I found a pretty interesting paper the other day about Failure-Oblivious Computing. The idea is simple: when a program encounters an error, simply have your runtime return some garbage value instead of crashing, throwing an exception, or go into error-handling mode.

If you’re a programmer, this suggestion will likely cause you to recoil in horror because the very idea that your functions will be getting back undefined values seems contradictory to everything we’ve been taught. However, it’s hard argue with the results: the authors tested eight fairly well known programs, from mail user agents to Apache and Samba, and in every case the failure-oblivious version arguably did the right thing — and did a better job — than the ‘safe’ versions that would throw an exception or shutdown in a controlled manner when they hit unexpected territory. Read the paper if you’re doubtful about this.

This idea is somewhat in opposition to the Erlang philosophy of Let it crash. However, in both these scenarios, the underlying motivation is the same: large complex systems will inevitably have bugs, and both philosophies not only plan for it, but code to ensure that the system as a whole keeps running in the face of serious errors.

It’s quite easy to react emotionally to these ideas and say that it’s all just too dangerous and unpredictable — coders have always had it hammered into them to check for error values and exceptional conditions. However, there’s also something to be said about the brittleness of software vs more organic systems: the latter will often recover successfully in the face of unexpected conditions, whereas software will simply break. Failure-oblivious computing may not be the answer, but it’s a pretty good first research step. It would be an interesting follow-up experiment to modify the runtimes of the dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby and make them return sentry values instead of throwing exceptions. How many dynamic programs would continue to run successfully rather than die with some weird programmer-centric error?

If you have a VPN at your workplace, chances are good that it’s one of those Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrator things, which seem to be an industry standard for VPN equipment. Chances are also good that you’ve likely been forced to use the evil, evil proprietary Cisco VPN client, which has been known to be a source of angsta majora for Mac OS X and Linux users. (And if you think Windows users have it good, think again: the Cisco VPN client completely hosed a friend’s 64-bit Windows XP system to the point where it wouldn’t even boot.)

Enter vpnc, an open-source VPN client that works just fine on both Mac OS X and Linux. Linux people, I assume that you know what you’re doing — all you should need is a TUN/TAP kernel driver and you’re good to go. Mac OS X folks, you’ll need to be comfortable with the UNIX terminal to use it; unfortunately no GUI has been written for it yet. If you’re a Terminal geek, here’s a small guide for you:

• Download and install a tun/tap driver for Mac OS X.
• Download and install libgcrypt. If you have DarwinPorts (neé MacPorts) installed, simply do “port install libgcrypt”. Otherwise, grab it from the libgcrypt FTP site and install it manually.
• You’ll need to check out the latest version of the vpnc code from its Subversion repository: “svn checkout http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/”. The latest official release (0.3.3, as of this writing) will not compile properly on Mac OS X, which is why you need the code from the Subversion trunk.
• After doing the standard “make && make install” mantra, run your Cisco VPN .pcf profile through the pcf2vpnc tool and save the resulting .vpnc file in /etc/vpnc.
• ./vpnc YourProfile.vpnc, and that should be it. While you’re debugging it, the --nodetach and --debug 1 options may be useful.

Muchas gracias to Mario Maceratini at Rising Sun Pictures for hunting down vpnc for me.

Welcome to the new-look Algorithm.com.au, redone from scratch. I’m now using RapidWeaver to do the web site rather than my 5-year-old installation of Movable Type; thank you MT, you served me well for that time! All my old blog entries have been imported across, although the URLs for the entries have all changed, sorry.

Apart from the obvious look’n’feel changes to the blog, I’ve finally put all my mixes online in the Music section, and added a small section on the code that I’ve released. (It’s not much code, so don’t be too disappointed when you visit there — but there’s lots more coming in the future!) So, have a look around if you’re bored, kill some time, and have the appropriate amount of fun.

Do you work with audio and video on the road? How does an astounding 640GB of storage on your laptop sound, with performance nearly meeting that of a desktop?

1. Buy a MacBook Pro, which can net you 160GB of internal hard disk storage.
2. Rip out the internal DVD drive and replace it with another 160GB internal hard drive, via an MCE OptiBay.
3. RAID-0 your internal 320GB of storage, for twice the read/write performance.
4. Buy a LaCie Little Big Disk, which will net you another 320GB of RAID-0 storage that’s totally bus-powered over FireWire 800.

Wallah, 640GB on the road. Of course, if you’re a serious performance freak, you’d probably opt for the 7200rpm 100GB drives instead of the 5400rpm 160GB ones. But that’ll only net you a meagre 400GB of storage instead of 640GB.

Your batteries might only last for about 30 minutes, but hey, it’s probably still longer than one of those Dell XPS Gaming laptops, and you can actually carry a MacBook Pro around without needing a truck.

You know that Which Operating System Are You quiz?

Well, they’re gonna have to expand it to include all six versions of Windows Vista, whenever that decides to be unleashed unto the world. Hello, six versions? With the starter edition only being able to use 256MB of RAM and run three applications at once? Even eWeek says that “you would be better off running Windows 98”. You know what, instead of choosing between Vista Starter, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate, how about I just run Mac OS X or Linux instead, you stupid tossers?

Jesus, the excellent lads over at Microsoft Research (who produce some truly world-class work) must be just cringing when they hear their big brother company do totally insane stuff like this.

Do you like Mac OS X?

Do you like… Vim?

If so, your prayers may just have been answered: see the Vi Input Manager Plugin by Jason Corso. Vi-style key bindings in any Mac OS X text input area? Schyeah baby. As Jason says:

Right now, you should be thinking — “you mean the editor in XCode will behave like Vi?” Answer: Yes.

It’s open source too. Nice work Jason; let the hacking begin!

I read somewhere a long time ago that the cable connectors for IEEE 1394 (better known as Firewire) were inspired by the connectors that Nintendo used for their game consoles. This assertion now seems to be on Wikipedia, so it must be true:

The standard connectors used for FireWire are related to the connectors on the venerable Nintendo Game Boy. While not especially glamorous, the Game Boy connectors have proven reliable, solid, easy to use and immune to assault by small children.

Clever. The 6-pin design for Firewire cables is great: absolutely impossible to plug in the wrong way, and you won’t damage a thing even if you try really hard to plug it in the wrong way. There are no pins exposed on the connector that can be broken, unlike, say, those damn 9-pin serial or VGA cables (or even worse, SCSI cables, ugh). It’s like the Firewire was designed by Jonathan Ive. (I dunno if Ive designed the iPod dock connector, but that’s definitely not as robust as a Firewire one.)

Yay for good industrial design.

Note to self: Before thinking your DVD drive is broken because it apparently can’t burn data DVDs properly, try another brand of recordable DVDs!

One of the features of the new video iPod (the “Generation 5.5” one) is that it handles videos bigger than 640×480 just fine. This shouldn’t be surprising for geeks who own the older video iPod that plays 320×240 video, since the alpha geeks will know that the older video iPods could play some videos bigger than 320×240 just fine.

A nice side-effect of this is that if you are ripping DVDs to MPEG-4, you can very likely rip them at native resolution: I had zero problems playing Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica on a new video iPod, and it had a native resolution of 704×400. (Note: This is with a standard MPEG-4 video profile, not H.264 baseline low-complexity.) This is pretty cool, since you can now hook up a little video iPod direct to a big-ass TV and know that video resolution is no longer a differentiating factor between DVDs and MPEG-4 video. Now if only the iPod had component video connectors available…