It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.

I Want One!

TI Blaze.  Screw the iPad.  This is the future.

On the one hand, it's a huge clunky thing.



On the other hand, it's a development platform, not a consumer device; it has two 800x480 touchscreens, HDMI out, and a built-in DLP projector; it has two five-megapixel cameras at front and a twelve-megapixel camera at rear; a dual-core 1.2GHz Arm Cortex A9 (superscalar out-of-order SMP); accelerometer, compass, ambient light, proximity, barometric and temperature sensors; Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS; and easy and open access to all the electronics, networking, and software.

Tech's slate (from the Accountancy story further down) isn't that much more advanced than this beastie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

Free At Last!

EA have just earned themselves brownie points with millions of gamers by re-releasing three of the older Command and Conquer games - Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, and Tiberian Sun - free.

Get downloading!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

Oodles Of Noodles

I have a working base storage class for Pita.  Unfortunately, most of my weekend was eaten up by my day job and other miscellanea, but it does work.

I'll post the full code later in the week once I have a derived class or two that does something more useful, in the meantime, here's the test code to give you an example of how it's used:

def oodle_test():
  # Create a base view
  pets = Oodle()
 
  # Create some pets
  log('Creating pets')
 
  # Create a dog, and save it
  pet = pets.new()
  pet.animal = 'dog'
  pet.sound = 'woof'
  pet.save()
  log('Dog saved, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Create a cat from a dict, and save it
  pet = pets.new({'animal': 'cat', 'sound': 'meow'})
  pet.save()
  log('Cat saved, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Append an aardvark
  pet = pets.append({'animal': 'aardvark', 'sound': 'snorf'})
  log('Aardvark appended, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Append a hippopotamus too
  pet = pets.append(animal = 'hippopotamus', sound = 'hrooonk')
  log('Hippopotamus appended, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # What pets do I have?
  log('Selecting all pets')
  for pet in pets.select():
    log('My %s says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  # Select and find on fields
  log('Selecting specific pets')
  # What does my dog say?
  for pet in pets.select(animal = 'dog'):
    log('Selected my %s; it says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  # Can I find my cat?
  pet = pets.find(animal = 'cat')
  log('Found my %s; it says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  return pets.count() == 4

The base view class, which has no indexes, no persistence, and no support for sorting, is called an Oodle.

The results of the test?

Creating pets
  Dog saved, 1 pets
  Cat saved, 2 pets
  Aardvark appended, 3 pets
  Hippopotamus appended, 4 pets
Selecting all pets
  My dog says woof
  My cat says meow
  My aardvark says snorf
  My hippopotamus says hrooonk
Selecting specific pets
  Selected my dog; it says woof
  Found my cat; it says meow
Oodle OK

Update: We've hit version 0.02 wih a successful hash-table implementation.  Next up is persistence...  And deletes.

Update: 0.03!  I deleted my pet hippopotamus!

Update: 0.04!  The idiom for pet in pets now works.  You can't slice it or select within it yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:34 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 356 words, total size 3 kb.

Stuff







Come to think of it, I need to redo them to insert Jy and Pi.  So there may be another colour shift coming.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Can't Sleep, Brain Busy

Idea popped into my head for a story set in the Mina Smith universe.  Mina's a customs agent, but this time our protagonist is an accountant.  As much an accountant as Mina is a customs agent, anyway.

Just a snippet that I'll likely never finish, but anyway...
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1937 words, total size 12 kb.

Dear Dell Australia

I can't configure a server on your site with more than 4GB of RAM or SATA drives bigger than 250GB.  Last time I checked it was not 2002, so could you please FIX IT?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:15 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Pixy, the Language

Well, sort of.  Kind of sort of.*

Okay, quick, tell me what language this is (without Googling the source code):

print "Eratosthenes' Sieve, in some funny language"

function print_sieve (limit):
  local sieve, j = { }, 2
  while j<limit:
    while sieve[j]:
      j=j+1
    print(j)
    for k = j*j, limit, j:
      sieve[k] = true
    j=j+1

print_sieve(100)

Hint: That's not it.  And I don't understand the first line of print_sieve at all.  Oh, right.  Logically, (sieve, j) = ({}, 2), so the local variables sieve and j are initialised as an empty dict and 2, respectively.

