Mathias's mock turtle soup

"Hanging out with @blissdev and @mathiasx like old times. ^_^"

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:51:03 GMT

"Hanging out with @blissdev and @mathiasx like old times. ^_^"

Unannounced MacBook Pro with Core i7 processor spotted at GeekBench

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:19:45 GMT

Shared by Ryan
EFF YES.

An eagle-eyed forum member of MacRumors uncovered the benchmark results supposedly of an unreleased MacBook Pro with a Core i7 M 620 processor under the hood. The MacBook was listed with the not yet seen before model identifier of 6,1 and was running an unreleased build of Mac OS 10.6.2 ((Build 10C3067). The MacBook scored a respectable 5260 Geekbench score and...

[Reposted from Narkalant]

cat paws

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:15:16 GMT

cat paws

[Reposted from kalafiorowa via hairinmy]

kojimajunya - atTumb

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:03:54 GMT

kojimajunya - atTumb

[Reposted from Ido via antifuchs]

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Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:48:30 GMT

[Reposted from dominik via chesh]

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Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:05:51 GMT

for @vklaus

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:47:06 GMT

for @vklaus
love, @ashe.

Mathiasx is currently reading: The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends (Paperback)

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:45:10 GMT

Mathiasx is currently reading: The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends (Paperback) by David Chelimsky
bookshelves: currently-reading

Mathiasx added: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Paperback)

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:44:54 GMT

Mathiasx added: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Paperback) by Andy Hunt

"I'm far from sold on the iPad as it was presented today, especially without t..."

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:15:44 GMT

"I'm far from sold on the iPad as it was presented today, especially without the ability to multitask, but there's a lot of potential there -- the promise of this thing isn't necessarily in what it can do out of the box, but what it can do once app developers start feeling out the boundaries of a multitouch user interface on a larger screen. I'd love to see what a DJ or music creation app on the iPad looks like, or how a video editing app might work, and I'm very curious to see how game developers approach casual multiplayer gaming."

–Editorial: Engadget on the Apple iPad -- Engadget

We keep forgetting that there were lots of tablets before the iPad.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:38:17 GMT

We keep forgetting that there were lots of tablets before the iPad.

Luckily, they all sucked.

roma

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:20:43 GMT

roma

[Reposted from mraumrau]

media_http24mediatumb_BwvtC.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 500x500 Pixel)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:00:04 GMT

media_http24mediatumb_BwvtC.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 500x500 Pixel)

[Reposted from nemoflow]

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Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:50:51 GMT

[Reposted from herrt]

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[Reposted from spacewolfunicorn]

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Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:48:48 GMT

[Reposted from patt]

"If you start all your automation projects out in a powerful scripting languag..."

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:30:54 GMT

If you start all your automation projects out in a powerful scripting language, it allows you to make the call as to when it becomes invaluable to add the kind of infrastructure of real code. It also means that you don’t have to learn an entire zoo of special-purpose tools. Scripting languages today give you virtually all the affordances of command-line tools.

Useful things tend to never go away. They keep growing and growing until they become an important part of your process. All little utilities reach a critical mass where they become important and thus deserving of real attention. If you build them right in the beginning, you won’t have to rewrite them when that day comes. Try as much as you can to keep behavior in code (not in tools or markup languages like XML). We know all sorts of ways to deal with code: diff to compare versions, refactoring, robust testing libraries. Why would we give all the accumulated knowledge of what we know about code just for the siren song of some elaborate tool?

–The Productive Programmer

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:30:00 GMT

One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Scaling PHP as a Scripting Language

PHP's roots are those of a scripting language, like Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of which have major benefits in terms of programmer productivity and the ability to iterate quickly on products. This is compared to more traditional compiled languages like C++ and interpreted languages like Java. On the other hand, scripting languages are known to generally be less efficient when it comes to CPU and memory usage. Because of this, it's been challenging to scale Facebook to over 400 billion PHP-based page views every month.

