As someone who tries to read a lot about my field, I feel I have my "ear to the ground", so to speak. And right now, I'm picking up a lot of hype-rumblings about the Erlang programming language. I have a little bit of experience with it, having used it briefly about 3 years, and having made a few
minor contributions.
Why are people interested in it? Picking up new programming languages is fun for some people, but in general, unless it's something backed by millions of dollars of marketing and development (Java, C#/.Net) there needs to be a 'killer feature' to drive adoption. Tk and Tcl, ease of developing simple dynamic web content with PHP, Rails and Ruby, and so on. Erlang, in many people's eyes:
- gets concurrency right, or at least is a big improvement over existing models (threads).
- Makes distributed computing easier and does it naturally.
- Is a solid base on which to construct reliable applications.
That appears to be enough to have nudged Erlang into a position where it has a chance at the big time.
While I would highly encourage people to learn a bit of Erlang, and to seriously consider its use for the type of systems for which it was created, I have some doubts about it becoming that widespread. Please read the following as the thoughts of a critical mind, and keep in mind that it's far easier to zero in on defects than it is to create something from scratch, so do not misconstrue my writing as being "against" Erlang (I do use it, enjoy it, and recommend learning it!), but as an honest appraisal colored by my own view of the world, which might not be like yours.
To begin with the superficial, its syntax is a bit odd. For a professional programmer, that shouldn't present much of an obstacle, and indeed isn't after a few days of using it, but there are a few things that I do find a bit annoying despite being used to the syntax, first and foremost being the use of . and , to separate lines of code, rather than a newline, or ; (which is used elsewhere). They're like little mouse droppings - hard to spot, and they get in your way when you swap out bits of code here and there. The last line of a function must end with a ., but other lines are separated with commas, so when you're cutting and pasting lines from here to there, you end up having to recheck the line endings each time.
Erlang is a
functional programming language. Once again, someone with a wide exposure to many programming styles will not find this difficult after a week or so of practice, to wrap your mind around a different way of thinking. However, I have some doubts as to whether a functional language will be able to bring on board the numbers necessary to be widely adopted (see
Scaling Down).
One of the benefits of wider adoption is, indeed, having a wider set of libraries - it's a "positive network externality" in terms of economics. Other people have written about the relative lack of Erlang libraries to do various things, but it's actually not one of the things I'm worried about - it's something that will take care of itself if the language grows in popularity. After being spoiled by Ruby's gems, what I really miss, though, is a nice, simple, easy distribution mechanism.
Related to making it easier for J Q Programmer to adopt, the error messages are at times not the most helpful I've seen in the computing industry:
Error in process <0.29.0> with exit value:
undef,[ shell_default,sfdsf,[] , erl_eval,do_apply,5 , shell,exprs,6 , shell,eval_loop,3 ]
In English, that means that I tried to execute the function
sfdsf(), which doesn't exist. It seems that there ought to be a way to keep the nice, computer parseable error messages, and add in something that humans would find just a bit easier.
Other people have already covered the problems with Erlang's strings, so I won't belabor the point. Suffice it to say that, in my opinion,
is_list([foo, bar, baz]) and
is_list("hello") should probably not both be true.
Which brings us to another issue. Erlang is a language used in big, reliable systems like telephony switches. That's not the sort of environment where you want to break things, so I doubt that Erlang will ever see big changes that introduce incompatibilities, like Python has recently done. This one is a tradeoff - stable, reliable and backwards compatible is simply not compatible with rapid development of the language - it's a zero-sum game, you want more of one, you get less of the other.
Related, is the "open sourceness" of the language. It is open source, which for me is very nearly a prerequisite for dedicating my time to a language, but Ericsson appears to maintain firm control over it. This is another thing that's both good and bad. Having the backing of a large corporation means that developers are paid to work on and enhance Erlang, which is beneficial to everyone. On the other hand, as some people say, open source is just the start,
open development is important too. Random thought: I bet Erlang would make a nice Apache project, but I'm sure the bureaucracy involved would be a nightmare.
In terms of the language itself, beyond the syntax, it feels a little bit too verbose. Perhaps not as much as Java (that would be difficult, wouldn't it)... maybe I'm just used to Ruby, which is about as concise as I'm comfortable with while still being readable. Sometimes, though, there is a little bit more 'repeat yourself' than I would like to see. For instance, in this implementation of
string_join (something else that ought to be in the standard library, but still isn't), it's necessary to create the same function, with different arity, simply to work around the fact that it's not possible to say the default separator should be " ":
string_join(Items) ->
string_join(Items, " ").
string_join(Items, Sep) ->
lists:flatten(lists:reverse(string_join1(Items, Sep, []))).
