Idea: how a JavaScript request handler could look When I saw node.js, we’d been writing a huge pile of JavaScript code for litl based on gjs (gjs is a custom-built JavaScript runtime, created for native desktop/mobile/consumer-gadget apps rather than server-side code). At litl, we use a syntax for asynchronicity invented by C. Scott Ananian – […]
Is there really no Linux API to just play a file? Something like: id = cache_file(“foo.ogg”); // cache the sample play(id); // play to default device libcanberra seems to only support playing stuff from a sound theme, not a file. PulseAudio seems to require setting up a main loop thing, creating a context, converting the […]
Many of us read one or two investment books, and take away that younger people should take more risk. If you buy a “target date retirement” fund in your 20s, you might end up invested 85% or more in stocks. If you’re in the tech industry, young, fired up about entrepreneurship, immune to risk — you […]
I wrote my own blog software in 2003, and today is the day I’m giving it up. My custom blog code just generated static files, so it never had a security bug or a performance problem. But it was kind of annoying to use. If all goes well and it doesn’t break, I’ve set up […]
Wishing I could be at the GTK+ hackfest this week. Hoping the heroes there will discuss converting GTK+ to a nice canvas library. I think it’s a couple person-months of work… but it may not be work there’s time to do for 3.0. Implement a “hovered” or “contains-pointer” property to replace enter/leave notify event in […]
I’m not the sort of programmer that runs around quoting design patterns and drawing UML diagrams. However, maybe it’s useful to discuss this rule of thumb, in the context of toolkits such as GTK+ and Clutter: It’s best to avoid code that “knows about” the scene graph or toolkit as a whole. Here are some […]
Disclaimer: I’ve never followed XCB development, this may have all been discussed already, but I hope this post is at least helpful as a data point illustrating what I understood and didn’t understand. Julien Danjou was disappointed recently because after porting dbus-launch to XCB, we had a bit of a “what’s the point?” reaction to […]
Nat Friedman has interesting results up for his informal survey on computer frustration, noting that “About a third of these issues could be addressed by webbook efforts like ChromeOS and litl, although the webbook model will probably raise new issues as well.” Seems like a good time to discuss how we designed the litl webbook […]
We’ve had lots of great comments on the litl webbook (see here and here for samples). Some discussion about whether a “webbook” is really different from a “netbook.” Here’s why litl webbook is not a netbook. litl OS is completely different from Windows 7. You can’t even run Windows or Linux very well on the […]
If you’re against big government, it’s time to be specific. You can see the budget pie chart at Wikipedia. Over the next decades, remember that Social Security and especially Medicare become ever-larger slices of the pie. As an against-big-government activist, how many of the following will you have the integrity to advocate dropping: 21%: Social […]