Sony recently announced and then promptly put on hold a software development program for networked devices called SNAP. Within hours, it seems the project was put on hold. Everyone seems to be reporting that the SDK is no longer available for download. It may not be linked from the main page anymore, but a quick search was all it took to find the SDK download page, which still seems to be working here.

EDIT: that page no longer has the SDK after all. I have a copy, but I don't want to distribute it if I don't have the right to. Instead, I did publish some of the LGPL'ed code on github here.

I go through periods of obsession with different programming languages. I don't know why, I guess I get bored easily. I usually get stuck using the same 2 or 3 at my day job. Since I work in web development, that tends to be PHP, Python and JavaScript. When I hack for fun, I'm not very goal-oriented, and I tend to want to explore and try new and exciting things. Well, new for me at least. Lately, I've been on a Common Lisp kick again. I've been writing code. I got to a point where I wanted to be able to pop the "nth" element from a list. Strangely, this doesn't seem to exist in Common Lisp. In Python, the "pop" method on lists has an optional parameter for which element to remove and return:

x = [1,2,3,4]
y = x.pop(1)
print(x) # [1,3,4]
print(y) # 2

So I had to write one, which involved learning how macros work again. Here's my first attempt:

(defmacro popnth (n lst)
  (let ((tempvar (gensym)))
    `(if (eql ,n 0)
      (pop ,lst)
      (let ((,tempvar (nth ,n ,lst)))
        (setf (cdr (nthcdr ,(- n 1) ,lst)) (nthcdr ,(+ n 1) ,lst))
        ,tempvar))))

Unfortunately, that makes 1 call to "nth" and 2 calls to "nthcdr" making the whole thing probably a bit slower than necessary for larger lists. So here is a version that only iterates through the list once:

(defmacro popnth (n lst)
  (let ((t1 (gensym))(t2 (gensym)))
    `(if (eql ,n 0)
      (pop ,lst)
      (let* ((,t1 (nthcdr ,(- n 1) ,lst))
              (,t2 (car (cdr ,t1))))
        (setf (cdr ,t1) (cddr ,t1))
        ,t2))))

Of course, there's a subtle error in these examples, the unquoting is off in the subtraction. Here it is fixed:

(defmacro popnth (n lst)
  (let ((t1 (gensym))(t2 (gensym)))
    `(if (eql ,n 0)
      (pop ,lst)
      (let* ((,t1 (nthcdr (- ,n 1) ,lst))
              (,t2 (car (cdr ,t1))))
        (setf (cdr ,t1) (cddr ,t1))
        ,t2))))

First of all, I like the Banshee project. However, I've just been continually underwhelmed by its features compared to Rhythmbox. They both read and write tracks to my IPhone, which is very nice. They both monitor my music folder for new music. Great. They both integrate with the Ubuntu One music store, which I like.

There are some differences, though. Rhythmbox ships with a plugin on Ubuntu that allows DAAP sharing. With Banshee, I have to run Tangerine separately. Also, Rhythmbox seems to be able to list the songs in an album in the correct order more often than Banshee. I don't know why, but even albums that have proper tagging sometimes play in the wrong order in Banshee. Banshee leaks memory. I left it open over the weekend (default configuration, no extra plugins enabled) and when I got back it was using 1.3 GB of memory. Not only that, but I had to kill the application as it wouldn't exit cleanly. Rhythmbox, on the other hand, has a very low memory profile, rarely going above 80 MB even when left running for days.

I like Banshee, but version 1.7.6 that ships with Ubuntu 10.10 still doesn't quite seem ready to replace Rhythmbox. Maybe if I get bored enough, I'll D/L the source and poke around and see if I can't help fix these shortcomings. The idea of tracking down memory leaks in a C# app doesn't seem like a lot of fun, though. Mono is a fine platform, I just haven't done much with it in awhile.

