sayap's blog

Just went to have dinner at this restaurant located at Dataran Sunway. The food was so so, and the bill came out to be $54.80. I gave the lady a 100 dollars bill and a 5 dollars bill. She got back to the counter and then returned me a 20 cents coin.

I argued to no avail. I gave up. As a kind enough person, I have decided to do them a favor instead, by advertising their good name at every oppurtunity, for free.

If you hate your hard-earned money and don't feel like giving it to me, this restaurant is a must-try for you:

广州屋
Kong Chow House
15-1, Jalan PJU 15/12
Dataran Sunway
Kota Damansara
47810 Petaling Jaya

Safara 4 Beta was released early this week, with several prominent UI changes such as tab bar on top, speed dial, and history/bookmark search from address bar. Thom Holwerda of OSNews fame, an avid fan of Google Chrome, soon tested the Beta and regarded it as a UI disaster. However, in doing so, Thom has made himself a hypocrite.

Thom's main beef with Safari 4 Beta is that the Safari team stole a fantastic idea from Chrome, bastardized it, and claimed it as their own. Here's what he said:

To me, it seems like Apple had heard that "Chrome has tabs on top", but instead of just being honest and admitting that Google got it right, they set a goal for themselves to make as many arbitrary and useless changes as possible so they could still claim they were innovating.

What Thom failed to realize is that the Chrome team stole not one, but two fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own. By that, of course I mean tab bar on top and speed dial.

Opera has had tab bar on top by default for years, and has done it in the right way. You see, in Opera, it is not just about having the tab bar "on top". You can put the tab bar on any of the 4 edges of the window (top, left, bottom, right), and the point is that anything at the opposite side of the tab bar belongs to the tab. The back button, the search box, the page itself, anything at the opposite side of the tab bar belongs to the tab. There is nothing special about this design decision, even though Chrome and Safari both try to make a big deal out of it. If you design a tabbed browser from the ground up rather than retrofitting tabs to a prehistoric browser (ahem, Firefox), this is the only sensible design. This is what Fred Brooks mean by conceptual integrity.

And then we have speed dial, a great feature introduced by Opera about 2 years ago. When you open up a new tab, you will be presented with 9 numbered squares, and you can assign a website to each of the square. Clicking on an unassigned square will pop out a selection list with the top 10 most frequently visited sites and all currently opened sites, followed by a shortened address bar where you can enter a URL manually (with history and auto completion). Clicking on an assigned square or using the shortcuts of CTRL + 1-9 will then bring you to the site.

As you can see, these are 2 fairly simple ideas. There is little room for other browsers to show their innovative touch here, but the Chrome team managed to do it anyway. Kudos. So what they did to the tab bar? It was placed not just on top, but on the very top -- it got merged with the title bar.

At first glance, Chrome merely copied the tab bar on top idea and made a few tweaks. Unfortunately, the tweaks it made violate the principle behind the idea, which is a clear separation of the tab bar and the tab's content. Let's use the bookmarks bar as the example here. In Opera, the bookmarks bar, if enabled, appears above the tab bar (below the menu bar, to be exact, since the tab bar can be placed at other edges). In Chrome, the bookmarks bar appears below the tab bar (below the address bar, to be exact). Is there anything about the bookmarks bar that is specific to the current tab? Nothing. It is global. If you add a bookmark, each Chrome tab in each Chrome window will have the entry in its bookmarks bar. When a global control like this appears in the per-tab content area, it breaks conceptual integrity.

In a tabbed browser environment, there are always things that are global to the whole browser, and things that are local to a particular tab. By being innovative and merging the tab bar with the title bar, Chrome leaves no room for the former. It cannot say to the users that whatever they do in one tab will not affect the other tabs, because it will.

You may argue that this is the correct design for Chrome, given that Chrome spawns a new process for each tab, so a tab can stand on its own as a full application, and all controls can be local to the tab. Well, explain to me why there are 2 chrome.exe processes if I open 1 tab, and 3 chrome.exe processes if I open 2 tabs? That's right, because one of them is the global process. You can't run away from that. Anyway, tying the UI to the implementation details is usually a bad idea, so this has little merit to begin with.

