npFET.com

Fully-Loaded Honda Fit

npfet — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:11:51 +0000

My car packed and ready to go to the bay area. The cargo and passenger seat were fully packed, along with the roof rack. The maximum weight capacity (800 lbs.) was definitely exceeded.

Google Chrome

npfet — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:04:01 +0000

Google released a new web browser, named Chrome. Chrome may seem like yet-another web browser, to gain market share from IE and Firefox. My first thought was that Google would use it to gain personal information by recording browser history and search queries, better targeting ads towards users’ interests. Reading their comic book about Chrome, I found the true reason to be much cooler and interesting.

Chrome is not a web browser in the traditional sense, but a web application framework and run-time environment. I believe it is a major milestone towards true cloud computing. Chrome’s GUI reflects this, with the ability to create start menu and desktop shortcuts for online web applications. Chrome does not show any navigation buttons or an address bar for these web applications, so the web apps resemble a desktop application.

Chrome includes a new Javascript VM (V8) which has much better performance than existing Javascript VMs. Web applications are generally programed with a mix of server-side and client-side (Javascript) code. However, the speed of Javascript has always been a bottleneck, so that computationally intensive tasks are done by the server. However, it is desirable for web applications to run locally when no network connection is available. By improving the speed of Javascript, applications can be coded to be run locally. Cnet has a benchmark showing Chrome’s V8 Javascript VM performance compared to other browsers.

Another desirable feature of cloud computing is storing data locally for offline use. Google already has this technology, Google Gears, and it is included with Chrome. Between this and Javascript V8, I am very excited about upcoming web applications.

Chrome includes other nice UI improvements: a smart address bar, simple bookmarking (that is actually useful), and an automatically generated start page. Tabs and windows in Chrome all run in a separate process, improving robustness and security. The rendering engine is Webkit, the same one Apple uses for Safari, and based on KDE’s KHTML engine. Chrome and related APIs are all open source for others to use.

Fast Javascript, local storage of data, and multi-platform, Chrome is a major milestone towards true cloud computing. In a few years, most data will be stored online and all we must do to switch to a different computer is login. We will no longer be fixed to using a single computer, but be able to seamlessly switch between a workstation, friend’s home computer, and an ultra-portable laptop.

This raises two important topics: bandwidth and security. As more of our data is stored online, bandwidth must be available to quickly upload and download photos and videos. Personal information stored online must be secured to maintain personal privacy. I believe both topics will be hotly debated in the coming years.

UPDATE: A friend pointed me to a benchmark comparing V8 to TraceMonkey, Mozilla/Firefox’s upcoming Javascript engine. Tracemonkey performs significantly better than V8 on many tests. V8′s advantage seems to be recursive code.

Electric workshop (afterwords…)

npfet — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:13:21 +0000

I gave the Electric Presentation/Workshop earlier today. About 50 to 60 students attended between two sessions. Originally it was going to be an hour each session, but we went a little overtime — about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. The workshop went reasonably well, another couple hours would have helped get through all of the material, but I think most students got a grasp of the basics of Electric. Hopefully the extra materials I provided will allow them to learn more in their spare time, if they are interested.

I have the materials for the workshop, including a PDF of the presentation and the lab, available at http://pub.npfet.com/electricworkshop.zip. It should be online for at least a couple of months.

Direct link to the presentation itself is at http://pub.npfet.com/electricworkshop.pdf, though it is short because most of the workshop was a live tutorial.

NYT: You Are What You Grow

npfet — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 05:21:22 +0000

Not too much to update regarding India…. the trip is winding down and have just stayed around the area. Waiting for my foot to feel better until I walk around more. (I sorta.. fell into a gutter…) Singapore is coming up in a couple weeks, and I’ll have plenty of new photos from there.

A bit old, but I thought this was an interesting article about how the farm bill is making America obese by encouraging overproduction of ingredients used in processed food:

The New York Times: You Are What You Grow

Chip

npfet — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:03:34 +0000

Here is a screen capture of the 8-bit MIPS chip I’m laying out:

Flash 9/Actionscript 3 Printing Problems on a Mac

npfet — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:54:10 +0000

In Adobe’s Flash 9 there appears to be a printing problem that manifests itself in Mac OS X only, at least with Actionscript 3. When a Sprite/MovieClip is not a descendant of the Stage (or maybe when it doesn’t have a parent), the object will not draw itself. This is a problem when printing with a PrintJob, because a sprite will not be drawn on the page if it isn’t a descendant of the stage. Sprites are added with addPage() but it does not add the sprite as a child. Hence, a blank area is printed where the sprite should be. The Flash 9 implementation on Windows doesn’t have this problem.

A good work around is to add the sprite to the stage, but to place it off-screen where the user can’t see. For example:

mysprite.x = stage.stageWidth + 10;

would place mysprite 10 pixels to the right of the stage edge.