A question came up at our Seattle scripting meetup about script debugging.

How does the scripting environment you use, PHP, Python, Perl, Javascript, etc, have debugging features? Can you set breakpoints, follow, go in and out of functions, look up the values of variables, watch variables change as the script is running?

What other debugging features do you have? What features would you like to have that you don't?

Obviously you should say what environment you use.

 9/9/2010; 3:41:29 PM.   .

It's been a long time since we looked at the object database in Frontier, so today Brent wrote a little app that checks out how the hash function distributes objects across the buckets for each table in the database.

Here's how the function works. It takes the first and last characters of the name of the object, adds them together and mods the result by the number of buckets, which is 11.

As the OPML Editor started up it made 125,091 calls to the hash function, and the results were distributed among the buckets as follows.

0: 14,792

1: 3,840

2: 9,629

3: 8,440

4: 15,368

5: 11,306

6: 7,561

7: 17,605

8: 13,074

9: 13,651

10: 9,815

This looks pretty random to us.

If anyone reading this is an expert in hash function trivia, if you have an opinion, please chime in.

 9/9/2010; 3:04:10 PM.   .

They still have card catalogs at the Seattle Public Library.

 9/9/2010; 2:25:02 PM.   .

This morning a truly important announcement from Apple that they will allow other development platforms to run on IOS. This is an unqualified good thing.

The timing couldn't be more interesting for me, because I'm in Seattle for two days working with Brent Simmons on the OPML Editor code base. One of the things we discussed yesterday was producing an IOS version, but realizing that it could not be distributed through Apple to end users (it could be distributed to developers) because it is a development environment. We plotted out a long roadmap that would take us through Linux to get to Android to try to get to a handheld environment, even though we would both vastly prefer to do this work on Apple's hardware. At today's meeting I'm going to suggest we skip the long road and make a beeline for IOS.

It's almost as if we're part of some dance. That Apple made this announcement right now makes what has already been a very productive and interesting meeting potentially much more so. Now the challenge is to see how we can take advantage of the new opening.

Still diggin!

 9/9/2010; 10:16:57 AM.   .

Spent some time yesterday in the main public library in Seattle.

BTW, due to a glitch in my CMS, the pointers to a piece about a paradox didn't make it into the index.

 9/9/2010; 9:40:38 AM.   .