Older blog entries for MarkAtwood (starting at number 922)

Review: Erlang books

The fine folks at O'Reilly sent me reviewer copy of two books on Erlang

• Erlang Programming: A Concurrent Approach to Software Development by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson
  
• Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong.
  

I am currently in the process of learning Erlang for a personal project. These books both measures up to the high expectations I have come to expect from Pragmatic Programmers Publishing and from O'Reilly Books.

Erlang is a difficult language to "sell", and is a challenge to learn.

Both books assume you have decently good programming skills, and don't need your hand held too much about the idea of programming, and instead show you how Erlang is different, it's unique and interesting features, and some of "how to think in Erlang".

Both are very good books for learning the language, and gaining basic skill in using it.

Both of the cover pretty much the same territory, in pretty much the same order. You only really would need one of them, but they are both equally good, so I can't recommend one over the other. Either get both, or pick one at random.


I wish there was more on "how to think in Erlang", especially since most programmer's intuitions about multiprocessing and concurrency, born of battle scars with multithreaded programming in C/C++, will be wrong.

Syndicated 2009-07-20 23:27:10 (Updated 2009-07-27 15:01:01) from Mark Atwood

Daily Randoms. Car getting ready for Burning Man, book Harald, book Makers, and sites that dont use

I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Kirkland, while my car gets its 60K service, plus Burning Man prep, plus getting a trailer hitch installed (also for Burning Man). It's going to take all day. Fortunately, this Starbucks isn't too noisy, has good wi-fi, and the seats are comfy.

David Friedman's novel Harald just came out as a free ebook. I love how the Baen Free Library has "send to my kindle" as a pushbutton option.

Also, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Makers, serialized over on Tor Books blog here. I've never really gotten drawn in into any of Cory's previous novels (stalled out on both Down and Out and Little Brother), but this one is working for me.

I'm annoyed that neither Last.fm or Pandora do Portable Contacts / Google Contacts / Facebook Connect / etc for "find your friends". It's only a very very mild annoyance, since I don't actually use Last.fm much, but it sent me an email today, which reminded me that I had an account there. But if you care to link up to me there, I'm at http://www.last.fm/user/PegasusFallen and on Pandora at http://www.pandora.com/people/me22893

A related annoyance is that MySpace's "find my friends" still uses the "3rd party password" anti-pattern when pulling from Google Contacts, instead of using PoCo. IMO, Google and Yahoo should start blacklisting the IPs of the sites that still do that, just to kick them over to using PoCo, and stop teaching people that it's okay to give every site that asks for it their webmail password.

Speaking of which, I showed a friend of mine today that webmail is not as apparently anonymous as some people think. All the big webmail services insert a Received header that contains the IP address of the browser the email was sent from.

Syndicated 2009-07-15 21:35:33 from Mark Atwood

Randoms

I am amused and glad to see that free public performances of the "Taming the Shrew" are being performed in Fremont, using the Troll as an ersatz stage.

I was sad to learn that Circus Contraption is closing up shop.

Why am I awake at 3 in the morning? The IM roster mocks me, as I look for someone to chat with. Away statuses are not to be trusted.

Amazon MP3 is a dangerous thing to have a few clicks away, to someone of a completionist bent. As I buy music from them, I mentally add features to the site that would encourage me to buy more. I wonder if I can make this skill generic. And would I want to? Thinking I might have a skill at commerce web site design with an eye towards optimizing it for increasing sales is a challenge to my identity...

Why are most online performances of electric string marred with an electronic percussion beat? The metronome is a teaching aid, not an instrument.

I've not posted much, recently. Not tech, nor personal musics, or even my journal. My life continues, likely to again become more public.

I just activated my eTrade RSA token. I now have 3 of the things to keep track of. That one, a Verisign PIP device that secures my paypal and ebay accounts, and a "Secure Computing Safeword(tm) Platinum" that secures the Sun VPN. They all basically do the same thing, generating a One Time Password based on a clock and a (presumably securely stored) key. Of the 3 designs, I approve the most of the PIP. It's exceptionally cheap to manufacture, the math of the resync trick allows it to not require a super-accurate local clock, and is very light. The Safeword is the worst, being big and heavy, and provably broken.

I went to Sierra's party on Saturday night. She was so anxious that it would turn out poorly or poorly attended. And yet it went great, and many interesting people came. I got more than a little overstimulated, and spent some time just sitting in the corner contemplating the flowery fractal artwork that she had painted on her ceiling.

Some of the people I know write the most amazingly introspective and philosophical articles. Finding a series of such articles is a joy, and will eat hours of time.

Syndicated 2009-07-13 10:06:06 from Mark Atwood

What I Did Sunday Afternoon.

Camp Pi Shade Structure, Test 2 from EntropyWorks on Vimeo.

Syndicated 2009-07-07 19:18:52 from Mark Atwood

Working on the Shade Structure, Mark II

Sunday yesterday, Brian, Yazz, Amy, Christine, and I all hauled the expanded and modified shade structure over to Volunteer Park and did another practice build. I worked out much better this time.

Syndicated 2009-07-06 19:59:23 from Mark Atwood

What I did today. Burning Man Practice Build

Brian and I went to Volunteer Park today to do a practice build of our shade structure. There were lots of lessons learned. We will try again next week.

Syndicated 2009-06-28 01:51:31 from Mark Atwood

Why is "All Things Considered" spending airtime announcing and reannouncing Michael Jackson's death?

I kind of expect higher standards for the news articles run by NPR.

Syndicated 2009-06-26 00:03:19 from Mark Atwood

Why I want regexp based killfiles for Twitter clients

A number of people I follow on Twitter are now retweeting #iranelection stuff.

And while it's important and interesting and all that, I am not interested in realtime interruption for it, and the duplication as multiple people retweet the same stuff is annoying.

Syndicated 2009-06-19 00:58:42 from Mark Atwood

Dream Notes, from last night

Rose kept turning up, but she was always in a hurry going someplace else

I was climbing down a flight of stairs while thinking "if this was a dream, i would be losing track of weight, and would just float down there, that would make this so much easier"

there was an old ruined bank building where my family used to go to church back in NC, but a organic food co-op had been built next to it

i was in a toystore looking at a book and this big beefy guy comes right up, starts talking about how neat the book looked, and started trying to pull it from my hands so he could see it, and then he looked really embarrassed, muttered an apology, and rushed off

there were a couple of people, women, who i knew i knew, but on waking, i cant remember who they are, that i was going someplace to meet

i was changing clothes in a back room, and a bunch of people come in just as im nude and about to start to redress, and i was a bit annoyed at them

Most of the time, I was wearing my heavy duster and a heavy wool blanket over it as well, and I could always feel the weight of it, and it rubbing against sensitive and touch hungry skin

Walked into a room, but couldnt at first see the person in it because she was wearing all bright red, with touches of white. She looked great in it, once I was able to see her.

Syndicated 2009-06-18 16:18:25 from Mark Atwood

Adrienne, in a Beehive Hairdo

Adrienne has dressed up as an old-school school teacher for a drama class presentation as part of her ASL courses. Thus, the hairspray based beehive hairdo.

Syndicated 2009-06-17 17:08:17 from Mark Atwood