Hint the second: It's the same language as this (believe it or not):

map    = |f,x| x ? %{ hd=f(x.hd), tl=map(f,x.tl) }
filter = |p,x| x ? p(x.hd) ? %{ hd=x.hd, tl=filter(p, x.tl) }, filter(p, x.tl)
take   = |n,s| n<=0 ? { }, { s.hd, unpack(take(n-1, s.tl)) }
ints   = %{ hd=1; tl=map (|x| x+1, ints) }

f = |seq| %{ hd=seq.hd; tl=f(filter (|x| x%seq.hd~=0, seq.tl)) }
primes = f (ints.tl)

table.print(take (100, primes))

Which implements the exact same function.

Hint the third: You'll be able to script your mee.nu blog like this soon.

* Good language designers borrow.  Great language designers swipe someone else's metaprogramming project.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 199 words, total size 2 kb.

Rhymes With Camel

I was looking at YAML as a serialisation option for Pita (it's already supported for exporting data in the development version of Minx).

So I ran some benchmarks.

It's sloooooooooooooooooooow.

Here we are, encoding and decoding a 2k record:

[andrew@eineus ~]$ python jsonbench.py
10000 iterations on 1973 bytes
Python
json: 10000 encodes+decodes in 4.9 seconds, 2055.8 per second
simplejson: 10000 encodes+decodes in 0.5 seconds, 20686.2 per second
pickle: 10000 encodes+decodes in 4.3 seconds, 2338.0 per second
cPickle: 10000 encodes+decodes in 0.6 seconds, 17297.6 per second
yaml: 10000 encodes+decodes in 213.4 seconds, 46.9 per second

json is Python's built-in JSON library, which is written in Python and thus somewhat sluggish.  simplejson is the same JSON library with an optional C implementation.  Essentially the same applies for pickle vs. cPickle.

yaml is PyYAML, which includes a C implemenation if you have LibYAML installed.  Which I do, but I can't seem to get the C implemenation to run...  Unless that's it, which would be pretty sad.

On the one hand, simplejson is the fastest of these options, which is good because it's also the most widely supported format and the easiest to parse.

One the other hand, 20,000 records per second is not all that much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:37 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 205 words, total size 1 kb.

Jsyn

Announcing Jsyn, the JSON syndication format for blogs and everything else.

Specification for version sqrt(-1):

1. Put a bunch of stuff in a data structure.
2. JSON-encode it.
3. Make it available somehow.

...

What, you need more of a spec?  But I've registered a domain and everything!

Seriously, freedom from so-called "simple" syndication, coming soon!  Part of the Pita* project.

Update: Spec version -1:

A Jsyn feed object will have precisely three first level sub-elements:

1. A feed element, an object containing the feed properties (required).
2. A schema element, an object containing advisory schema information (optional).
3. A items element, an array of objects representing the data items (required, but may be empty).

Example:

{"feed": {"source": "http://ai.mee.nu/feed.jsyn"},
 "schema": {"source": "http://jsyn.net/schemas/blog.jsyn", "version": 1.0},
 "items": []}

A client may use a local copy of the schema so long as the version matches that specified in the schema object.  The server must increment the version when updating the schema.  The server may revert to an older schema with a lower version number; the client must not continue to use the local copy of the schema in this case.

* Which is part of the Minx project**, which is part of the make-Pixy-rich-or-drive-him-insane-either-is-fine project.

** I've subdivided Minx into three parts, like Gaul, only with less garlic: Minx, the bliki; Meta, the template, formatting, and scripting engine; and Pita, the database engine/abstraction layer.  In addition, there's Miko, the planned desktop client.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 240 words, total size 2 kb.

