Re: 4.1 pre-release 0

Hmm, strange that they are giving you update options for the wrong platform.

Did you find that Chrome worked any better with a force-refresh of the page (the shift-ctrl-r)?

Re: 4.1 pre-release 0

What do you mean? Does it refuse to connect to the server, or something?

Are you sure it is the right IP and port (the :8000)?

Docs

Yeah, Google Docs has really good collaborative editing features but it is a poor word processor and a terrible text editor.

Unfortunately, I have a poor sense of UI/UX (or just don't care enough about them) so I am not great at building tools [...]

I don't have any great insight into this one but I wanted to point out something which we sometimes miss in the software world, especially in the internet age, despite it being something we all realize, at least on some level.

Historically, we [...]

Post Order

There isn't really a strong notion of "post order" except within the context of a single user. Between users, however, it there isn't a specific way of interpreting that.

The posts do have dates but I am hesitant to rely on those since someone [...]

Multi-photo posts

While just making a "bunch of photos" into a kind of inline extension, I am hesitant to do it that way since I suspect people might want to be able to find photos uploaded that way through another path, as well.

Hence, I have to figure out a way to [...]

This is a short talk about how I fear that client-server software design has become a "progress trap" (something which seemed like a good idea but lead into a dead end).

I also provide some possible other ways to design systems, from federated [...]

Scalability of Cacophony's data model

An interesting thing about the introduction of the replyTo mechanism is that it will definitely dump more data, and more meta-data, into the main record stream of the on-IPFS data structure.

In theory, this should be just fine. In fact, the entire [...]

A quick discussion of what vector processing is, how it contrasts with scalar processing (and super-scalar), and how it compares with other processing mechanisms like co-processors and graphics processors.

A simple way to think about this is: If [...]

IPFS eventually finds requested data

Yesterday, there were 2 instances of failing to fetch data which could be resolved with "dht findprovs" which I think is because my node couldn't find the hosting peer "dht findpeer".
In both cases, the data fetch started to work after about 30 [...]

Declarative UI Musings

The Cacophony 3.0 pre-releases mean that I am back into front-end UI world, making updates to support the recent core changes.

Now, as anyone who knows me can attest, I do NOT like working on UI, and definitely not JavaScript-based browser UIs. As [...]

I talk about copy-on-write data structures, most specifically within the context of file systems. The idea does extend to databases, more generally, and some of the themes can even be observed in content-addressed systems, such as IPFS.

The basic [...]

Reddit Post

Just wanted to make a small text update to draw attention to a post I made on Reddit to mention Cacophony.

This seems to be well-received but, unfortunately, isn't drawing as much conversation as I had hoped.

Still, nice to see that people are [...]

I talk a little about memory usage in modern software and how a lack of concern around it has led to systems which are slow, can't scale down to smaller devices, and are often just incorrect.

Take this as a bit of technical rant from "an old GC guy".

Final decision on WebSocket state updates

A follow-up to earlier decisions around using WebSockets to communicate.

In this audio clip, I talk about how the design did work out as well as the initial indications but there were a few other points I wanted to make.

First of all, I ended [...]

I talk a little about my love-hate relationship with notification-based design patterns in application development, based on some recent ideas around Cacophony.

While these approaches seem to make the high-level responsibilities within the system [...]

I was reminded of the very powerful and elegant concept of binary streams when resolving a memory problem caused in the network library under Cacophony, recently.

I talk about how data streams can move data in and out of a program without needing [...]

I talk a little bit about the idea in software development of "eating your own dogfood" as well as the narrower idea of self-hosted systems (for example, building the version control system you use to manage the software you are building).

There [...]

As an update from my last post about using WebSockets to stream updates to the front-end, instead of just using REST-based polling, I talk a bit about some observations made through this.

In general, this seems to lend itself to thinking about the [...]

Using WebSocket-backed event-based updates instead of REST polling

Something I started playing with in Cacophony 2.0-pre5 was using WebSockets to send dynamic data updates to the front-end, instead of polling a REST end-point. Specifically, I did this for the status page as its changes of state weren't directly [...]

Just a quick talk about the thought process behind the "StandardAccess" approach used in Cacophony 2.0 pre4. That is, using a coarse-grained locking and data abstraction instead of the more fine-grained approach previously being used.

Basically, I [...]

We often hear companies talking about how their offering is "new technology" but how true is that, really? In this video, I talk about how this distinction is missing and that most of what is pitched as "new technology" is just a product or [...]

A short bit of a ramble about a concern I sometimes see people make where they "don't want to block" while blocking is actually a pretty fundamental way that the system works. The concern isn't with blocking, so much as blocking in the wrong place.

Just a quick one, mostly just to test out the new Cacophony 2.0-pre0 release (doing this with in-browser recording).

I talk about the difference between code and data or, more correctly, how they aren't as different as often thought and that the [...]

While I am not someone who does much work in tradition web back-ends, this is idea I find interesting.

I talk a little bit about what an event store is and how that differs from a traditional database.

This involves discussions of some scalability [...]