The Green Is Spreading

It seems like, in a lot of instances, that geeks begin to embrace a technology and slowly, over time, the general population adopts the technology too, the Internets being the recent example. So it was to my delight that I found a geek's blog totally centered on green living! Just perusing his recent articles, I found several that got the tinkering juices flowing and that I'd like to try out in the near future. I am definitely going to keep an eye on this blog and do my best to help spread the word about green living. Hopefully society will begin to take the green approach seriously.

New Webserver To Play With

So what's a guy to do on Friday night / Saturday? Probably look for something really nerdy to do, right??!?? That's probably the response of most guys right? Okay, maybe not; but when your significant other is still playing in Florida, and the movie theatre is running on partial power and not showing movies, it is easy to become absorbed by something new and shiny. My new toy: YAWS, (Yet Another WebServer for those not in the know). I am a web developer and as such spend a healthy chunk of time leveraging the Apache webserver to serve up the web applications I develop. So when another web server makes performance claims like this (thoughput ( load(x-axis) vs KBytes/second(y-axis)): apachevsyaws.jpg

Our figure shows the performance of a server when subject to parallel load. This kind of load is often generated in a so-called "Distributed denial of service attack".

Apache dies at about 4,000 parallel sessions. Yaws is still functioning at over 80,000 parallel connections.

Intruiged, I upgraded my version of erlang, got myself YAWS up and running, and am now delving into the world of erlang web development. I think I'll write a simple application in both erlang/YAWS and PHP/Apache and run some benchmarks to test these claims myself. To see my YAWS development, tune your browser to my compy. Currently it only has the default site, as my erlang fu is in development. The graph is non-trivial and if it proves to be true, even partially true, that YAWS can handle 20x the number of parallel requests Apache can, that may be just the advantage we need over our competition. More to come…

Those Crazy Germans

Whilst using the internets in a non-professional manner, I found a home plan that I would not mind living in at all. Half the house is a living room type area; the other half - a cylinder that rotates to reveal three compartments. The bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom all reside within the cylinder and can be rotated with a remote control. I gotta say, for the single life, this is a pretty cool looking place to live. Currently only a prototype, the house covers 36 meters square. I wonder how long it will take to start stacking them like legos…

Ah Ha!

Continuations…frequently referred to by Paul Graham as, to paraphrase, awesome. With all the reading I've done regarding continuations, I've never really seen the big deal about them.  Turns out its because I didn't get it. Imagine that… Fortunately for me, I have continued to read about them and finally had the "ah ha" moment. Reading this page describing fuctional programming, the author explains continuations in way that finally made it click:

A "continuation" is a parameter we may choose to pass to our function that specifies where the function should return. The description may be more complicated than it sounds. Take a look at the following code:

int i = add(5, 10);
int j = square(i);

The function add returns 15 to be assigned to i, the place where add was originally called. After that the value of i is used to call square. Note that a lazy compiler can't rearrange these lines of code because the second line depends on successful evaluation of the first. We can rewrite this code block using Continuation Passing Style or CPS, where the function add doesn't return to the original caller but instead returns its result to square.

int j = add(5, 10, square);

In this case add gets another parameter - a function that add must call with its result upon completion. In this case square is a continuation of add. In both cases j will equal 225.

So if you redefine your functions to take an optional last parameter that points to where the function should return to, suddenly you have some serious flexibility regarding what happens at the end of functions. The brilliance behind this method is shown a little further in the article:

Once we convert a program to CPS it becomes clear that every instruction has some continuation, a function it will call with the result, which in a regular program would be a place it must return to. Let's pick any instruction from above code, say add(5, 10). In a program written in CPS style it's clear what add's continuation is - it's a function that add calls once it's done. But what is it in a non-CPS program? We could, of course, convert the program to CPS, but do we have to? It turns out that we don't. Look carefully at our CPS conversion. If you try to write a compiler for it and think about it long enough you'll realize that the CPS version needs no stack! No function ever "returns" in the traditional sense, it just calls another function with the result instead. We don't need to push function arguments on the stack with every call and then pop them back, we can simply store them in some block of memory and use a jump instruction instead. We'll never need the original arguments - they'll never be used again since no function ever returns! So, programs written in CPS style have no stack but have an extra argument with a function to call. Programs not written in CPS style have no argument with a function to call, but have the stack instead. What does the stack contain? Simply the arguments, and a pointer to memory where the function should return. Do you see a light bulb? The stack simply contains continuation information! The pointer to the return instruction in the stack is essentially the same thing as the function to call in CPS programs! If you wanted to find out what continuation for add(5, 10) is, you'd simply have to examine the stack at the point of its execution!

Continuations are particularly well-suited to web programming because of the stateless nature of the web. A request for a page could come at anytime, and what happened before  that page request will not matter. However, this is not always desirable. With continuations, we can simulate state, even in a stateless environment. For more on that subject, start with this article. An interesting alternative to MVC. This is a whole new paradigm from the one I was taught in school and I think rightfully so. It is a tough concept to wrap your mind around at first. Now that I've had the "ah ha" moment, I look forward to implementing these ideas in my future work.

Man of...microfibrillar cellulose???

Think steel is the only way to make something really strong? New research seems to have made material out of organic material that is as strong but tips the scale at a fifth the weight. From the article:

Microfibrillation destroys the original bundles of cellulose fibers in plants, and creates a new structure consisting of tiny interconnected microfibrils.

We all remember from way back when that plants are, in fact, a renewable resource. While this process can produce steel-like material, it can also produce softer plastic-like materials. Replacing plastic with the cellulose-based materials lessens the need for oil, as plastic is derived from oil. Crude oil is refined and portions of it are used to create plastics of several varieties. While plastics do not consume a large portion of crude oil (estimates put it around 4%), certainly anything that can reduce the demand on oil, and increase research into renewable resources, should be encouraged. Hopefully this use for cellulose will prove beneficial on many levels.

Tooltips

Ever find a link or button on a website that looked interesting but was disabled? Did you feel frustrated when you didn't know why that certain something was disabled? This is a prime example of where a little hint as to why something is the way it is would be oh so useful. These hints are commonly referred to as tooltips, and a nice little javascript library named Tooltip.js handles this nifty little feature. Looking at their demos, it seems like a nice tool in the toolbelt. We'll see how nicely it plays with Caseman.

Greenspan takes note of alternative fuel

Ethanol has been receiving quite a bit of press, but a harsh look at the numbers show that corn is not the endgame solution for the US's energy woes. Should we hang up the spikes and enjoy our remaining years of gasoline, while bracing ourselves for a catastrophic fallout when the last gallon is burned? Nah…corn-based ethanol, while helpful, and certainly a good poster child for green energy, is not the answer. A combination of green energy technologies, including corn-based ethanol, wind, solar, geothermal, biodiesel, and others, will be the only way to curb this country's 140 billion gallons per year gasoline habit. Perhaps the most promising, though, is cellulose-based ethanol. CNN Money reports:

But unlike corn-based ethanol, cellulosic ethanol can be made from a variety of things that might otherwise be considered waste – sewage sludge, switchgrass, plant stalks, trees – virtually anything that contains carbon.

There is a potential 1 billion tons lying around the country that would be usable, which is estimated to be equivalent to 100 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol. While it is probably impossible with our current infrastructure to tap all of that potential, it certainly poses a significant contribution towards freeing ourselves from fossil fuels.