Solipsism Gradient

We’ve spent a couple of excellent days at our friend’s bed & breakfast near Verona. I’ve spent a few hours redoing their site in Sandvox, which I hadn’t really used much before; it’s a very cool app, although it takes a few minutes to get the hang of its use of “pagelets”.

They’re still in the age of dialup for now, I’ve spent some time downloading a couple of thousand e-mails, and even lost a few to an Eudora crash… so if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t answered, sorry. I’ll try to catch up when we get back.

We’re off again tomorrow to Savona to catch another ship, and will be back home before the end of the month. Stay tuned.

On board the Costa Mediterranea, using their ruinously expensive (30 Euros per hour) satellite connection. All is well, I’ll have more news on the weekend.

We’re also packing for yet another trip. If all goes well, we’ll be in Milano (Italy) early on Sunday, catch a train to Venezia, and from there start the first of two Mediterranean cruises. In between we’ll visit friends in Verona. Back around the end of November…

Of course, I’ll take my trusty laptop and plan to make excellent progress on the XRay II project. So stay tuned for developments.

Well, WWDC was over yesterday, a bit too abruptly for my taste. Even more abruptly than usual, they started pushing people out of Moscone at 12:30 sharp, and I somehow had counted on the labs being open until 1PM.

As it stands, several people I hadn’t had a chance to met did turn up on the last minute, and we had to have a somewhat uncomfortable short chat at the doors. I think that Apple should have a long lunch on the last day, closing the doors not before 2PM. Or reschedule the (to me, largely useless) Beer Bash for Friday afternoon.

My feelings about the conference are best expressed by the famous Gary Larson cartoon “My brain is full”. Well, it may not be full now, but it certainly felt like it during the first 3 days. So much to learn, or even to glance over to see if it will apply to what I’m doing.

That said, we’ve had a day to relax, do a final stroll around San Francisco, and get our stuff packed in a reasonably TSA-compliant way. I bought Amit Singh‘s magnum opus, “Mac OS X Internals” and it contains even more information. Whew. But I’m certain all this has been an excellent investment.

At least, this time, I won’t have a significant e-mail backlog and will be able to get right back to work on Tuesday, after sleeping off the jetlag. I made over 900 pictures with my new camera, so expect Flickr posting to resume soon…

Since yesterday, we’re safely ensconced at a nice hotel in downtown San Francisco, where we’ll stay for 4 weeks – leaving just after WWDC.

The trip up to Corvallis (OR) was marvellous, especially the visit to Crater Lake. It’s the prettiest lake I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a lot. All this took a little more time and energy than we’d budgeted for, and after visiting with some friends we passed up a chance to see the famous DaVinci Days Festival. Instead, we opted to just walk around the beautiful Oregon State University campus, which was well worth the visit.

Going south the next day we opted for the more scenic 101 route (instead of the 5, which we’d driven up on), and it also was great. The Pacific shore is always beautiful and we also had an opportunity to revisit Ferndale, where we’d been on a previous Los Angeles-Vancouver trip.

So, everything’s settling down and for the next 3 weeks I’ll try to do some extra work on XRay II. Hopefully I’ll have a working alpha to show off at WWDC. Or at least a T-Shirt…

In a motel in Ashland, Oregon, where we’ve been visiting friends and having an excellent time.

The trip started out on a quite negative note – our first flight (CFG-GRU) was over two hours late, making us miss our connection to Dallas. We usually never book connections so close, in order to forestall this sort of thing, but our travel agent, who’s aware of this, was on vacation and we changed (temporarily) to another agency. Turns out all flights in the chain were a few hours late except for that most important one, which we missed by30 minutes. So the airline had to put us up in a hotel and, early the next day we went to San Francisco on the red-eye flight starting at New York.

To cap this, when we went to get our rental car, we were informed our reservation had been canceled by the travel agency – strangely enough, not by ours, but by yet another one we never use. After some negotiations with the manager we were informed they were all out of compacts, but we could get a larger car at a slight price increase. OK, reasonable enough…

…but when we got to the parking garage the attendant pointed at an empty lot and said all those cars had already been rented out! So back to the rental office… where after some more waiting we were issued a Buick Lacrosse GNX (GLX? VGX? VGA? something like that). With leather seats and other knicknacks, and most usefully, a GPS locator, which proved invaluable in our sidetrips.

We drove straight up Interstate 5 to Ashland and stayed at a motel near the intersection with Route 66. Ashland is a marvelous little town – lots of greenery, nice shops and very friendly people. We leave today for Corvallis, which lies northwards, but I’ll give some more details tomorrow.

All’s packed and ready for our trip to San Francisco (with a shorter visit to Oregon). We’ll be home after WWDC. I’ll be online most of the time, I hope. More as it happens!

We had a nice short vacation visiting friends in Campanha, in the interior of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This is a small town, almost equidistant from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, and the main focus is coffee and tangerine plantations. I’ve posted 10 selected photos and maybe later I’ll post some more.

Meanwhile, I’m glad to report that XRay II is slowly getting back up to speed. I lost over 2 months doing premature optimization… yes, I should have known better, but it snuck up on me in the form of caching.

The file system browser in XRay 1.x was an afterthought, tacked on because I needed to check out many files to test. I used Apple’s SimpleBrowser sample code nearly as-is and only cached each item’s 16×16 icon. It worked amazingly well, but it didn’t react properly to events like volume mounting/unmounting and folders changing.

One of the first things I did for XRay II was to make a better browser. I also decided to use the same backend data structures for the browser and for the object that represented the file item being XRayed. Of course this meant that the icon had to be cached in each object, as well as the name, the FSRef, the pointer to the parent folder… then I thought, I’d also better cache catalog info results, metadata, etc. etc., as all this would be needed later. Soon this object grew like topsy, adding all sorts of interesting information about the file item, each added lazily whenever requested…

…but it turns out that it became increasingly complex to keep this back-end cache synchronized with the actual file system. In fact, everything I did to optimize the cache internally made it more difficult to do external synchronization.

So, over the last month I basically started out from scratch with the back-end and, as soon as possible, implemented mount/unmount modifications, and folder change notifications (using M. Uli Kusterer‘s excellent UKKQueue). It turns out that it’s basically unproductive to cache anything but the name and icon… except, of course, while an item is being XRayed.

More as it happens…