Which is a lot more typing than
string_join(Items, Sep=" "). This is pure opinion, and very subjective, but Erlang to me feels like it falls more in the "systems programming language" category than "scripting language". It's a bit more verbose, it needs to be compiled to run it, modules need to have an entry point... it's not as suitable to quick throwaways as Ruby, Tcl or Python. Of course, it is certainly higher level than C, and leaner than Java, but still falls an the other side of an admittedly fuzzy line in my head. Its command line options reinforce that. Whereas "scripting" languages do the obvious thing first:
ruby foo/bar.rb
Erlang is a little bit more complex:
erl -noshell -pa foo/ -run bar
A minor detail, once you get used to it, but still, I prefer the "do the obvious thing first, and let the user have some say in the matter if they want to do something else" approach to systems design.
One of the wonderful things about Ruby on Rails, is that it uses Ruby throughout, templates included. Without getting into the merits of using templates vs other systems, my own opinion is that Rails gets them right, and demonstrates the flexibility of Ruby by using it as the language for the templates, rather than inventing some other solution. I don't see the same flexibility in Erlang, which is unfortunate, as it blows Ruby out of the water in terms of being a very solid solution to deploy on a server (no fiddling with proxies and load balancers and single threaded mini-servers + hot code replacement =
nice).
Of course, there are lots of good things about Erlang, as mentioned at the beginning of this article - concurrency and distribution, but also language features like pattern matching that are a lot of fun to use, a pleasant syntax for dealing with binary data, list comprehensions, first class functions, tail recursion, and lots of other goodies. However, if I had to try and predict the future, I could easily imagine another language grabbing some of Erlang's good ideas and running with them, perhaps being more "conventional" in other respects - this isn't uncommon in the languages field, as we've seen with things like Lisp and Smalltalk. On the other hand, one of the reasons I *am* quite happy with Erlang is that it is most certainly not a proof of concept - it is a very practical language that excels at solving certain classes of problem, and does so in many commercial settings. If you're the kind of person who enjoys new things, check it out!
Unfortunately I will have to disconnect my FONera and buy a real WiFi router to replace it because that small box is a glitchy piece of crap compared to every other WiFi router out there.
The killer: if the LaFonera can not connect the FON authentication servers, then it thinks that there is no network available and does not let me use my Internet. There is even no way to force it to pass connections to outside which is required in many cases such as partial network failures (when you can not get to FON servers for some reason, but rest of the Internet works just fine) and for web signup pages that some ISP’s use to login users to their network. And you can not use another PC for that, because it records the MAC address.
The box frequently freezes and the DNS server stops responding. I can continue working by editing my local DNS server settings to the DNS of my ISP, but that is no way to work!
The damn thing has no idea about uPNP which is a must nowadays for peer-to-peer transactions.
And lastly there is absolutely no way for me to fix any of this because the FON keeps a tight lock on the firmware. In the time when all good software and community projects go to the open side, the FON moves further and further to the dark side and that is disturbing.
I consider this a permanent failure on FON’s part that negates my ability to hold my side of the Fonera promise.
It would be so much easier if I could ssh into the thing - ping stuff, traceroute stuff, put some kind of flag file to say that network in fact is there, release or refresh the DHCP lease or even restart the damn thing remotely. Nothing of this is available.
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.21 is out. Now
with even more actions!
I am helping to kick off the 
* Even it was short notice, I got ticket (last ticket in Bhavanagar Express) luckily! Thanks to our receptionist Rochelle! Reached early in the morning on Friday and again it was headache to get rickshaw with meter working properly! I have to pay 50 Rs (Standard rate for any place for stranger ;)). We have got nice guest home at Ahmedabad. With warm welcome, my all usual weakness from traveling went away in seconds. Took some pictures from 8th floor. Buildings, Houses, Peacocks!
* Day started with meeting, thank God, it was really good meeting than our imagination from previous experiences. Fixed some technical issues. And then we went to our new office. Awesome furniture, spacious area and yes, very good connectivity 
Again, went to GVP and came back late evening. Ah, before that, Ashok helped me to book tickets for 
Today I went to #debian-x and asked how they have been doing to update debian/changelog files and they said that they’re using GIT log but updating the files by-hand so, since we’re wanting to use it here at work, I’ve started to write up the script for it.