The merging has other implications as well. In Opera, I can double click on the title bar to maximize/restore the window, and I can double click on the tab bar to open a new tab. Chrome can only cater to one of these, and it picked the title bar. That's definitely a sane decision, one that I believe will be made by most people when faced with the question. But why put yourself in the situation to make such a decision in the first place? Why can't we have both?

And what will happen when Chrome get ported to Linux? Unlike the Windows land, there are proper Windows Managers in Linux (ironically). A well-behaved Linux application doesn't mess with the title bar. I have hundreds of applications installed, and not one of them mess with the title bar. Even Dialo 2, when played in windowed mode, has a proper title bar. If Chrome team decides to make the Linux version a good citizen (e.g. relying on something like Netbook Plasma Theme), does that mean I can then double click on the tab bar? But that would make it inconsistent with the Windows version.

And what will happen when Chrome users with wide screens come to their senses and start demanding to have the tab bar at the left edge? Where shall the bookmarks bar be placed then, will the window be split horizontally first and then vertically, or the other way around? Has anyone in the Chrome team ever thought about this when the merging decision was made? Doesn't seem to.

Trying to be too clever with the title bar has put Chrome in a lose-lose situation when it comes to porting to multi-platforms and adapting to changes.

Meanwhile, if the reason behind the merging is to have more screen real-estate for the actual web page, it baffles me why Chrome still doesn't support the full-screen mode. The saving of 20 or so vertical pixels due to the merging is definitely nice, but if I am using a so-called netbook with a limited screen size of 1024x600, I'd definitely love to have the ability to use all 1024x600 pixels for browsing purpose.

Well, enough about the tab bar, let's move on to the next idea bastardized by Chrome, the speed dial. While the Chrome team can claim that they came across the novel idea of tab bar on top all on their own, anyone with or without a clue knows that the "Most visited" page in Chrome came from Opera's speed dial. As I mentioned earlier, this is a very simple idea, one that makes you go "Ah, why didn't I thought of this before" when you first use it. There is almost no room to implement it wrongly, but the Chrome team somehow managed to strike again.

Ok, imagine this. You have a phone that remembers the numbers you have dialed and how frequent you dialed them. Then, every time you press that big fat button on the phone, it will bring up a screen with the 9 most frequently dialed numbers. While in this screen (and only in this screen), pressing 1-9 will then dial the corresponded number for you.

How useful will that be? Well, the answer depends. If you are the kind of person such that every time you flip open the phone, you'd like to see who have you been calling most frequently before deciding who to call, then this feature is a godsend for you. If, however, you are the kind of person that do not have the aforementioned mental disease, this feature is totally useless.

The speed dial, in both phones and browsers, serves a useful purpose. It lets you put something you deem as important at a prominent place, and allows you to reach it with the least effort. It has nothing to do with frequency. You may have speed dial #1 associated with that particular girl's phone number, using it once a year just to confirm that she is not dead yet. Your speed dial, your choice.

In comparison, the most visited page is way smarter. It determines what appears on the page for you, because it is smarter than you. It determines the order things appear on the page for you, because it is smarter than you. You do not have the ability to quickly go to your top favorite site (e.g. sayap.com) by pressing CTRL + 1 from any tab, because you are not smart enough to determine the order. If, like most people, you have been using Google Search most frequently, then you have no choice but to crown it as the super universe page number one (pronounced with Japanese accent). If you just come across a fantastic site (e.g. sayap.com) after using Chrome for 6 months, you can't make it appear in the most visited page other than launching a Chrome DDOS attack to the site. Of course, the site owner would then have to take down the site, leaving you with another useless entry in the most visited page.

To be fair though, I believe that the most visited page feature did indirectly give us something very useful. Firstly, ask yourself this: how could such a useless feature get past user testing? Well, the only reasonable explanation goes like this. A bunch of guys were given Chrome to beta test for a week. After a week, in each of these guys Chrome installation, the most visited page was invariably filled with porn sites. This, of course, can be a major convenience, provided no one else will be using your computer. To overcome this shortcoming, the Chrome team gave birth to something that solves the common problem faced by at least 50% of the mankind -- the infamous incognito mode (a.k.a the porn mode). At this point, the testers became too busy to test this new feature (who can blame them), and nobody give a damn anymore to the most visited page, which got to stay in the browser. Makes perfect sense, isn't it ;)

So, to recap, the Chrome team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own (just read the last page of the comic if you disagree with this statement)

However, unlike Thom, my main beef with Chrome is not that the team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own. No, it is not.

