As GLaDOS would say, It’s been a long time. How have you been?

I was invited a few weeks ago to keynote at /dev/world 2010, a conference for Mac developers in Australia. It was my first-ever keynote, and you know, inspirational talks turn out to be kinda harder to give than technical talks. For those who didn’t attend, the talk intended to address the two most frequent questions I get asked about Pixar (“how did you get there?” and “what do you, uhh, actually do?”), and provide some insight into Pixar’s culture.

Two videos that I referred to in the talk and I think are an absolute must-see—whether you’re an engineer, CEO, manager, designer, artist or otherwise—are

• Ed Catmull’s talk at Stanford Business School: Keep Your Crises Small (~40 minutes, minus question time)
• Randy Nelson’s Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age (~10 minutes)

They complement Steve Jobs’s amazing commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. The number of insightful, genuine sound bites you can take away from those three talks are off the charts.

For all those who attended my keynote, I hope it was worthwhile. Thank you to everyone in the audience for giving me such a warm reception and for making me feel back at home, and thank you to the AUC for putting on a great conference.

Also, new website look, oooooo. It almost looks like it was made after 2000. Hopefully this will mean more regular updates on my blog than once per decade. I guess we’ll find out!

Just before I left Sydney, I gave one last talk at the revived Sydney Cocoaheads user group about Objective-C Internals. It’s similar to the presentation that I gave at fp-syd a few months ago about Objective-C and Mac OS X programming, but was tailored for a Mac audience rather than a functional programming audience. As a result, the Cocoaheads talk has a lot more detail on the object model, memory layout, and how message-sending works, and less info on higher-order messaging and language features (e.g. I didn’t talk about categories at all.)

If you’re a Mac coder, hopefully you’ll find something new in there. As always, drop me an email if you have any questions!

P.S. For all the voyeurs out there, the San Francisco move & Pixar are both going great! More news on that soon, too.

Four little announcements, all of them Mac-related:

First, myself and my comrades at Realmac Software are very proud to announce the release of LittleSnapper 1.0, our swiss-army-knife picture, screenshot and website organisation utility thingamijiggo. We’ve all worked hard on this for the past few months and sweated over a ton of details to try to make it a polished user experience and be a joy to use; we hope you agree. (You would not believe how long we spent figuring out how the blur and highlighting tools should work before they became their final incarnations, or how much pain was involved when we decided to add FTP and SFTP¹ support late in the development cycle.) If you’re a Mac user, give it a whirl; it’s a hard program to describe because it has a lot of different workflows, but between the quick annotation tools, easy Web sharing with QuickSnapper/Flickr/SFTP¹, website DOM snapping, and the iPhoto-like forget-about-what-folder-you-need-to-put-your-picture-in snapshot management, I’m sure you’ll find something useful for you in there. Hopefully our hard work can make life just a little easier for you!

¹ FTP must die.

I blogged earlier that I was speaking at MacDev 2009 in April, but didn’t mention exactly what I was talking about. Well, the talk abstract’s up now:

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

So, two sections: first, low-level hackery of the Objective-C runtime. Second, a different kind of low-level hackery, and one that’s arguably far more important: understanding the essence of computation and programming languages, and why I fell in love with both Haskell & Objective-C, two languages at completely opposite ends of the planet.

I’d like to point out that while the MacDev registration fee seems fairly expensive at £399, keep in mind that covers your accommodation and also meals, which easily covers £100-£150. Scotty’s done a lot of organising so that you don’t have to. There’s also a Christmas special on at the moment where a few applications are included in the registration price; check the MacDev 2009 website for details.

If you’re an imsoniac and are having trouble sleeping, you’ll hopefully enjoy a recent Late Night Cocoa episode where I talk to Scotty about Garbage Collection. (Actually, you probably won’t enjoy it so much after you find out exactly how -retain & -release are implemented under-the-hood. The words CFBag and “lock” should hopefully scare you enough.) It’s a bit of a long episode at over an hour and a quarter long, but next time I’ll say “um” a bit less which should shorten it to about half an hour. Have fun. And use GC! (LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver both aren’t GC yet, but you bet your ass they will be for the next major versions.)

I’ve had a pretty long exodus away from the fp-syd user group since I was off getting drunk overseas for about four months. That, of course, meant that somehow my brain was rather misplaced when I arrived back in Sydney, so I decided to give a talk at fp-syd upon my return… on the same day that LittleSnapper 1.0 was due to be released, leaving pretty much no margin for error. Oops. I’ll glad to say that the gusto prevailed, and that both the talk seemed to go OK (well, I wasn’t booed off the stage anyway), and LittleSnapper was released on time. (Just; thanks Alan and Danny!) My talk there was similar to the one I gave at Galois in Portland earlier this year: a whirlwind tour of the Objective-C programming language and Mac OS X technologies for a functional programming audience. In particular:

• basics of the runtime system,
• higher-order messaging and its analogy to higher-order functions in functional languages,
• some details on the engineering marvel that is the Objective-C garbage collector, and
• (updated!) information on Blocks, LLVM and Clang, and a wee tiny bit of info on Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

I’ve updated the talk with a few extra slides, since Apple have made a little more information to the public now. (In particular, brief information on Blocks, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.) Enjoy all!

I have the small honour of being a speaker at the maiden conference of MacDev 2009, a grass-roots, independently run, Mac developer conference in the UK that’s being held in April next year. MacDev looks like it’ll be the European equivalent of C4, which was absolutely the best Mac developer conference I’ve ever been to; I’d say it’s the Mac equivalent of Linux.conf.au. If you’re a Mac developer at all, come along, it should be great fun, and give your liver a nice workout. Plus, how can you ignore such a sexy list of speakers?