UPDATE: Well, I've reviewed the situation, and there are a couple votes in the opposite direction. First of all Rhythmbox fails to transfer songs successfully to my IPhone, creating invalid or unplayable entries. Conversely, Banshee does this correctly. Also, Banshee has Amazon MP3 store integration that works nicely. You buy the tracks and they download into your collection instantly. That's nice. Also, the other day I noticed that Rhythmbox's memory usage managed to creep up to nearly 400 MB, so it obviously isn't perfect in this respect. For now, I think I'll try using Banshee, I'll just have to remember to restart it periodically to keep memory usage sane.

I'm in Kauai, on vacation. It's amazing. Everybody should come here.

Python Class Notes are available online, now. It is still a work in progress and will continue until I am done. If you don't like it, fork it on github, make it better, and send me a pull request. Content is Creative Commons licensed, code is BSD.

I've got this habit of writing Python apps with the following form (when I say Python, I mean, of course, Python 3.x):

while True:
    command = input("enter command> ")
    if command == "quit":
        break
    elif command.startswith("something"):
        do_something() # and so on...

Well, I'm used to interactive shells like bash or the Python or Ruby interactive shells which have history (with up-arrow) and sometimes even tab-completion. Apparently, the readline module in Python provides this functionality without too much effort. Here's a little snippet which will turn on simple history (not saved between sessions, though that is possible, too) and tab-completion.

import readline

commands = [
    "help",
    "quit",
    ]

def completer(text, state):
    if state == 0:
        for command in commands:
            if command.startswith(text):
                return command
        return text

readline.set_completer(completer)
readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

while True:
    command = input("#> ")
    if command == "quit":
        break
    elif command == "help":
        print("You've got the following commands to pick from:")
        for c in commands:
            print("   %s" % c)

Just importing readline does quite a bit of the work, transforming input into something you'd expect from normal Unix-like shells. In order to get tab completion, you have to write your own function to do it for you. This is a very simple one, showing basic command completion, using a list of commands. The completer function system is a bit odd. It will keep calling the function with incremented state values until you return a non-string. So, a simple implementation just checks if the state variable is zero and returns the tab completion if available.

I'm looking for a laptop. I just have a few requirements, and I'm wondering if I can get such a laptop for under $1000. Here are my requirements:

• Portable: 12" to 14" screen.
• Quiet.
• Doesn't run hot. I need to be able to set it on various surfaces without overheating, like my legs.
• Dual core, 64 bit processor. (I'm not interested in Atom processors)
• I don't need an optical drive.
• Mobile internet: 3G internet would be nice
• SSD. Maybe this is optional, but the fewer spinning parts, the better.
• Ubuntu Linux compatible
• Webcam / Microphone
• Ships with at least 2 GB of RAM, upgradeable to at least 4 GB.
• Battery life: it's gotta have at minimum 5-6 hours life under normal load, 4 hours playing videos.

I'm teaching a Ruby on Rails class this term at the Art Institute of Portland. I wanted to create a place to make my class notes available. Also, I wanted to be able to edit them at any time and to be able to edit them in an easy, simple markup language. My solution was this, create a simple Rails web application that serves up a list of documents which are merely files stored in folder that are written in Markdown syntax. Markdown is nice, because it looks pretty decent as plain text, and converts into decent, simple HTML with bold headings, italicized or bold text or preformatted code blocks as necessary. So, I did it, I put together a simple Rails 3.0 app that accomplishes that exact purpose. It only took about an hour (not counting the time actually spent writing the content.) The code is released under a BSD license and the content will be available under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. The page is available right now, here: rails.deliciousrobots.com.

I got the Markdown plugins for Vim, which are fantastic and make it downright enjoyable to edit this text. I added Google's prettify to syntax-highlight the code blocks for me. It's the same JavaScript library I use on this blog. Instead of keeping the content in a volatile database, it is tracked through the Git repository. I also made the source available on github. Even if all you want to do is add to or update my content, or fix a bug in the code or add a feature to the web application, you can fork my git repository here : github.com/deliciousrobots/md_docs. Just send me a pull request and I can update my content or code with your changes. Neat, huh?

