kiss the sun and walk on air » tech http://osi.fotap.org my thoughts and my life. yes, another blog on the internet. who would have thought. Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:32:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 making concurrent programming easier! http://osi.fotap.org/2008/08/12/making-concurrent-programming-easier/ http://osi.fotap.org/2008/08/12/making-concurrent-programming-easier/#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:59:05 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/?p=80 my job involves a lot of concurrency, since we specialize in infrastructure for multiplayer games.

i have a lot of ideas on how to simplify the programming model we expose to plugin developers, some of which i’ll be expanding upon at a later date.

but, to help achieve those goals, paul hammant turned me on to a library mike rettig has ported from .net, jetlang.

it reminds me a lot of the old excalibur event code that the avalon team worked on years ago.. trading sinks and sources for publishers and subscribers, the end goal is the same. i tried to revive the event code a month ago or so, but it felt to large.. not all of the functionality was really needed.

jetlang does it right.. its simple and focused, and will be an excellent base to build upon.

mike posted about a 0.1.3 release today. i’m fairly happy with the api, and i think mike is too. next thing i want to tackle is a maven build, to help bring it to a wider audience. then, time to build stuff on top of it!

anyways, go check it out. post a message to the mailing list with your thoughts.

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2008/08/12/making-concurrent-programming-easier/feed/ 0 mina – the high performance construction toolkit http://osi.fotap.org/2007/11/14/mina-the-high-performance-construction-toolkit/ http://osi.fotap.org/2007/11/14/mina-the-high-performance-construction-toolkit/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:18:58 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2007/11/14/mina-the-high-performance-construction-toolkit/ here are the slides for my presentation at apachecon us 2007 on MINA

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2007/11/14/mina-the-high-performance-construction-toolkit/feed/ 0 radar unveiled — twine! http://osi.fotap.org/2007/10/19/radar-unveiled-twine/ http://osi.fotap.org/2007/10/19/radar-unveiled-twine/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:57:15 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2007/10/19/radar-unveiled-twine/ today, radar networks has unveiled what we’ve been working on. check it out.

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2007/10/19/radar-unveiled-twine/feed/ 0 (more) radar networks press http://osi.fotap.org/2007/07/03/more-radar-networks-press/ http://osi.fotap.org/2007/07/03/more-radar-networks-press/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:51:25 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2007/07/03/more-radar-networks-press/ i guess the “web 3.0″ moniker has stuck. business 2.0 recently did a nice multipage article on my company, radar networks. go read it. their description of what we’re doing is the best you can get for now :)

of course, nothing is perfect. their subtext is “web 3.0, no humans required”, and that’s not quite right. humans will always be an integral part of the web. it should be, web 3.0, making humans better. its about augmenting what you can do, not replacing you.

(there was also a less-exciting article in businessweek here. as they say, any press is good press)

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2007/07/03/more-radar-networks-press/feed/ 0 building tcp/ip servers with apache mina http://osi.fotap.org/2007/05/04/building-tcpip-servers-with-apache-mina/ http://osi.fotap.org/2007/05/04/building-tcpip-servers-with-apache-mina/#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 21:33:04 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2007/05/04/building-tcpip-servers-with-apache-mina/ here are the slides from my talk today. was well attended for the last talk on the last day. i felt i blew through my slides too quickly though. need to have more for next time if i’m going to follow this presentation style.

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2007/05/04/building-tcpip-servers-with-apache-mina/feed/ 2 press! http://osi.fotap.org/2006/11/12/press/ http://osi.fotap.org/2006/11/12/press/#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2006 07:08:41 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2006/11/12/press/ my company was recently featured in the ny times. good quotes from our ceo, nova.

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

(link)

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2006/11/12/press/feed/ 0 subversion 1.4 and intellij idea 5.1.2 http://osi.fotap.org/2006/09/13/subversion-14-and-intellij-idea-512/ http://osi.fotap.org/2006/09/13/subversion-14-and-intellij-idea-512/#comments Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:09:33 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2006/09/13/subversion-14-and-intellij-idea-512/ don’t install the subversion 1.4 client if you want interoperability with your working copies between things that use javasvn and the svn command-line. 1.4 apparently changes the on-disk structure of the working copy, and breaks the subversion support in IDEA.