Syntactistaticality

Now where the heck was I, before being buried under an avalanche of poorly-considered Atom feeds and Chinese replica watch spam?

Ah, right.

We can't do a full Progress-style where clause in Python, unfortunately.  Or not without more trickery than I intend to apply; someone did make a working goto - never mind that, a working comefrom - but I'm not inclined to go to that sort of length.

So.  I want the first 20 posts in a given folder of a given blog, sorted by date order (descending, of course).  Pythonically.  No SQL.  Let's see:

db = Pita.Connect(host, user, pass, database)
posts = db.views.posts

I've connected to the Pita server and have a view open.  Now:

for post in posts(folder=f,order='date-',limit=20):
    ...

That's not bad.  With Python's named parameters, you can use any field in a flat record structure, so:

authors = db.views.authors
a = authors.find(name='Pixy Misa')
for post in posts(author=a.id, tag='databases',order='score-',limit=20):
    ...

If we have a nested structure, though, it doesn't work.  Python doesn't let you say:

for post in posts(author.name = 'Pixy Misa')

even if we have the code to automatically resolve the relation.  It's not valid syntax.  So that's one place where it breaks down.  Another place is ranges; we can say

for author in authors(country = 'Australia')

to get a list of authors who live in Australia, but we can't say

for author in authors('Andorra' < country < 'Azerbaijan')

even though that is a valid Python expression.  It will get evaluated, and we'll just pass either True or False to authors() (or throw an exception), and it just won't work.

Now, the design of Pita is that it's primarly a document database with advisory schemas.  It's not schemaless like many or the key-value stores, and it's not fixed-schema like most traditional relational databases.  Each view has a schema, which specifies what fields should be there, and if they are, what type they should be.  Fields can be missing, in which case the schema may specify a default value.  And you can stick in whatever additional data you want, so long as the schema doesn't specifically conflict with that.

What this means is that we can know that country is a string, and if we do an equality comparison between a string and a list, we mean that we want to know if the string is in the list.  So we can also do this:

for author in authors(country = ['Australia', 'New Zealand', 'Canada'])

to get authors from any of those countries.

By returning a generator or iterator, we can efficiently replace this:

for post in posts(blog=b,tag='databases',order='score-',limit=20)

with the more Pythonic

for post in posts(blog=b,tag='databases',order='score-')[:20]

Slicing (as it is called) is very general in Python and very useful, so adapting it to database selects will come naturally.

But what about range searches?  There's no obvious Pythonic syntax for this, at least, not one that works.  Here are a few possiblities:

for house in houses(price = '<100000'):
    ...
for house in houses(price = ['>50000','<100000']):
    ...


We know price is of type money, so we look at that string, and the leading < means it's a range match.  Goody!  Doesn't work so well - or at all, for that matter - for strings, because we could be perfectly well looking for those exact strings. 

We could have an explicit range function:

for house in houses.price.range(50000,100000):
    ...

That's not too bad either; it's pretty clear syntactically and semantically, and it requires no parsing.  Doesn't let you differentiate between > and >= though - and you can't do a range match on more than one field.  (You can't effectively use a binary tree for such a search anyway.)  We can still slide in our other parameters like so:

for house in houses.price.range(50000,100000,suburb='Wondabyne'):
    ...

But (again due to the strictures of Python), they must come last.

Since we're building a generator, it should be possible to do this LINQish trick:

for house in houses(suburb='Wondabyne').price.range(50000,100000):
    ...

The first operation produces a view that knows to search on the suburb field for Wondabyne.  This derived view has the exact same attributes of the original view, and price is one of those attributes, and we can use the range selector on price just like before.

We should be able to keep doing that sort of thing, until we get something like:

for house in houses.suburb('Wondabyne').bedrooms.range(3,5).bathrooms.min(2).price.max(150000).order('price+'):
...

But it's not terribly dynamic.  So, next stop, dynamism.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 701 words, total size 5 kb.