But then today I was thinking about how software compares to the “real world,” and it seems that the same layering/dependency problem exists there too—what if every structure, machine, and tool on the Earth was destroyed and we had to rebuild everything from scratch? Even if the associated knowledge was somehow preserved, I wonder how long it would take us to get back to having supertall skyscrapers, fly-by-wire jumbo jets, and smart phones.

Perhaps the situation with software isn’t so bad after all, or at least the real world is no better off (depending on how you look at it).

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As it stands now…most user-visible development…[has] been put on hold…. We have no working theme…our current window manager Azalea is now unsupported.

Let’s face it: without a usable desktop environment available, nobody cares if you have managed to take a foreign programming paradigm and bolt it onto Objective-C or make Objective-C code (sort of) run on the Javascript runtime. This is how projects fail, or at least manage to forever languish in obscurity.

I hate to say it, but the fate of the Étoilé project now seems doomed to follow that of the GNUstep project itself, which, while technically impressive, has repeatedly failed to produce a practical system for users, despite nearly 20 years of ongoing software development (sound familiar?). As it stands today, the GNUstep UI is basically an imperfect clone of the outdated 25 year old NeXT UI, even though it’s still not nearly as usable or solid as the NeXT was in 1992 (I know, support for themes is in the works, but it doesn’t appear to be of practical use today).

Don’t mistake my point here—I would love to be proven wrong. I have been hoping to see GNUstep succeed for the past 15 years (and for a while there at the end of the 90′s, when OPENSTEP was poised to enter the mainstream, I actually thought it had a very good chance). But I have grown very weary of waiting for a utopia that has never materialized.

What do I think Étoilé/GNUstep need to do to succeed? It’s simple. Focus on providing a comprehensive, usable, environment for the end user. Make that your number one priority. You should not worry about providing a bunch of pie-in-the-sky, next level shit until you have first achieved this goal. Don’t concern yourself with surpassing the competition in terms of usability until you have first caught up with them.

Ideally, this should come in the form of a custom OS distribution on a Live CD, or a set of packages that are dead simple to install on popular operating systems. There should be two simple installation options for users and developers.

Once you actually have this platform to offer, you will have three things that will provide the critical mass that is required to achieve your long-term goals:

1. end users who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will attract
2. developers who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will produce
3. third-party applications that run on your platform, which in turn will make (and keep) the platform viable.

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After learning that Linux and U-Boot had been ported to the Trim-Slice and reading about CompuLab’s commitment to open source, I was very excited about this system as an ARM-based target for low-level boot loader and operating system development projects.

However, my excitement quickly changed to dismay this week, when I received my Trim-Slice and set out to gather the tools needed for low-level software development. What I found is that while CompuLab may be committed to open source, NVIDIA clearly is not.

It turns out that, unlike most commercially-available processors, manuals for the Tegra 2 are not publicly available on the Internet or elsewhere. NVIDIA only makes this documentation available to their commercial “partners/customers.” This pretty much dashes all hopes of using the Trim-Slice for low-level development, unless all you want to do is tweak the existing U-Boot or Linux kernel.

As I see it, Linux for the Tegra 2 (L4T) exists mainly to create the illusion of openness around what is essentially a closed system. I have no problem with closed systems, when marketed as such. What I find misleading and frustrating is that this processor is integrated into products that are marketed as open systems.

These days, with whole systems integrated on a single chip, closed systems are more closed than ever before. Before SoCs, it was often possible to reverse engineer much of the system architecture by examining the design of the logic board, which often included a large number of components with readily-available specifications.

As it stands, it appears unlikely that operating systems other than Linux could be ported to the Tegra 2 without the direct involvement of NVIDIA, since the only source of information on the processor is the Linux kernel source code. Linux kernel source code is not a substitute for proper hardware documentation. Source code is neither a complete nor reliable source of hardware information, not to mention the copyright problems that would arise due the code being under GPL.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a truly open system, look to something other than the Tegra 2.

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As much as I dislike Apple as a company I do tend to like John Gruber and his analysis.  He is an ass like me most of the time which probably helps.  This time though he goes to far.  He points out that some tests with Flash on the Android found that it could stream Flash video (H.264) over WiFi for well over 3 hours.  He then links to the Android specs and comments:

If you think that sounds good, note that the Nexus One is rated for 7 hours of video playback time.

First off, while I don’t like that Apple doesn’t offer flash on the iPhone/iPod, I have no love for it either.  I am not defending Flash here.  However, John is twisting facts and I am pretty sure he knows it.  “7 hours of video playback time” is not equal to “7 hours of streaming internet HD video”.  I would be surprised if, using a non-Flash source like the HTML5 <video> tag, the times would be much if any better.  The drag on the battery due to the WiFi will make the drain attributed to Flash seem very insignificant.

