sources are owned by the community and can be changed by the community then progress happens much faster than if each section of code depends on one person.

He talks a lot about the need for trust and respect which I agree with, although I think removing all the author tags from the code is a pretty extreme way to make the point.

I think with the right kinds of tools (an easy way to browse and back out commits, good tests, good notifications, etc) collective ownership is a huge win. That was my motivation in writing the cvs log browser and hopefully at some point with OpenACS our community development tools will be good enough that a dialogue centered on concrete action will be the most natural way to do things (see Sam Ruby and Rael Dornfest and Andy Oliver again for more comments on code, community, and decision making).

I installed rl_returnz on the server so pages are now served compressed for browsers that support it. I tried it in IE5.5, NN4, and mozilla 1.2.1 and things worked fine. It should make some of the bigger pages like the cvs log browser snappier for slow connections.

There is a great interview with Martin Fowler at artima.com. One thing in particular that caught my interest was his views on code ownership (and they are the same as mine).

Martin Fowler:

Weak code ownership and refactoring are OK. Collective code ownership and refactoring are OK. But strong code ownership and refactoring are a right pain in the butt, because a lot of the refactorings you want to make you can't make. You can't make the refactorings, because you can't go into the calling code and make the necessary updates there. That's why strong code ownership doesn't go well with refactoring, but weak code ownership works fine with refactoring.

It's exciting to see the uptake of the RSS 2.0 Blog Archive format described by Dave Winer. Theres are namespaces defined for Radio and Movable Type and there are several blog browsers being written.

From looking at the server logs I see more and more services which are consuming blogs and hopefully doing something interesting with them. Providing full archives in an easily consumed format should help that along. Blogdex and daypop are cool but even cooler are the services that will take your archive and help you explore the things you are already thinking about like technorati and blogstreet. I would like to see a service take your browsing history, let you score your interest in the pages you visited, and generate a personalized syndicated feed. (something like the Amazon "Page You made" page only with ideas rather than products).