AOLserver Chat Logs

2007/03/22

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IRC [10:11] <kriston> It occured to me yesterday that PHP does not load in all its libraries into memory.
IRC [10:12] <kriston> So I guess I miss this AOLserver thing.
IRC [10:41] <Dossy> :)
IRC [10:41] <Dossy> Hey, Kris.
IRC [10:41] <kriston> Whassup
IRC [10:41] <Dossy> Not much. Busy. Low motivation.
IRC [10:42] <Dossy> Too many things to do with AOLserver, not enough time.
IRC [10:42] <Dossy> Yeah, PHP makes me sad.
IRC [10:42] <kriston> What in the world could there be left to do with AOLserver.
IRC [10:42] <kriston> And for what gain?
IRC [10:42] * kriston sobs quietly
IRC [10:42] <kriston> I'm only curious.
IRC [10:43] <Dossy> Improve the nsdb interface to properly handle binary data. Update AOLserver so that it does the Right Thing(tm) with regard to Tcl_Obj internal UTF-8 encoded representations.
IRC [10:43] <kriston> Oh... My... God...
IRC [10:43] <Dossy> There's lots of places where Tcl_ExternalToUtf() is needed.
IRC [10:43] <kriston> I didn't know nsdb still doesn't do binary. It's not 1996 anymore.
IRC [10:44] <Dossy> :)
IRC [10:44] <Dossy> Well, it "does" but ... not the right way.
IRC [10:44] <kriston> As you can see I hold a dim view. Sorry.
IRC [10:44] <Dossy> It's cool. So do I. But, that's why I'm still interested--there's lots of room for improvement, still.
IRC [10:45] <Dossy> And, AOLserver with its few inconvenient warts is still a pleasure compared to dealing with PHP, trying to scale Rails (or Ruby in general), or dealing with mod_perl.
IRC [10:45] <kriston> As long as you still enjoy it.
IRC [10:45] <kriston> Oh, wait, you said something about low motivation.
IRC [10:46] <kriston> I dunno ever since they rehosted AOL Mail into some other platform I guess it was all over for AOLserver.
IRC [10:46] <Dossy> low motivation is not AOLserver-specific.
IRC [10:46] <Dossy> I'm having serious existential angst now.
IRC [10:46] <kriston> Like fear of death and why do we build roads and buidlings because we're all gonna die some day anwyay?
IRC [10:46] <Dossy> for "all over for AOLserver" there's still a ton of it running.
IRC [10:46] <Dossy> Not specifically those issues, but yes.
IRC [10:47] <kriston> Yah I know I have a little thinger on my web browser that tells me what everything is running.
IRC [10:47] <kriston> So I'm pretty keen on who's running what. It's interesting.
IRC [10:47] <Dossy> I'd love to see AOLserver reach a point where I can honestly say "more AOLserver runs outside of AOL than inside it."
IRC [10:47] <kriston> You'll get past that.
IRC [10:47] <Dossy> The startup I'm working for/with now ships a physical appliance. I'd love to get AOLserver on it ... :)
IRC [10:47] <kriston> Eww.
IRC [10:48] <kriston> There are great embedded systems that you could use.
IRC [10:48] <Dossy> It sure beats watching them run apache+libraries galore+etc. in 128MB footprint of embedded hardware that's already tight on space.
IRC [10:48] <kriston> The biggest obstacles will be getting the threading working in a tiny memory space with a weak MMU.
IRC [10:48] <kriston> What platform is it? Many of them don't even have threads to being with.
IRC [10:49] <Dossy> Linux.
IRC [10:49] <Dossy> ARM.
IRC [10:49] <Dossy> Custom hardware.
IRC [10:49] <kriston> Well there you are, threads, a good strong MMU, nice 32-bit math, not bad at all. Is it ARM9 or something more weird?
IRC [10:50] <Dossy> ARM9 in the next board that's currently in prototype.
IRC [10:50] <Dossy> The previous board may also be ARM9.
IRC [10:50] <Dossy> (previous == currently in the field)
IRC [10:51] <kriston> single core?
IRC [10:52] <kriston> If the new AOLserver is the long-talked-about add-on to Tcl instead of its "own thing" then it would be really cool to get working on that.
IRC [10:52] <Dossy> yeah, single core.
IRC [10:53] <Dossy> yeah, eventually it'd be nice to do: tclsh; "package require aolserver"
IRC [10:53] <Dossy> nsd start -threads 10 ...
IRC [10:53] <kriston> But if an apache solution already runs it should be a 2-hour project to build and get AOLserver running a hello world program on that platform.
IRC [10:54] <Dossy> Sure.
IRC [10:54] <Dossy> the question isn't "platform" but what applications we can build and ship
IRC [10:55] <Dossy> my assertion is building thin little background tasks that are schedule by aolserver are a better way to go than some nasty cronjob wake-and-poll crap
IRC [10:55] <Dossy> having simple tasks that can communicate with other tasks through nsv and concurrency controls (sema, events, etc.) is better than a crapload of tmpfiles
IRC [10:55] <Dossy> esp. since the storage is solid state, etc.
IRC [10:56] <kriston> how do you avoid burning out the eeprom bits that can only be written about 300,000 times?
IRC [11:01] <Dossy> avoid writing to them
IRC [11:01] <Dossy> ?
IRC [11:02] <kriston> I assume /tmp is in ram, otherwise the part of the disk-on-chip or whatever that gets written too much wears out.
IRC [11:03] <Dossy> yeah.
IRC [11:04] <Dossy> and/or there's some flash memory onboad
IRC [11:04] <Dossy> er onboard
IRC [11:04] <Dossy> which, again, has limited lifespan, but ...
IRC [11:06] <Dossy> So, what are you doing/working on these days?
IRC [11:07] <kriston> After some random shit government contractors and failed dotcoms I work for Akamai now.
IRC [11:09] <kriston> ...in the Public Sector Custom Engineering group. I get to keep my top secret clearance. It's all good.
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IRC [11:36] <Dossy> Cool. Sounds like you're having fun. That's great.
IRC [11:49] <Dossy> Well, you're welcome to hang out here on IRC. Folks come and go and talk periodically. :)
IRC [12:46] <partymola> hell yeah!
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