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Apparently for me it is a myth that XMPP teams can make anything that works. And their site is logically down. I am gonna make my grumpy old man. It still take

Apparently for me it is a myth that XMPP teams can make anything that works. And their site is logically down. I am gonna make my grumpy old man. It still takes 1 day for an apprentice coder to : - make an irc bot; - program a rs232 port; - to draw a pitcure accessing a framebuffer; - to make hello world in Tcl/Tk that is centered horizontally and vertically in a bigger canvas. But seasoned devs cannot easily do the same with: - xmpp; - usb; - css/js... Either the quality of the devs is going down, or some progresses are not. ADDENDUM technical issues in jabber: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yGdLTF4J8DEJ:about.psyc.eu/Jabber&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yGdLTF4...

nextos 11y ago
This is so true. XMPP is quite complex. Complex to the point that bringing up a possible bug on either GTalk generating XML or Mcabber parsing it will leave some seasoned XMPP developers scratching their heads for a while, till they find the source of the problem. It's sad, because we don't have that many decentralized multiplatform protocols. I had high hopes for Signal, but so far there is just one closed server.
FreeFull 11y ago
I have a feeling that USB's complexity is there for good reasons. As far as xmpp and css/js go, there definitely is a lot of complexity that could have been avoided with a different initial design, although hindsight is 20/20.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
rprospero 11y ago
While I'll join you in demanding the kids off our lawns, I'm looking forward to seeing 120V AC run through the very last serial port. There's nothing like sending a message down the serial power and seeing nothing come back. So many wonderful ways to fail. Does this device require a null modem cable? When the manual said that all commands needed to be terminated with a '\n', did they actually mean "\r\n" and not mention it? Am I sending ASCII bytes to a piece of hardware that expects strings of UTF-16, without documenting it? Did one of the students swap the cables and I'm just talking to a deactivated motor controller? Has this particular serial cable finally bit the dust? Is the hardware expecting me to transmit data on pin seven for some ungodly reason? Did one of the students swap the the detector cable and the pre-amp high voltage line and fry the board I'm trying to talk to? These are all issues that I've had to contend with on serial communications. The big catch is that it's usually not just one of these problems, so I wind up needing to check every possible combination. Having a device on USB saves me a boatload of trouble. The devices hooks up to the computer through a single, standard type of cable. If I can see the device after I plug it in, it's a software problem. If I don't see it, there's a hardware problem. Just from the above scenarios, seeing the equipment NOT connect eliminates 75% of the phase space for the problem. If I DO see the hardware, I've cut out 96%. So much easier to debug with USB.
anon4 11y ago
Protocols are getting more complicated. Sometimes needlessly - XMPP; sometimes out of necessity - we can't let you poke bits in the framebuffer directly, because the graphics card is now this almost-blackbox superscalar coprocessor that only incidentally maybe has a display hooked to a tiny little region of memory that you could perhaps think of as a "framebuffer", but the framebuffer is actually not linear, but tiled in some weird way for performance. Actually making the complex and simple stuff coexist on the same system is a very... complicated challenge.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  So here's a question (and a personal manifesto) Would things be better if they were worse? That is, what if we gave a little bit less of a shit about optimizations and preferred simple over fast? We live in a world of magical black boxes that even experts in the field have trouble manipulating. We need to protect and promote the Freedom to Tinker and that means carefully considering when optimizations are really critical hindrances.

nextos 11y ago

This is so true. XMPP is quite complex. Complex to the point that bringing up a possible bug on either GTalk generating XML or Mcabber parsing it will leave some seasoned XMPP developers scratching their heads for a while, till they find the source of the problem. It's sad, because we don't have that many decentralized multiplatform protocols. I had high hopes for Signal, but so far there is just one closed server.

FreeFull 11y ago

I have a feeling that USB's complexity is there for good reasons. As far as xmpp and css/js go, there definitely is a lot of complexity that could have been avoided with a different initial design, although hindsight is 20/20.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

rprospero 11y ago

While I'll join you in demanding the kids off our lawns, I'm looking forward to seeing 120V AC run through the very last serial port. There's nothing like sending a message down the serial power and seeing nothing come back. So many wonderful ways to fail. Does this device require a null modem cable? When the manual said that all commands needed to be terminated with a '\n', did they actually mean "\r\n" and not mention it? Am I sending ASCII bytes to a piece of hardware that expects strings of UTF-16, without documenting it? Did one of the students swap the cables and I'm just talking to a deactivated motor controller? Has this particular serial cable finally bit the dust? Is the hardware expecting me to transmit data on pin seven for some ungodly reason? Did one of the students swap the the detector cable and the pre-amp high voltage line and fry the board I'm trying to talk to? These are all issues that I've had to contend with on serial communications. The big catch is that it's usually not just one of these problems, so I wind up needing to check every possible combination. Having a device on USB saves me a boatload of trouble. The devices hooks up to the computer through a single, standard type of cable. If I can see the device after I plug it in, it's a software problem. If I don't see it, there's a hardware problem. Just from the above scenarios, seeing the equipment NOT connect eliminates 75% of the phase space for the problem. If I DO see the hardware, I've cut out 96%. So much easier to debug with USB.

anon4 11y ago

Protocols are getting more complicated. Sometimes needlessly - XMPP; sometimes out of necessity - we can't let you poke bits in the framebuffer directly, because the graphics card is now this almost-blackbox superscalar coprocessor that only incidentally maybe has a display hooked to a tiny little region of memory that you could perhaps think of as a "framebuffer", but the framebuffer is actually not linear, but tiled in some weird way for performance. Actually making the complex and simple stuff coexist on the same system is a very... complicated challenge.

colechristensen 11y ago
So here's a question (and a personal manifesto) Would things be better if they were worse? That is, what if we gave a little bit less of a shit about optimizations and preferred simple over fast? We live in a world of magical black boxes that even experts in the field have trouble manipulating. We need to protect and promote the Freedom to Tinker and that means carefully considering when optimizations are really critical hindrances.