By Gruber’s reasoning then I would like to see him explain why, when the iPod Touch specs say I am supposed to get “up to 30 hours” of music playback time I only get roughly 8 hours in one charge when listening to Pandora.  I will tell you why “jackass”, it’s because of the WiFi.  While I won’t deny that Flash will drain the battery faster than the internal player we can’t blame it (solely) here.

It’s the same reason my wife’s Kindle can run forever with the WiFi disabled but won’t last a day with it on.  No Flash there, just soul sucking, battery draining internet access.

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Change your devices name. Not that big of a deal.

Look familiar to you?  It is (except for one word change) exactly the reply Mr. Jobs gave to the developers of iPodRip, now called simply iRip.

I mean come on Steve, it’s “not that big of a deal” right?  Oh what?  You have already done all of the code which mentions iPad?  You already have spent lots of money on marketing with the name iPad?  Well I am sure The Little App Factory didn’t do that at all so maybe this is different?

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I’ve been exploring the B programming language. I’ve had a casual interest in this for years and have only recently dug into it a little deeper. I created the following comparison to C for myself and anyone else who may be interested.

What’s different compared to C?

• No preprocessor or associated directives (no symbolic constants or macros).
• No explicit types or typedef keyword; all variables have “word” type, similar to the int type in C. B does not have array types as in C, just pointers to vectors.
• No type qualifiers or const or volatile keywords.
• No floating point support.
• auto keyword used to declare automatic (local) variables.
• extrn keyword instead of extern keyword.
• No static keyword in earliest versions (though Dennis Ritchie’s C History paper seems to indicate that it may have been added later).
• No sizeof operator.
• No function prototypes; must use extrn to declare functions before use.
• Identifiers are restricted to 7 characters and may contain the backspace character.
• Variable initializers do not include the equals sign. For example: auto x 1 declares an automatic variable x with the initial value 1.
• No hexadecimal constants.
• No structs, unions, or associated operators (. and ->).
• No enums.
• No do or for loop constructs.
• No continue, or default statements.
• No comma operator.
• No logical operators (&& and ||); must use bit-wise expressions.
• Assignment operators have the form =op instead of op= (as in early C prior to 1976).
• Relational assignment operators not found in C: ===, =!=, =<, =<=, =>, =>=.
• Thompson’s original manual did not include bit-wise exclusive OR operator (^), bit-wise not operator (~), or break statement (MH-TSS reference includes these).
• Escape character is * instead of \. For example, *n is the newline character.
• Additional escape sequences:
  • *(  {
  • *)  }
  • *e  EOT
• No equivalents to \a, \b, \f, \r, \v, \?, or octal/hexadecimal escape sequences.
• B strings are terminated with *e (ASCII EOT) rather than *0 (ASCII NUL).
• Controlling expressions for switch statements do not require parentheses.
• Parentheses are required for return statements when a value is returned. For example: return (x)
• Compound statements consisting of only a single statement preceded by variable declarations and/or label definitions need not be surrounded by braces in function definitions or if/while/switch constructs.

  Example 1: Read a character from stdin if cond is true.

  if (cond)
    auto unused;
    extrn read;
    read(0, &unused, 1);
  

  Example 2: Definition for a function g, which returns its parameter, f.

  g(f)
    return (f);

What’s similar?

• Expression structure, operators, and operator precedence, except as mentioned above.
• if/else, goto, switch, while, and return statements, aside from the differences mentioned above.
• Everything else not mentioned above.

References:

• Users’ Reference to B, Ken Thompson
• The Programming Language B, S. C. Johnson & B. W. Kernighan, Technical Report CS TR 8, Bell Labs (January 1973)
• The Development of the C Language, Dennis M. Ritchie.

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So, now that the app is actually usable I have some niggles. These aren’t complaints, just things based on my usage scenario that would be “nice to haves”.

• “Top” button. I really like the gestures. They are very slick. I often find myself reading, and reading, and reading and now I am at the bottom of a very long page. Using the gestures to scroll back to the top of the page is a real pain the the ass. It would be nice to have a button to tap (or a gesture would be fine) to take you back to the top.
• “Mail to Me” option. I do email pages/articles quite often from Safari. But the largest portion of my emailing from within Safari comes in the form of emailing the page to myself. Probably 90% or more of the emails from Safari are to myself. I do it for multiple reasons. I don’t have time to read it now. It is applicable to my desktop so I want to read it there. The page doesn’t display correctly in Safari (flash *cough* *cough*). Or I just would rather read it on my nice big monitor. At any rate it would be nice if, in addition to the normal Mail Link button if there were one next to it that just just automatically emailed the link to your default address. No other display, nothing to select other than that button. After it’s clicked the buttons go away and you are back viewing the page.

Here’s to hoping….

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Creating sub-shells in bash is simple: just put the commands to be run in the sub-shell inside parentheses. This causes bash to start the commands as a separate process. This group of commands essentially acts like a separate script file, their input/output can be collectively redirected and/or they can be executed in the background by following the closing parenthesis with an ampersand.

via: LJ

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