I’d had grandiose plans for a series of blog posts over the Triduum this year, but I never finished Good Friday’s post in time and it was downhill from there. Eh well. However, while I’m neither Anglican, Episcopal, nor a great fan of Rowan Williams, I recently read the sermon he gave this past Easter Sunday and thought it was unusually good. It’s no longer Easter, but it’s still the Easter season, so I may as well share:
This is the awesomest ad:
I don’t use proprietary software very often; one of the few pieces of proprietary software that I do use with some frequency is the proprietary Adobe Flash Player plugin. On a daily basis, it reminds me why I try to avoid proprietary software in the first place.
One illustrative point: I’m sure most people who have used the plugin on Linux experienced occasional browser lockups when exiting a page which used Flash. I experience it frequently, and everyone I’ve asked has had the same issue. It’s been a problem with the 9.0 releases of the plugin for a long time, but Adobe’s never done anything about it. Either they don’t know, or they don’t care.
I can’t rule out not knowing. I’d love to report the bug, but Adobe doesn’t provide an obvious way to do that without going through their “complimentary product support” channels—which require a registered Adobe product. All I want to do is put in a PR! Most open source projects are more receptive to bug reports (and that isn’t saying much).
Of course, if I did put in a PR I couldn’t really be more specific than
“the flash player sometimes deadlocks when tearing down a plugin instance,
locking up the entire browser.” I don’t have the source available to me
to examine the issue in any more detail, and the EULA I agreed to when
installing the plugin is rather stringent about reverse-engineering, so
it’s not like I could legitimately go in with gdb to see what the deal
is either.
This is hardly the only annoyance, either. Non-IA32 platforms have been left in the dust for a long time, and in recent revisions of the 9.0 plugin for Linux, there’s at least an additional livelock, worsening memory leaks, and severe performance regressions in the video pipeline. (Incidentally, if you’re having memory problems with Firefox, try removing the Flash plugin and see the kind of difference it makes.)
If the Flash plugin were open source and the worst issues had remained unresolved for this long, I’d try to resolve some of them myself. I’ve got a decent amount of experience with concurrent programming, and more likely than not the issues are fairly straightforward. This is not because I feel any special obligation to Adobe to do their work for them. I’d be doing this for my own sake, and for the sake of the other people who have to deal with this stuff all the time.
Adobe’s decision to open source their Tamarin JavaScript runtime had me hopeful that they would eventually also open source the Flash runtime (at least just the plugin), but their more recent decision to incorporate DRM into Flash is discouraging. They could still open source the non-DRM portions, but most likely my only hope for an open source Flash plugin is something like Gnash—which I can’t safely contribute to now that I’ve agreed to Adobe’s EULA for the proprietary plugin. In the long term the DRM decision is also likely to cut open source players off at the knees since their ability to play the most popular Flash content will be strictly limited. If Adobe isn’t going to give us an open platform to play Flash content, nobody else can either—is that it? Beacuse that’s the appearance it gives. You get it from Adobe, or not at all—and there’s an awful lot that Adobe simply isn’t providing.
Thanks Adobe; you’ve managed to alienate another developer. I’m going to stick to authoring software and content for platforms whose vendors don’t play these kinds of stupid control games, so I don’t lock my own users into your twisted little world. Sun’s entirely open platform is looking much better these days, and they’ve finally got people working to address the gross deficiencies of Java applets that gave Flash its opening in the first place. I’ve done Flash development in the past—the reason Flash dominates right now is not because it’s great platform to use and develop for, but rather only because the alternatives have been so much worse. That circumstance is, thankfully, beginning to change.
Garritan has put together an online version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s classic book on orchestration. With commentary on the original text, and the ability to play back score fragments and follow along in your browser if you have Flash, it’s a really awesome resource.
PantoGraph is a prototype 3d rendering engine that outputs SVG and is implemented as a Blender Python script.
(Hat Tip: BlenderNation)
My PGP keys expired recently; the new public key is available from the
usual place. The
fingerprint of the new key should be
E829 4985 45A1 5870 7239 A6FF 1293 0555 EF78 AF6E.
Those with whom I’ve been maintaining key trust relationships, see me offline about signing.
SoundManager 2 is a rather nice BSD-licensed JavaScript library which employs a small Flash shim to provide a straightforward JavaScript API for sound playback.
Use responsibly, kids.
Intel’s go parallel subsite on DevX has a rather nice article up about designing threaded applications. Highly recommended.
I’d also suggest browsing around the go parallel section itself; it’s not bad reading even if it has an (understandable) bias towards Intel tools and technologies.
(Hat Tip: Jeff Turcotte)
There’s a new interview with me up on InfoQ about Ruby concurrency, Rubinius, and the Actor Model.