After some time of hacking and some questions answered at #git, on freenode, I was able to get it working. Obviously it has to be improved (hey, send me a patch!) but it works for my tests.
It has been made availabe at 
If you hadn't the occasion to see RSA-TON, just look around for it, find if
it is broadcasted at a later time and watch it.
The Tonga team just had 10 minutes of weakness, with South-Africa scoring
three tries. But they never gave up, scored two tries and finally ended up
25-30, winning the defensive bonus point and really worrying South-Africa.
For sure, the repeated failures of RSA on penalties also helped for this
scenario, but Tonga became the stars of this pool and Finau Maka is the star
of Tonga..:-)
The Bollaert stadium in Lens is more used to the fights of the local soccer
team than high level rugby but they supported the Tonga team the very same
way they support the "Sang et Or". I think that the Tonga players will
remember that one.
England can *really* worry.
This week has been a week of pictures for me. I was looking around on Wikipedia earlier in the week and decided that the articles around the Porirua area where I live was looking a little barren. So I've been out taking a few snaps to liven it up a little. The articles themselves don't look that great either so I'll see if I can't put some effort into improving them as well.
As a result though, I've been playing with photographs and I'm finding that the graphics landscape on Linux has improved significantly since last time I was playing around with things. I've been using 
I just upgraded my X server at work. Oh my god. I had a working configuration with multi-head (without Xinerama).
I was happy. Oh yes I remember yesterday everything was so fine. And now it screwed everything up.
I've got 3 LCD screens and 2 Matrox G450 PCI cards. After restarting X.Org 7.3, all I've got was two screens (connected on the first card) in clone mode. Very useful.... After 1 hour of googling I managed to use xrandr to setup a Xinerama display on this 2 screens....
I don't want Xinerama and I want my other Matrox card back. I don't know why but reading Brice Goglin post around, I understand that the old behaviour is no more available. GREAT, now I'm stuck with Xinerama that a lot of window managers don't handle correctly and I still don't know why my other Matrox card doesn't work.
Is X.Org 7.3 a piece of shit or what?
Hello World,
a tape streamer of one of our customers died two days ago and we haven’t anymore warranty on this device, a new infrastructure will be realized soon anyway. So, we needed a cheap temporary solution. We bought a WD network harddisk for home use and “remote access over the internet”, even if we only need local access to it. It’s a 500 GB harddisk and you find several short GPL references in the crappy 5-pages-manual. Ok, this sounded already interesting. I read the manual and see that only Windows 2000 and Windows XP are supported and that you have to install a very proprietary Windows tool to start using the harddisk. Later there would also be a webinterface available, after the initialization.
Ok, so I wanted to know if it’s possible to access the drive also with other operating systems. I connected the RJ45 port of the harddisk with my ethernet card with a cross-over cable and started to sniff with ngrep on the interface. After waiting a while I got this message some strange from a APIPA address to a Multicast address. Ok, assigned my local interface an address in the APIPA range and connected with my browser to it:
T 169.254.71.58:80 -> 169.254.71.57:56819 [A]
The device asks for a password, I went to the website of WD to read the “full manual” (as the CDROM isn’t readable with Linux as it seems), in the support part I found something about “admin” and “123456″. With this information I could login on the device and saw that it does nothing else than Samba (3.0.14) and it’s also accessible via smbclient. Without the proprietary tool, without sending personal information to Westerndigital and getting stupid newsletters.
Maybe I will remove the harddisk from the case later and install it on my workstation (it isn’t reachable except port 80 and the netbios stuff) to see what exactly is on it. At least I know that it’s an ext3 filesystem.
I think vendors who use embedded Linux systems for their devices and use such proprietary clients, give not more information about it are just crap. It’s something like unfair for the free-software community. 
(even if it works unofficially with an uncommon way)
[Update]
A little codesnippet from the Webinterface… very useful 
function moveArrow(ycord) // vert cord of layer
As I produce quite a lot of photos and want to manage them in some
reasonable way, I started to look for some tools which can do
commenting/tagging/whatever of taken photos. I really don't want these
meta data stored outside picture itself, so most of photo managers
currently available are not acceptable. When reading 
Ein ‘grml-live -t /dev/shm -c GRMLBASE,I386 -s etch’ und keine 5(!) Minuten sp ter hab ich dann mein 135MB kleines grml:
Mit grml-live kann man sich somit seine pers nlich angepasste Linux Live-CD erstellen, ohne sich erst mit 