My main beef with Chrome is that the team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, claimed them as their own, and still shamelessly regarded themselves as making some new open standards and asked others to follow suit and copy from them.

The way I see it, the only new standard set by Chrome is that it is now perfectly fine to steal ideas from others without credit, bastardize them however you want, and still feel good about yourself. Incidentally, this standard is being followed closely by the Safari team, as proven by Safari 4 Beta that comes with a combo tab/title bar that is completely unusable and a "Top Sites" page that apparently "will change to match your evolving tastes". Marvelous.

The Safari team deserves at least a pat on the back from Thom for a job well done.

P.S. This post may make it seems like I consider Chrome as a bad product. Actually, I think it is pretty good. If you work on Chrome, in particularly the backend components such as the multi-process architecture and the javascript engine, I think you are indeed very cool. If you work on Chrome and your name happens to be Ben Goodger or Chris DiBona, well, you sucks.

As a follow up to my previous post, I am going to rant about my poor experience with screenscraping. Although the xmltv grabber, in its current incarnation, works with listings from The Star and Astro, the script was initially written to target the official websites for TV3/NTV7/8TV/TV9 (Media Prima) and RTM1/RTM2 (RTM).

To understand why the idea was ditched, here's a sample line of html from TV3:

<td><a id="plcRoot_Layout_zoneCenter_ContentPlaceHolder_partPlaceholder_Layout_zoneScheduleContent_TV3ScheduleContent_ScheduleMain1_dlScheduleToday_ctl04_lnkShow" title="Date: Aug 19, 2008&lt;br>Time: 10:00 AM - 10:02 AM" class="ScheduleLink" onmouseover="this.T_STICKY=false;this.T_WIDTH=300;this.T_FONTCOLOR='#000000';this.T_FONTFACE='Verdana';this.T_PADDING=5;this.T_BGCOLOR='#FFFFFF';this.T_TITLE='BERITA TERKINI';this.T_STATIC=true;return escape('Date: Aug 19, 2008&lt;br>Time: 10:00 AM - 10:02 AM');" href="/Shows/MainNormal.aspx?MasterID=258&amp;ShowID=322&amp;MenuID=1&amp;TemplateID=3">BERITA TERKINI</a></td>

It contains an id that is 150 characters long, multiple unescaped closing angle brackets, and some funky onmouseover code. Truely thedailywtf.com material. Oh ya, the html file with little content approaches 100K in size.

TRWTF about Media Prima websites, however, is the lack of consistency. All 4 sites appear to be running the same ASP.NET app, but subtly, each one is different:

• It is Schedules.aspx on TV3 and NTV7, ScheduleToday.aspx on 8TV, and Schedule.aspx on TV9.

• To get today schedules, you need to pass in query string parameter view=today to TV3, NTV7, and TV9. 8TV, of course, doesn't need it.

• NTV7 only contains partial listing and will truncate shows that have been aired from the list. TV9 contains partial listing but doesn't truncate. TV3 and 8TV contain full listing and doesn't truncate. IMHO, Media Prima should change one of them to contain full listing with truncation. Then we will have a permutation.

• If you feel adventurous, you can probably get around the truncation by simulating ASP.NET's postback and using the lovely calendar widget that has number-of-days-since-2000-01-01 as its parameter. If you feel adventurous, and have too much time in your hands.

Bashing aside, one good thing about Media Prima is that they are not afraid to show you what's under the hood. I just checked the 8tv schedules and was presented with this error message, embedded in the page:

[Error loading the WebPart '8TVScheduleSubNavi']
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mediaprima\8tv\CMSWebParts\8TV\Schedule\8TVScheduleSubNavi.ascx(17): error BC30451: Name 'LinkHelperClass' is not declared.

Awesome.

In comparison, RTM website is surprisingly good.

• Both RTM1 and RTM2 pages are consistent to each other. This is a small feat, but I have to mention it.