One common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the more complex parts of your PHP application directly in C++ as PHP Extensions. This largely transforms PHP into a glue language between your front end HTML and application logic in C++. From a technical perspective this works well, but drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application. Learning C++ is only the first step to writing PHP Extensions, the second is understanding the Zend APIs. Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can't afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.

Scaling Facebook is particularly challenging because almost every page view is a logged-in user with a customized experience. When you view your home page we need to look up all of your friends, query their most relevant updates (from a custom service we've built called Multifeed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill out the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all the rich data that people love about Facebook. All of this in just under a second. HipHop allows us to write the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site.

Since 2007 we've thought about a few different ways to solve these problems and have even tried implementing a few of them. The common suggestion is to just rewrite Facebook in another language, but given the complexity and speed of development of the site this would take some time to accomplish. We've rewritten aspects of the Zend Engine — PHP's internals — and contributed those patches back into the PHP project, but ultimately haven't seen the sort of performance increases that are needed. HipHop's benefits are nearly transparent to our development speed.

Hacking Up HipHop

One night at a Hackathon a few years ago (see Prime Time Hack), I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage. Even PHP itself is written in C. We knew that it was impossible to successfully rewrite an entire codebase of this size by hand, but wondered what would happen if we built a system to do it programmatically.

Finding new ways to improve PHP performance isn't a new concept. At run time the Zend Engine turns your PHP source into opcodes which are then run through the Zend Virtual Machine. Open source projects such as APC and eAccelerator cache this output and are used by the majority of PHP powered websites. There's also Zend Server, a commercial product which makes PHP faster via opcode optimization and caching. Instead, we were thinking about transforming PHP source directly into C++ which can then be turned into native machine code. Even compiling PHP isn't a new idea, open source projects like Roadsend and phc compile PHP to C, Quercus compiles PHP to Java, and Phalanger compiles PHP to .Net.

Needless to say, it took longer than that single Hackathon. Eight months later, I had enough code to demonstrate it is indeed possible to run faster with compiled code. We quickly added Iain Proctor and Minghui Yang to the team to speed up the pace of the project. We spent the next ten months finishing up all the coding and the following six months testing on production servers. We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of our Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.

How HipHop Works

The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It's more likely that you see if (...) {...} else {..} than it is to see function foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory.

The transformation process includes three main steps:

Static analysis where we collect information on who declares what and dependencies,
Type inference where we choose the most specific type between C++ scalars, String, Array, classes, Object, and Variant, and
Code generation which for the most part is a direct correspondence from PHP statements and expressions to C++ statements and expressions.

We have also developed HPHPi, which is an experimental interpreter designed for development. When using HPHPi you don't need to compile your PHP source code before running it. It's helped us catch bugs in HipHop itself and provides engineers a way to use HipHop without changing how they write PHP.

Overall HipHop allows us to keep the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance benefits of C++. In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.

Learn More this Evening

This evening we're hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you'd like to watch.

As I'm sure there will be plenty of questions, starting this evening take a look at the HipHop wiki or join the HipHop developer mailing list. You'll also find us at FOSDEM, SCALE, PHP UK, ConFoo, TEK X, and OSCON over the next few months talking about HipHop for PHP. We're very excited to evolve HipHop into a thriving open source project along with all of you.

Haiping Zhao, a senior engineer, has found Facebook to be a programmer's paradise.

Life Below 600px

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:41:48 GMT

| I Am Paddy

http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/

My Leopard desktop with a little GeekTool action.

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:03:20 GMT

My Leopard desktop with a little GeekTool action. (Submitted by...

My Leopard desktop with a little GeekTool action.

(Submitted by Mike)

Mathiasx added: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover)

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:27:28 GMT

Mathiasx added: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover) by Gabriel García Márquez

Mathiasx added: The Productive Programmer (Paperback)

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:24:05 GMT

Mathiasx added: The Productive Programmer (Paperback) by Neal Ford

"So I made a bet with myself, as helpful as it was humiliating: “Can you study..."

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:36:42 GMT

"So I made a bet with myself, as helpful as it was humiliating: “Can you study – really study - for 10 minutes?” I needed objective validation, a Time Tutor, and I found one in a kitchen timer shaped like a pomodoro (the Italian for tomato) – in other words, I found my “Pomodoro”."

