waffle

A few days ago I linked to a post on Perl 6’s current status and bemoaned that the post started out commenting on clear Perl-isms and how they have survived. Why, I went, does this start out talking about the Schwartzian Transformation?

The day after, a long time reader IMed me and thanked me for the wonderful link and how he stayed up reading up on Perl 6. It turns out that the same site hosts a brilliant series of Perl 5 to 6, outlining some changes in Perl 6 in a way that, well, isn’t the spec, which is what inquiring minds have been confined to for comprehensive coverage. Keeping everyone else who codes Perl abreast of what’s really up with Perl 6 is a seat that’s still available, but in the meantime, there are concepts to swallow and differences to ascertain, and this site does a better job than anything I’ve seen. (All parts are listed in the sidebar under “Posts in this category”, and since it’s about differences, it predicates knowledge about Perl 5.)

Perl 6, when it comes to attacking some long-lived programming problems head on, really is one of the better attempts out there.

What do you get if you stick nine SSDs in a RAID 0 (striped)? “Battleship Mtron”. Reaches sustained read speed of 830 MB/s (Megabytes, not Megabits, although also not Mebibytes), gated from the theoretically achievable 1100 MB/s only by the “enterprise” RAID controller. They actually transferred 1 GB in under four seconds and booted Vista in ten seconds.

There will be a brief recess for drool wiping.

Here’s the crazy part: this article is one and a half years old, posted in December 2007. Although these were the lauded (and expensive: nine drives ran $7000) Mtron 16GB SSDs, we have better and cheaper drives today.

What else is interesting about this? Today’s SSDs only have a bad reputation because the cells have a limited lifetime that’s slowly being extended by advances in flash technology and better OS support. SSDs, as most things solid state, very rarely fail for no reason; instead, they run out. RAID 0 using HDDs was neat but dangerous since the risk of a drive failure grew. RAID 0 using SSDs means that the data’s moved faster and, although the whole setup now bears the burden of each SSD’s risk of sudden failure, each individual drive is by far less likely to fail, since it gets half (or less) the traffic.

• The question on everyone’s lips: What you can write in Perl 6 today. I like the Perl community because it’s extraordinarily friendly and as delightfully quirky as the language itself, but the shut-in factor is a bit unnerving at times. I get that Perl 6 writing at least in the beginning has to center on what old and trusted constructs can now be dispensed with because of a more capable language, and I get that (for some odd reason) the only ones still following Perl 6 are Perl Hackers, but with all the candy in Perl 6, I don’t think that the Schwartzian Transformation deserves top billing.

• Google Chrome does extensions right: one type for content filters, one type for browser adornments; both with disparate, implementation-detail-resistant, designed APIs. Firefox never had well-designed APIs for extensions as much as they had high-level (reified?) plumbing, which is why extensions sometimes break between versions.

• Speaking of Google Chrome, the early automated builds for Mac shows that a real Mac team is producing this. The attention to detail was always great in Windows Chrome, and OS X Chrome fits in remarkably well in OS X. Hats off.

• Zune HD’s browser brings the brown: it’s based on Internet Explorer 6. Great move. Bring the awesome rendering power of the browser that was obsolete eight years ago and now holds back innovation to the detriment of web users everywhere. Everyone running WebKit (Nokia, Android, Palm Pré and iPhone) are bringing their best game out of the box; why build a toy? (No, the “heavy, heavy customization work on the UI” or “[optimization] for multi-touch, gestures, and finger-based navigation instead of a stylus” won’t net you points, because you would have had to do that regardless.)

• I JIT you not: they’re making ahead-of-time compiled assemblies resilient to patches to contributing modules in CLR 4. Always fun to hear how the hard problems are solved.

• Internet goes bonkers over Palm authoring an iTunes device plugin for the Palm Pré. You did know you could write those, did you? You did realize that Palm’s not going to ship something that they have to word in the manual as “to sync Palm Pré in iTunes, select [name of our arch-rival] in the source list, bask in the glory of the rich, prominent on-screen image of [name of Lucifer reincarnate device] and press the ‘Sync’ button in the lower right corner”, and that’d work for about a month before Apple finds a way to work around it?

  Update: Pré footage from D7: “That icon looks like an iPod”. They’re actually doing it? Have they gone stark raving mad?

• Penny Lane, literal version. The only good literal version besides Take On Me (”pipe wrench fight!”).

Zero Punctuation “reviews Duke Nukem Forever”. Scathing and filled with bum humor as always, but also gets around to posing some probing and uncomfortable questions about what the past twelve years have meant for the gaming industry.

The perfect warm-up to next week’s E3. Wait, we have E3 again? I guess we do.