• The date parameter follows ISO8601, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD, unlike Media Prima websites that expect 3 parameters for day, month, and year. Kudos to the developers.

• The page size is 6 times smaller compared to Media Prima.

• The listing follows the newspaper day (i.e. from morning until the next morning), rather than the actual day (i.e. from midnight to midnight). This is good usability.

• It has reliability issue at times -- RTM1 listing is blank since 2008-12-28.

As for Astro website, there is nothing much to talk about. Overall, it is just OK.

• Pages are consistent.

• The date parameter uses the format of DD-MON-YYYY.

• A day of schedules is splitted into 2 pages, one for AM, one for PM. This is cumbersome not only for the script to scrape, but also for an actual person to read.

• Things like No Transmission and Transmission Ends are included as shows with start time and duration. This isn't really necessary.

• The size of the page is 3 times bigger compared to RTM.

The Star website has its goods and bads, but still, it is the best among the bunch.

• Pages are consistent.

• The date parameter uses the format of MM/DD/YYYY. Ugh.

• The listing contains columns for description and episode. This is a major plus. However, the episode column contains a mix of English words and Arabic numerals. It has to be more consistent.

• The listing follows newspaper day (duh).

• It spells SpongeBob SquarePants correctly. Shame on you, Astro.

Lastly, the web designers for RTM/Media Prima/Astro/The Star really need to start learning how to use CSS to properly separate content from presentation. Seriously. Let's just start by giving a freaking id (that is less than 150 characters) to the freaking schedules tables, so that I don't have to rely on some bizzare bgcolor attributes to identify them. Amen.

Ever since I got mythtv up and running months ago, I have always wanted to use the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) feature. Unfortunately, getting tv schedules in a format understandable by mythtv (i.e. xmltv) is not so easy.

From a bit of googling, I found 2 (non-)solutions. The first one involves using tvxb through wine to grab tv schedules from Astro through screenscraping. Apparently, it doesn't work anymore, as the tvxb site is showing the following message:

All Astro satellite channels (No longer works - needs updating. 2008/10/12)

The other solution is a perl script written by Shahada Abubakar that also screenscrapes Astro listing. Like the first one, this solution has also ceased to be working, due to the flaky nature of screenscraping.

Of course, the googling and testing were just unnecessary foreplay. I was set at the beginning to come up with my own solution anyway. With the help of wonderful python libraries such as BeautifulSoup and lxml, I wrote a xmltv grabber that:

• can screenscrape either Astro or The Star listings for channels rtm1, rtm2, tv3, ntv7, 8tv, and tv9

• is functioning as of 2008-12-31

Here's the script: grabmy.py

To get it to work, install the requirements first:

easy_install BeautifulSoup lxml httplib2 python_dateutil

Then, run the script to generate a xmltv file:

python grabmy.py -f my.xml

Feed mythbackend with the file:

mythfilldatabase --file 1 my.xml

And finally, here's the EPG in its full glory if you channel-flip at 2am:

Parody of 最佳損友 by Jan Lamb

Lyrics:

朋友 佢有百幾個朋友
朋友 個個也好似朋友
奇怪 晚晚去facebook遊走
遊到凌晨 仍係唔夠

朋友 你送佢一個蓮藕
朋友 你送佢一塊雞柳
回禮 佢送你一杯紅酒
收咗紅酒 當你最佳好友

時時共你 facebook之中click通宵都不夠
我冇訓過覺 你有沒有
好多好玩東西facebook都有
add咗四百個group 盡情留言評論夠
日日夜夜用力擴闊宇宙
等班friend愛看佢個戶口
現實佢共你 有十個月冇聚頭
但上網佢叫你朋友...