I went to GitHub today to make a public mirror of a Git repository I use to track my dot files. You know, the unix configuration files in my home directory. Apparently, GitHub no longer lets me create public repositories on my free account (this was some temporary glitch, the "New Repository" button reappeared the next day). Fortunately, my Git repository is housed on my VPS and Git comes with a server built in that serves up your repositories using the git:// protocol. I have the server managed with supervisord. I created a file called /etc/supervisor/conf.d/gitd.conf:

[program:gitd]
command=/usr/bin/git daemon --base-path=/path/to/my/git/repos

By default, git-daemon serves up your repositories read-only, and only the ones with a file called 'git-daemon-export-ok' in them.

So my dotfiles repository is now available to the public, though this very server here: git://deliciousrobots.com/dotfiles.git . You can clone the repository like this:

$ git clone git://deliciousrobots.com/dotfiles.git

The next thing I would like to do is set up a web interface, so people can browse the repository at their leisure without having to clone it locally. I don't run apache, as a rule, on my VPS, just nginx. So, that might take a little figuring out.

UPDATE : The dotfiles repo is now available directly on GitHub.

Right, so Abe Lincoln supposedly said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." OK, sure, maybe he said that. Old Abe must have been a software programmer, because we love our tools. We start wars over them. As you probably didn't care to know, I changed employment recently. Let's just say that I moved from Company A to Company B. I realized that my Vim skills are a bit stiff, having built up some bad habits at my previous job. The issue is how much time it takes to get to a file in a directory structure. I was so familiar with the source trees that I knew where everything was most of the time, so I would just hit colon-e-space and then start typing folder names, tab completing them and the name of the file I wanted to edit. That alone is faster than moving to the mouse and just navigating the tree through clicks, but it doesn't really work out for all-new code bases.

Solution 1: Have another bash shell handy, use the unix tool 'find' or grep through file contents with ack, find the file name that way, then open it using the aforementioned 'slow' way. This solution is slow, takes lots of extra keystrokes and context switching.

Solution 2: I had another go with NERDTree. It's basically a file tree navigator plugin for Vim, even uses the mouse if you really want to suck. Trees suck. I used it with the keyboard. It's not bad, and I keep it around if I want to sort of visually explore the code base. It didn't really help me find files any faster. I was still switching to the shell to find them.

Solution 3: Command-T is a Vim plugin designed to emulate TextMate's supposedly magical file finder/opener thingy. Basically, it is magical. You invoke the plugin (it's backslash-t by default) and start typing, it does a fuzzy match on folder and file names to get to the file you want. It's really good. The tricky part is getting it installed. First of all you need the version of vim that has all the scripting extensions installed. On Ubuntu, you can install vim-nox instead of vim-basic. You'll also need the ruby and ruby-devel packages. After that you can pretty much install it like any other Vim plugin, except that you have to build a C component that the Ruby code uses to the fuzzy matching so quickly. Just read the README.

That's the happy ending... Oh, but you wanted more Vim goodness? OK, fair enough, snipMate is another bit of awesome stolen from TextMate and transmitted into the world of Vim. It's just the code snippets functionality. Go check it out, you'll thank me later.

Now, I consider Ubuntu to be a fairly progressive Linux distro. There is something that is a bit odd, though. I was poking through the .bashrc in my home folder to see what the default bash settings are in Ubuntu, when to my surprise, I found this gem:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
#force_color_prompt=yes

Uh, yeah, the color is going to distract from the output. Maybe they should remove all the colorful backgrounds and pretty icons in the default Ubuntu theme, in case someone forgets they are supposed to be working and, I don't know, enjoys the beauty of color. Ubuntu is a friendly, colorful experience in general, so I don't know where this advice originated.