–The Pomdoro technique by Francesco Cirillo

"As far as identifying and releasing simple, useful code, don't spend too much..."

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:24:32 GMT

As far as identifying and releasing simple, useful code, don't spend too much time thinking about it. Go about your day, your normal routine, but keep an eye out for things causing you pain. Things causing your coworkers pain.

An annoying kink in your deployment? Repetitive and error prone security practices? Bug in the authentication plugin you're using?

Keep your eyes open and, when you identify a pain point, something causing friction in your workflow, write it down. Store it somewhere.

Later that night you pour yourself a glass of wine, maybe some bourbon, sit down on the couch and write a solution.

Keep it simple and make sure you can complete the library or plugin in one night. Then write a blog post and release it.

–Chris Wanstrath: gist: 0a2655aed6a26fa15a02 - GitHub

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:05:59 GMT

[Reposted from rorqualmaru via antifuchs]

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Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:03:37 GMT

[Reposted from wombat via hairinmy]

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Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:00:11 GMT

[Reposted from queitsch via hairinmy]

yes. beware

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:58:49 GMT

yes. beware

[Reposted from aimalfunction via hairinmy]

Internbot Chronicles #4: CI & Test Metrics - GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:32:22 GMT

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/159805492/internbot-chronicles-4-ci-test-metrics

Currently thinking about: How robots can trick you into being empathic towards them? (using the same tricks that dogs and cats use on humans?)

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:16:05 GMT

Currently thinking about: How robots can trick you into being empathic towards them? (using the same tricks that dogs and cats use on humans?)
via tweenbots | kacie kinzer

Continuous Integration for the Lone Programmer

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:41:50 GMT

[Reposted from pannan via hairinmy]

"There are a few exciting programming jobs, such as working for a startup, dev..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:39:36 GMT

"There are a few exciting programming jobs, such as working for a startup, developing iPhone apps, etc, but most IT work is absolute drudgery. Its maintaining bank databases, debugging 20 year old Cobol and C code, writing reports, tracking down obscure problems caused by joining 2 or more systems, etc. Then there is testing, documenting, supporting, training and interfacing with customers. Get lucky, work for yourself, or just admit that you've gotta earn a living somehow and if it were fun it wouldn't be called work."

–xoctor in the thread Did turning your passion of programming into a career after college kill the passion? : programming

"I didn't develop a passion for programming until more than ten years after I ..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:32:58 GMT

I didn't develop a passion for programming until more than ten years after I got my first programming job. I didn't graduate college either, and when I was in college, I studied Latin, Ancient Greek, art, and music. ...

However, I run a side business training programmers to have awesome careers, so, speaking totally as somebody with a vested capitalist interest in the topic, I think you're probably going to get tramped on, manipulated, bullshitted, mistreated, abused, mind-raped, and otherwise shat on by a variety of employers. It happens.

–Giles Bowkett in the thread Did turning your passion of programming into a career after college kill the passion? : programming

"At Rubyfringe a few years ago, I suggested that IDE features are language sme..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:42:30 GMT

At Rubyfringe a few years ago, I suggested that IDE features are language smells. This statement reflects a lot of bias: I spend a lot of time holding a programming language hammer, and thus every problem looks like a language paradigm nail to me. But just because I'm biased doesn't mean I'm wrong. Or more importantly, even if I'm wrong it might be interesting to ask ourselves what would happen if we looked at the tools in our development tool chains and treated them as failures.

You can play this game with IDEs, issue managers, wikis, time trackers, project management applications, even email. They're all sitting in their own silos completely disconnected from the code that is what we actually build and test. Honestly, when you look at the commit hooks and APIs that we use to bind them together, don't you despair? We're using tissue paper, spit, and baling wire to integrate components without any attempt to rethink the entire jenga pile of tools.

–2010/01/beautiful_failure.markdown at master from raganwald's homoiconic - GitHub

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Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:40:06 GMT

[Reposted from takietakie via hairinmy]

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Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:37:08 GMT

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