問佢有沒有 確實也沒有
friend"能"friend未知電話 都係得電郵
陳舊電話薄 係最薄 冇facebook咁厚
返工你又有沒有 繼續搏命鬥
又玩又add 一路一路遊
人人在facebook 亦變做 佢brother老友
早知登記後 各自有 各自嘅地球
奇就奇在 你在佢 佢在佢戶口
每日留下片段與禮物與電郵
無謂卻唔會 想logout

有沒有 確實也沒有
friend"能"friend未知電話 都係得電郵
陳舊電話簿 係最薄 冇FaceBook咁厚
返工你又有沒有 繼續搏命鬥
賣出自己 比大家收購
人人在facebook "禁"兩"禁" 有一班老友
腸蛋仔佢仲有 十個 廿個 萬個老友

In the last few days, I got the chance to play with a bit of JavaScript at work. As someone who has near zero JavaScript experience, it appeared to me that it is a language with little conceptual integrity. Some examples:

• Objects are associative arrays, but unlike arrays, they don't have any helper function or attribute (because objects are associative arrays). It says a lot about the language design when arrays have reduce() while associative arrays do not even have length.

• There is no function overloading, and default parameter can't be specified either. Fear not - you are blessed with the magical arguments, and the warm and fuzzy feeling from coding a command line app.

• JavaScript 1.8 added a lambda notation that gave the braces another meaning. A pair of braces create an object. A pair of braces also form a code block. If your have a one-line function followed by an opening brace, you need a return. Otherwise, you don't.

• jQuery has a each function that associates a true return value as continue and a false return value as break. prototype has a each function that used to associate a $continue exception as continue and a $break exception as break. Desperately wanting a piece of "anonymous function does not always return a value" warning, it now associates any return value as continue.

• Python got PEP8, Java got code convention, JavaScript got sparse style guides that do not conform to each other. Nobody seems to referring to them anyway.

In short, there is no equivalent word for Pythonic in the land of JavaScript. As a programming language, JavaScript is just like ManBearPig, with limbs and body parts from different animals attached together at random to create the ferocious monster.

Not unlike ManBearPig, people easily get confused when it comes to defining JavaScript. Is it half man-bear, half pig? Or is it half man, half bear-pig? Look at this question posted at stackoverflow, seeking the real identity of JavaScript:

There have been some questions about whether or not JavaScript is an object-oriented language. Even a statement, "just becuase a language has objects doesn't make it OO ".

Is JavaScript an object oriented language?

And here's my favorite answer with a +8 (emphasis mine):

Javascript is a multi-paradigm language that supports procedural, object-oriented (prototype-based) and functional programming styles.

Half man, half bear, half pig. That's a ManBearPig in my book.

Of course, by rephrasing a little, we can get a more correct answer:

JavaScript is a programming language that looks pretty much object-oriented, but aspiring to be a functional one, yet being used the most to create procedural code.

Trying to clean up the image of JavaScript, Douglas Crockford kept telling us that JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language. Which is, of course, the same as saying ManBearPig is the world's most misunderstood animal. Duh. At least ManBearPig has a consistent name. No such luck with JavaScript.

Anyway, enough with the JavaScript bashing, which is not the point of this post. You see, this is all part of Al Gore's effort to spread ManBearPig awareness. Al Gore invented the Internet, which then gave birth to JavaScript that closely resembles the evilness of ManBearPig. He just wanted to subtlely tell the world how dangerous ManBearPig is, by giving us this reckless languauge called JavaScript. Thus, let me end this by saying:

"Thank you, Al Gore. You are super awesome."

One of the hottest topic recently is the controversial keynote delivered by GregKH regarding how little Canonical contributes to the Linux ecosystem. Dustin Kirkland, a Canonical employee, wrote a rebuttal by playing the "our penis company is so small" card and painting the criticsm from GregKH as an attack from a much bigger and established competitor.

As much as I love to see an underdog succeed, I don't buy Dustin's argument at all. Look, GregKH is a smart guy. Coming from a competing company, he would have expected this kind of attack. Thus, regardless of whether he did so conciously or not, the slides centered around Canonical versus Gentoo, not Canonical vesus Red Hat/Novell/IBM. Gentoo as a smaller player win or tie in all comparisons, rendering Dustin's argument worthless.

Anyway, in his futile attempt to further prove his point, Dustin showed us this masterpiece:

The fun part about Google Trend is that you can interpret it however you want. As a biased Gentoo user, I see that

• Ubuntu is doing well with noticeable spikes after released dates

• Linux is getting worse all the time

• If you combine their search volumes together, the whole pie is actually shrinking

Which is essentially what GregKH told us: Ubuntu is not helping the Linux ecosystem (actually, it's hurting, but let's try not to read into the graph too much).