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2006/09/13/subversion-14-and-intellij-idea-512/feed/ 0 we have been heads-down coding hard… http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/31/we-have-been-heads-down-coding-hard/ http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/31/we-have-been-heads-down-coding-hard/#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:37:31 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/31/we-have-been-heads-down-coding-hard/

Workin Hard and Making Progress:

… Another cool thing today was a presentation by Peter Royal, about the work he and Bob McWhirter have done architecting our distributed grid. For those of you who don’t know, part of our system is a homegrown distributed grid server architecture for massive-scale semantic search. … All of us in the presentation were struck by how elegantly designed the architecture is.

(Via Minding the Planet.)

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/31/we-have-been-heads-down-coding-hard/feed/ 0 latest goings on http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/28/latest-goings-on/ http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/28/latest-goings-on/#comments Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:01:45 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/28/latest-goings-on/ we’ve made some announcements at work. nova (our ceo) has also promised to start blogging more about us too.

in other news, this morning is my last in brooklyn. in a few hours, tricia, mike, the cats and i fly to san francisco. (mike is coming to ferry our 3rd cat, since jetBlue has a one pet per human policy). here’s to this new chapter in our life being a good one!

]]> http://osi.fotap.org/2006/08/28/latest-goings-on/feed/ 2 itunes: lots of music, a big ipod, and a laptop http://osi.fotap.org/2006/05/07/itunes-lots-of-music-a-big-ipod-and-a-laptop/ http://osi.fotap.org/2006/05/07/itunes-lots-of-music-a-big-ipod-and-a-laptop/#comments Sun, 07 May 2006 21:14:30 +0000 osi http://osi.fotap.org/?p=61 I recently switched back to a laptop from a desktop, and at just about the same time, ended up with a 60gb iPod. as it turns out, the music that I keep in iTunes all fits on the iPod. Thus, it didn’t make much sense to me to carry around a laptop with half of its space devoted to music that is also on a portable music device that I’m also carrying around. This is my solution. (Thanks to the folks over at the mac achaia, where i posted this question and got some ideas).

My needs were simple:

  • Not duplicate music on my laptop HD and the iPod wherever possible
  • Keep the iPod set to automatically synchronize with iTunes, to retain a single master copy of ratings/playcounts in iTunes
  • Be able to add music while away from home and get it on to the iPod

I decided to keep my music library on an external firewire drive. As I have been keeping a backup of my music library there (along with stuff that I removed from keeping track of in iTunes a long time ago when everything was on a smaller laptop a few computers ago), it seemed like a good place to start.

First, I made sure that everything that was in my ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library folder was actually registered in iTunes (not required, just housekeeping). Here’s a little shell script to do just that. It uses FileMerge, so be sure to have the developer tools installed.

I then told iTunes that its library was really my backup copy on the external drive. This fixed its references for things that I had moved out of the way in my last desktop->laptop migration, and for everything else, it still thought they existed on the internal drive. I then told iTunes to consolidate its library. This (unfortunately) copied everything from my internal drive to the external one, duplicating everything that already existed on the backup drive. No worries, as the duplicate filenames are very predictable, I was able to make a script to fix that as well. Then, I toggled the “Keep Library Organized” checkbox in iTunes and it renamed everything and stripped off the superfluous  1 that it had added.

Now, for mobile operations, I’m (ab)using the fact that iTunes will silently flip its library location to be on the local drive if the external drive is not attached. This means that all of the files will be marked as not found, but not a problem, as they exist on my iPod. Thus, I can rip CD’s or otherwise add music to the library while on the road, and still get that to sync with the iPod (I’ll just get a warning about not being able to find some files to copy, but it won’t remove things from the iPod). Then, when coming back home, just plug in the external drive, and Consolidate Library from the menu, and everything will be whisked onto the external drive.

Hope this is useful to someone else out there with a similar predicament :)

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