|piks| n. a box at the Royal Mint in which specimen gold and silver coins are deposited to be tested annually at the trial of the pyx.
Here is a useful trick that is unreasonably effective for simple computer use goals using modern terminal agents. On macOS, there has been a terminal osascript command since the original release of Mac OS X. All you have to do is suggest your agent use it and it can perform any application control action available in any AppleScript dictionary for any Mac app. No MCP set up or tools required at…
I have been using macOS voice control for about three years. First it was a way to reduce pain from excessive computer use. It has been a real struggle. Decades of computer use habits with typing and the mouse are hard to overcome! Text selection manipulation commands work quite well on macOS native apps like apps written in swift or safari with an accessibly tagged webpage. However, many webpages…
Onovanday Restonpay is going to logbay here again. It's time to take back the rss-source-rss-reader web of links
(I wrote a long comment in the Hacker News discussion of Guido's slides about his plans for async io and asymmetric coroutines in Python 3.4 , but I thought it was good enough to deserve a blog post) From a certain perspective [Guido's desire to keep non-portable stack slicing assembly out of Python] is a rational decision. Because the CPython API relies so heavily on the C stack, either some…
There has been a lot of news this week about vulnerabilities in very low-level platform code being used in production by many many people. First there was a ruby exploit, and now today I see that there is a new java zero day. The truth is, these kinds of exploits are absolutely everywhere. When off-the-shelf libraries are assembled together to make a whole that is greater than the sum of the…
I've been working on Boot 2 Gecko (Firefox OS) for the last 9 months now, and it has been both a completely insane project and an awesome project. Insane amount of work, awesome implementation. Writing an OS from the ground up is no easy task. Luckily, we're not doing that. We are building on top of the linux kernel and gecko, both open source projects that have lots of effort put against them. It…
Perhaps the reason we have not seen single-page html applications that connect directly to peers without an intermediate server is that browsers cannot easily listen on a local port. They can open outgoing connections all day long, but WebRTC may be the first web standard that allows the browser to listen on a port. If there are others, please let me know. Of course, the WebRTC spec looks overly…
Coverage and Profile Information Gathered from -D The disassembly information provided by SpiderMonkey's -D switch is much richer than the plain coverage data I gathered with my trace hook. However, the disassembly is printed straight to stdout which makes it more difficult to separate from test output and harder to parse. So, I wrote a small patch which makes -D take the filename to write the…
Dumping Bytecode with SpiderMonkey While trying to implement my code coverage tool, SpiderMonkey's -D flag was brought to my attention. You need to have a debug build of SpiderMonkey. You can find instructions on how to get the source and build here. For the given input file foo.js: var a = 1 + 1; var b = 2 + 2; var c = a + b; Running with the command-line switch -D gives: $ js -D foo.js --- PC…
Code Coverage Reporting in JavaScript Now that I am working on dom.js, I need to learn an entirely new environment and all the tools that go with it. JavaScript is also fundamentally different from other scripting languages because usually the environment it is executing in is the browser rather than the command line. However, dom.js is designed to be used in environments where a native DOM does…
I started work at Mozilla yesterday. It has been quite a whirlwind. I'm sitting next to Brendan Eich and working with David Flanagan. David's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide was the reference I turned to when I seriously started with web programming in 2000, and when Brendan Eich wrote JavaScript I was working on server-side scripts hosted in LambdaMOO and had no idea what I wanted to do with my…
Simplified one-wire transmission system If the secondary does not have distributed capacitance which cancels the coil's self induction, then an appropriately sized capacitor should be added between the coil and ground.
Magnifying transmitter replication Key tuning factors Coil length must match one quarter the wavelength of the impulse frequency. Coil capacitance, including a capacitor added to coil, must cancel self-induction of the coil. Impulse rise and fall slopes must be as sharp as possible, possibly in the nanosecond range. Impulse duration must be as short as possible. The duty cycle of the wave should…
Another minor Spawning release cleans up some log messages, the way PYTHONPATH and the location of python are determined, and adds some convenient command-line options for controlling the operation of the server. Here are the release notes: Added --access-log-file command line option to allow writing access logs to someplace other than stdout. Useful for redirecting to /dev/null for speed…
Last weekend I wrote a Python binding for Mongrel's http11 parser. I will probably integrate this into eventlet.wsgi and Spawning at some point, but it's not really that much faster than eventlet.wsgi's existing pure python http parser, so I'm not in a hurry. I decided to release the code on github in case anybody else is interested in playing around with it in the meantime. This is the first time…
I'm reading Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World , a most excellent book about complexity. This quote caught my eye: In defending itself so thoroughly against the monarch, the milkweed became inseparable from the butterfly. And vice versa. Any long-term antagonistic relationship seemed to harbor this kind of codependency. (p 74) This made me realize…
Since Ian was kind enough to give me instructions that gave me a working lxml (I had never been able to compile it before), I thought I'd write a quick scraper by mashing lxml together with eventlet. The result is a thing of beauty: from os import path import sys from eventlet import coros from eventlet import httpc from eventlet import util from lxml import html ## Make httpc work -- I'll make it…
ptth is an idea I have planning on implementing for a few years now. The basic idea is that you take normal HTTP semantics and reverse them, meaning that the client (from the TCP perspective) acts like a server (from the application perspective), and the server (from the TCP perspective) acts like a client (from the application perspective) and makes requests on the client whenever it feels like…
Eventlet 0.7 Eventlet 0.7 fixes some very long-standing bugs. First of all, there was a CPU leak in the select hub which would cause an http keep-alive connection to consume 100% CPU while it was open. The problem was that every file descriptor was being passed in to select, even if the callback for the readiness mode was None. This bug has been in since the very beginning of eventlet, and it's…
Spawning is an experimental mashup between Paste and eventlet. It provides a server_factory for Paste Deploy that uses eventlet.wsgi. It also has some other nice features, such as the ability to run multiple processes to take advantage of multicore processors and multiprocessor machines, and graceful code reloading when modules change or the svn revision of a directory changes. Graceful reloading…
The last release of eventlet was 0.2, which we did when we re-open-sourced the fork of eventlet I worked on while I was at Linden Lab. 0.2 was released quite a while ago, and eventlet has seen significant improvement in the meantime. The main change in this release is the ability to use libevent as the multiplexing api instead of raw select or poll. If libevent and the Python wrapping are not…
I had a really good idea over the weekend for using eventlet and mulib to combine the concepts of REST and Actors. Eventlet has had an Actor class for a while now, but I haven't really used it for anything. After otakup0pe twittered a link to the Reia language (everyone knows how much of a language geek I am) I started thinking about Actors again and how I could have applied them to various work…
I just had a cool idea. Usually, people run HTML templating engines on GET. They fetch some data, load an HTML template, and then mash the two together. My idea is to instead run the templating engine on PUT. The body of the PUT would have the data to be templated. The URL that was PUT to would determine which template to use. The response from the PUT would contain the fully templated output,…
For those that may not know, I got a job at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. I really enjoy what I do, and I find this reduces the urge to work on recreational programming on the kinds of things that I enjoy. (It has also seemed to reduce my blog output to almost nil.) I've had a project on the back burner for a while that involves pushing data into LSL (the Linden Scripting Language…
It's been over a year now since I posted to this blog. What happened? I got a job at Linden Lab just over a year ago. Somehow, my blogging just stopped during that time. I have been busy though, and have been using twitter recently. I'll probably start posting here again with more frequency, as I have lots of things to talk about, but until then check out my twitter:…