In Re:

CrossOver Chromium vs. Firefox 3 – Javascript performance results

Business, Firefox, Google, Ubuntu No Responses »

Sep 152008

An interesting thing happened on my way to the web today. While reading through my rss feeds, I came across a story about CrossOver doing a Proof of Concept port of Chromium to CX. Interesting since the mighty “g” can’t seem to get it together for Linux. I’ve already downloaded and played with Chromium at work on my XP box and was impressed with the speed. It seemed much snappier than FF3.

So being an overly curious bugger, I downloaded the deb pkg for Ubuntu32. Yeah, it looks pretty rough — but what the hey, it’s a PoC right? So, I thought maybe a little speed test is called for, so I googled “javascript test” and my cloud brain returned, “Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark“.

So I fired it up in the cxChromium port and then it the standard FF3 on Ubuntu. Here is what I saw for cxChromium. I then swing over with FF3 and get these results. Javascript in FF3 is 2.44x slower than cxChromium. Man oh Man, is the v8 javascript engine a hummer.

Google App Engine — Auto-Increment vs. UUIDs

Google App Engine, Python No Responses »

Apr 272008

App Engine is a pretty dramatic thought departure for lots of programmers who are used to writing an app that runs on a single server and access a single database. Case in point, there has been a recurring topic of auto-increment fields on the App Engine list — people trying to implement their own version of it since it is not a native datastore type.

Using an auto-increment field is not the way to go. It is viable when you only have 1 database but the datastore for your app is going to/can be replicated out to other machines. This would mean that their exists times, when datastore’ != datastore” — over time datastore’ would be sync’d with datastore” so that datastore’ == datastore” — this would lead one to believe that there will be times when the idea of an auto-increment field will not be synchronizable or that the result of the synchronization would be less than satisfactory. My belief that auto-increment fields are the wrong idea in this environment is strengthened by the fact that they are not offered as an intrinsic datatype.

The way to go, in my opinion, is to use UUIDs. (see links below)
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-uuid.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4122.html

Greedy Coin Changer

Python No Responses »

Apr 262008

Noah Gift over on O’Reilly OnLamp Blog has an article on building a greedy coin changer. That is, given a value, say 71 cents, calculate the fewest coins needed to make the amount. He had listed a number of solutions, but I felt I could do it a bit more pythonic.

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""implement a greedy coin changer, returning the
fewest coins to make the change requested."""
#coin_list can be expanded to include silver dollars
# and 50 cent pieces by just expanding the coin list
# to [100,50,25,10,5,1] the reulting answer
#structure will modify itself to reflect 

coin_list = [25,10,5,1]
change_requested = .71
remaining = change_requested * 100
change_returned = []    #result structure

for coin in coin_list:
    num_coins,remaining =  divmod(remaining,coin)
    change_returned.append(int(num_coins))

print change_returned
print remaining

The benefits of this version, are no conditional logic is needed, the coin structure can be modified and the answer will modify itself accordingly.

Google App Engine — Runs on Python

Business, Google, Python No Responses »

Apr 082008

Now this is truly an interesting development. Google’s just announced App Engine is sure to super-charge the Python community and convert a number of disillusioned developers of other languages in to Pythonistas. There have been lots of interesting comments floating in the blogosphere about what this could mean.

I think it is a great opportunity on a smaller scale than anyone might imagine. Sure, this could serve as the platform for the next YouTube type social-2.x site, but what I think this really means, is that Google is rounding out the Google Apps for Domains by giving the ability to create something more than a brochure-ware style site offered by their current Sites for Google Apps.

Many are looking for Google to use this as an opportunity to expand advertising revenue, and that is certainly possible for widely popular webX.x sites but what they really needed is another tool/knife to hold to the competition’s throats. Looking at the tea leaves in the bottom of my glass, I see something more akin to a SharePoint attack; Going after the S in SMB market.

App Engine allows for authenticating users via Google system, how much longer until we can interact with other Google services in a similar fashion?? Calendaring, GTalk, etc — I’m not talking mashups, something much more refined.