Moonbase

atomic_ops

MenTaLguY — 2008-05-13T16:44:59+00:00

atomic_ops is a library of portable primitives for building lockfree multithreaded programs in C, by Hans Boehm of libgc fame. The basic atomic operations portion of the library is MIT-licensed, although it also includes a GPLed addon library which provides nearly lockfree stacks and a lockfree malloc implementation.

Adobe Does Not Suck

MenTaLguY — 2008-05-10T19:31:08+00:00

(This is a follow-on to my post The Adobe Flash Player Deadlock)

I’ve been very pleased to see that, after my original post on March 9, many of my criticisms have been addressed, and I’ve learned that some were simply founded on poor communication. Let’s run through some of them.

Criticism: There is no way for the general public to report flash player bugs.

Originally, your options for reporting bugs were posting comments on a certain blog, or filling out the Adobe feature request form at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish. The blog wasn’t particularly encouraging since few of the issues raised there got addressed or even received a positive response (I’m also not linking to the blog because towards the end the exchanges between frustrated Linux users and a beleaguered Adobe project manager make both sides look needlessly bad).

I had also not been aware of the wishlist form as an accepted avenue for reporting bugs, but the current version of the page makes that a little more clear and easier to find in a search on Adobe’s site. However, the wishlist form still isn’t very ideal. Rather than a black hole to send “wishes” into, I’d really been hoping for a public bug tracker where you can actually see the fate of your problem report. Even Sun, in their most obnoxious days, had such a thing for Java.

Thankfully, as of April 8, Adobe finally has a public bug tracker for flash: http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer.

This criticism is now completely addressed.

(Many thanks to Marnen for filling me in on this point.)

Criticism: Adobe is not devoting sufficient resources to the Linux Flash player for it to remain viable.

I had based this criticism on Adobe’s public statements and history so far. After an initially promising release of Flash 9 (Linux Flash had previously languished buggily at verison 7 for an extended time), subsequent Flash 9 releases were increasingly infrequent and full of new regressions. Adobe was supposedly going to make a big push for Linux with the release of AIR, but when Adobe actually released AIR 1.0 in February, they omitted support for the Linux platform since (according to the AIR FAQ at the time) they had to “wait on the core Flash Player’s support for Linux to be finalized.” All these things together painted a very ominious picture for the future of Flash on Linux.

On March 30, however, Adobe released an alpha version of AIR for Linux, showing that they were making a serious effort to support the platform. I suspect that the reason for the falloff in Flash 9 support is the result of Adobe reallocating programming resources to Flash 10/AIR, although it would be nice if Adobe publicly announced their plans the same way that they did for 64-bit Photoshop, so people wouldn’t be left to conclude that, absent released software, they didn’t have any serious plans at all.

This criticism is probably unfounded to the extent that Adobe is doing the best they reasonably can as long as they are not accepting outside help by opening development of their own player (which itself would require a significant initial investment of resources that Adobe may not have).

However…

Criticism: There is no finalized release of the Flash player for Linux which is stable enough to use for development work.

It’s still the case that the latest Flash Player 9 takes out my browser multiple times an hour if I use it heavily (FlashBlock has helped mitigate this issue for casual use). Since Linux is my preferred development platform, there’s no way I could see myself developing for it until this changes.

(A few people have asked me why I think Adobe has to be altrustic and expend resources supporting Linux. They don’t, of course. But then I don’t have to be altrustic and bend over backwards to develop for an RIA platform that doesn’t have good support for the development platform I normally use either. Remember that the original post was about why I personally didn’t want to develop for Adobe’s platform.)

For now this criticism remains unaddressed, although with the alpha release of AIR for Linux I have hope that it might be addressed this year.

Criticism: Adobe is putting up roadblocks for open source Flash player implementations.

Even when Adobe finally published specifications for the flash format, they carried restrictions which prevented using them to implement your own flash player. Interviews with Adobe employees in the past had also indicated that Adobe was concerned about retaining control of its platform. Worse, in March they had announced their intent to make DRM part of the flash platform, introducing an additional obstacle for Open Source players.

However, just this month (May), Adobe launched the Open Screen Project and removed the restrictions on the use of their specifications. Some have called this a PR stunt, since the way it worked out Adobe hadn’t relaxed the restrictions on the specifications until all the information published in them had been reverse-engineered by the developer community anyway. However, I think calling it a PR stunt misses an important point—the Open Screen Project is specifically a signal that Adobe is no longer directly hostile to alternate Flash Player implementations.

This criticism is largely addressed; DRM remains an issue on the horizion, but Adobe’s public stance against non-Adobe players has clearly changed.

Criticism: Adobe doesn’t consider broad platform support for Flash to be important.

Historically, aside from Flash Lite (which is fairly different to the regular Flash platform), Adobe’s official support for Flash has mostly extended to PPC OS X and x86-32 OS X and Windows. There’s been the rather flaky and inconsistent support for x86-32 Linux (and the zombie-like revival of some version of the PPC Flash 7 plugin for the Wii), but that’s about it. The thing is, until you are able to support a certain number of platforms, the incremental cost of supporting each additional platform is extremely high. There’s essentially a knee in the graph, and Adobe is still quite far from reaching it.

As Sun discovered with Java, truly broad platform support is really only possible with an open source implementation of the platform. The community-developed zero-assembler Hotspot has enabled the JVM to be brought to a wide variety of new platforms which didn’t have Sun Java before with extremely little initial effort, and soon may start leveraging LLVM for cross-platform JIT performance. Flash will not be able to catch up in terms of platform support until at least one solid open source implementation of the Flash platform is available. On the evidence of the Open Screen Project, and their previous open-sourcing of the Tamarin runtime, I think Adobe finally realizes this.

I think this criticism was unfounded. Their release of Tamarin in November ought to have been a clue to me that they were waking up about this.

Blogging Again

MenTaLguY — 2008-05-10T17:18:28+00:00

Job stress had really gotten to me the past couple months, to the point where I really didn’t have the time or energy to blog. Now that I’ve made some needed changes, I’ve got quite a lot of ideas piled up to blog about. I will try to pace myself and do it in small chunks, to avoid a yeggesplosion.

Rowan Williams' Easter Sermon

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-28T03:32:19+00:00

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:

The Archbishop of Canturbury’s Easter Day Sermon

Monster - Legs

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-21T02:45:11+00:00

This is the awesomest ad:

Monster – Legs

The Adobe Flash Player Deadlock

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-10T00:19:56+00:00

(Update: see Adobe Does Not Suck for an update on these criticisms.)

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.

The Garritan Interactive Principles of Orchestration

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-09T05:43:41+00:00

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

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-08T09:24:32+00:00

PantoGraph is a prototype 3d rendering engine that outputs SVG and is implemented as a Blender Python script.

(Hat Tip: BlenderNation)

New Public Key

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-08T05:23:14+00:00

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.

Money Counting Styles Around the World

MenTaLguY — 2008-03-05T04:11:57+00:00

On YouTube