Sigh. * shake head in disbelief *

Yesterday, James Reeves posted some Haskell code on slashdot and sort of challenged others to come up with equivalent solution in other languages:

listToForest :: Eq a => [[a]] -> Forest a
listToForest = map toBranch . groupBy ((==) `on` head) . filter (/= [])
           where toBranch = Node . (head . head) <*> (listToForest . map tail)

According to James, "assuming you know Haskell pretty well, [the code]'s fairly clear as well". He may be right, but for anyone who doesn't know Haskell, it looks downright scary. Anyway, what the code does is to convert some grid form of data (a list of lists in Python, e.g. rows of query result):

A I A
A I G
B D B
B W H

into some hierarchical form:

A -> I -> A
       -> G
B -> D -> B
  -> W -> H

Sounds easy? I thought so. After several failed attempts with Python, I finally realized the key for the Haskell code to be so concise was groupBy. And sure enough, Python got the equivalent in itertools.groupby. Nice. With that, here's a version in Python that is (hopefully) understandable by a mere mortal:

from itertools import groupby

def make_tree(data):
    return [[node, make_tree([x[1:] for x in iterator if x[1:]])]
            for node, iterator in groupby(data, lambda x: x[0]) if node]

>>> data = [['A', 'I', 'A'], ['A', 'I', 'G'], ['B', 'D', 'B'], ['B', 'W', 'H']]
>>> print make_tree(data)
[['A', [['I', [['A', []], ['G', []]]]]], ['B', [['D', [['B', []]]], ['W', [['H'
, []]]]]]]

With groupby, slicing the data is a piece of cake. We iterate through the iterator returned by groupby, chops everyone's head off, and passes the bodies as a list to the next recursive call. Simple, and get the job done.

Looking further into the documentation for itertools, I found izip and islice. Despite the naming, they are not made by Apple, though they are still cool. They basically allow you to zip and slice an iterator as if it's a list:

from itertools import groupby, islice, izip

def make_tree(data):
    return [[node, make_tree(izip(*islice(izip(*iterator), 1, None)))]
            for node, iterator in groupby(data, lambda x: x[0]) if node]

I am not sure if this iterator version performs better than the initial version, but I am pretty sure it is more dangerous, especially if the dataset is large, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, what James wanted to achieve is to then transform the tree into xml. Here's how to do so with my pseudo-tree:

indent = 4
def write_tag(tree, level=0):
    for node, children in tree:
        if children:
            print '%s<%s>' % (indent * level * ' ', node)
            write_tag(children, level+1)
            print '%s</%s>' % (indent * level * ' ', node)
        else:
            print '%s<%s/>' % (indent * level * ' ', node)

>>> tree = make_tree(data)
>>> write_tag(tree)
<A>
    <I>
        <A/>
        <G/>
    </I>
</A>
<B>
    <D>
        <B/>
    </D>
    <W>
        <H/>
    </W>
</B>

It's late and I need to sleep. To recap, the Haskell solution took 3 lines, and the Python solution took 3 lines. It's a draw. Peace. Let's all point to Java and laugh.

Here's how a normal person starts a blog:

1. Make a coin toss. Heads for wordpress, tails for blogger, middle for others.

2. Sign up.

3. Blog like a normal person.

Of course, blogging like a normal person is pretty boring. For one, if you blog like a normal person, you won't even get arrested under ISA. Boring. * yawn *

So here's how a real man starts a blog:

1. Spend a few days looking for a server that is cheap, fast, and has a reasonably not-slow connection to whatever 3rd world country that you happens to live in.

2. Call your credit card company to authorize the payment for the server, all the while resisting the urge to explain that the transaction is not for porn.

3. Spend a few days looking for a blog software that doesn't have any freaking release yet, let alone a stable one. Spend a few nights setting it up -- in a 3rd world country, you get slightly less sucky connection in the off-peak hours.

4. Realize that unstable really does mean unstable, and the software is just unuseable. Nonsense. A magical touch of hg revert -r 486 . makes it production ready, and you are good to go.

5. Blog about how to start a blog (to mask the fact that you have totally forgotten what you wanted to blog about in the first place).