Update: My talk abstract is now available…

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

I am a great believer in getting the foundations right. Similarly to how bad code design or architecture often leads to a ton of bugs that simply wouldn’t exist in well-designed code, building a complex system on unsteady foundations can produce a lot of unnecessary pain. What are the foundations of your favourite programming language?

It’s 2008 and we’re still seeing buffer overflows in C.

After one of the longest road-trips of my life, I gave a presentation at DevWorld 08 in Melbourne, Australia, titled “The Business of Development”:

Coding is just one part of what makes a great product, but there’s always so much else to do and learn. So, what can you do to help ship a great product—besides coding—if you’re primarily a developer? In this talk, learn about important commercial and business issues that you, as a coder, can help to define and shape in your company, such as licensing and registration keys, adopting new technologies, software updates, handling support, your website, and crash reports.

The talk has a definite Mac focus and is geared towards people who are writing commercial software, but it arguably applies to all software on any platform, whether you’re a professional programmer or a hobbyist, working on open-source or not. The slides are now online; you can find it on my talks page or download them directly (40MB PDF).

I’ve given a few talks so far this year, which I’ve been kinda slack about and haven’t put up any slides for yet. So, if you’re one of the zero people who’ve been eagerly awaiting my incredibly astute and sexy opinions, I guess today’s your lucky day, punk!

Earlier this year, on January 2, 2008, Earth Time, I gave a talk at Kiwi Foo Camp in New Zealand, also known as Baa Camp. (Harhar, foo, baa, get it?) The talk was titled “Towards the Massive Media Matrix”, with the MMM in the title being a pun on the whole WWW three-letter acronym thing. (Credit for the MMM acronym should go to Silvia Pfeiffer and Conrad Parker, who phrased the term about eight years ago :). The talk was about the importance of free and open standards on the Web, what’s wrong with the current status quo about Web video basically being Flash video, and the complications involved in trying to find a solution that satisfies everyone. I’m happy to announce that the slides for the talk are now available for download; you can also grab the details off my talks page.

A bit later this year in March, Manuel Chakravarty and I were invited to the fp-syd functional programming user group in Sydney, to give a talk about… monads! As in, that scary Haskell thing. We understand that writing a monad tutorial seems to be a rite of passage for all Haskell programmers and was thus stereotypical of the “Haskell guys” in the group to give a talk about, but the talk seemed to be well-received.

Manuel gave a general introduction to monads: what they are, how to use them, and why they’re actually a good thing rather than simply another hoop you have to jump through if you just want to do some simple I/O in Haskell. I focused on a practical use case of monads that didn’t involve I/O (OMG!), giving a walkthrough on how to use Haskell’s excellent Parsec library to perform parsing tasks, and why you’d want to use it instead of writing a recursive descent parser yourself, or resort to the insanity of using lex and yacc. I was flattered to find out that after my talk, Ben Leppmeier rewrote the parser for DDC (the Disciplined Disciple Compiler) to use Parsec, rather than his old system of Alex and Happy (Haskell’s equivalents of lex and yacc). So, I guess I managed to make a good impression with at least one of our audience members, which gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

You can find both Manuel’s and my slides online at the Google Groups files page for fp-syd, or you can download the slides directly from my own site. Enjoy.

Finally, during my three-week journey to the USA last month in June, I somehow got roped into giving a talk at Galois Inc. in Portland, about pretty much whatever I wanted. Since the audience was, once again, a Haskell and functional programming crowd, I of course chose to give a talk about an object-oriented language instead: Objective-C, the lingua franca of Mac OS X development.

If you’re a programming language geek and don’t know much about Objective-C, the talk should hopefully interest you. Objective-C is a very practical programming language that has a number of interesting features from a language point of view, such as opt-in garbage collection, and a hybrid of a dynamically typed runtime system with static type checking. If you’re a Mac OS X developer, there’s some stuff there about the internals of the Objective-C object and runtime system, and a few slides about higher-order messaging, which brings much of the expressive power of higher-order functions in other programming languages to Objective-C. Of course, if you’re a Mac OS X developer and a programming language geek, well, this should be right up your alley :). Once again, you can download the slides directly, or off my talks page.

Here, you can download the slides for a talk I presented to the Sydney Linux Users’ Group on the 28th of July 2006, named “Erlang and Concurrency”. Note that the PDF file I’ve linked to here is quite large, since there’s a lot of images in there.

Download: Adobe Acrobat PDF (~7MB)

Some things to note about the presentation:

• There were two short videos presented: a tech demo of the Unreal Engine 3, and snippets from the totally groovy Erlang the Movie, which has also been transcoded to the Ogg Theora video format thanks to Silvia Pfeiffer. These movies didn’t make it to the PDF intact.
• I’m very proud that there wasn’t a single slide there with bullet points :).

There’s an excellent blog by Garr Reynolds named Presentation Zen that led me to doing it in the style that I did. In particular, check out the Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates comparison that Reynolds did; no prizes for guessing who Reynolds prefers as a presenter.

There’s a number of resources you can check out on Erlang:

• The unofficial and official Erlang Web sites.
• An Erlang tutorial.
• Another Erlang tutorial.
• How to interpret Erlang crash dumps.
• Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers, by Joel Reymont.
• Haskell vs Erlang, and Haskell vs Erlang Reloaded.
• An introduction to Erlang on informit.com.
• A Slashdot article about moving toward distributed computing.
• trapexit.org, an online Erlang community site.
• The documentation for Mnesia, Erlang’s awesome distributed, soft-real-time database.
• Joel Reymont on his dream language being a combination of Erlang and Ocaml.

Update: I found another Erlang tutorial named Erlang in Real Time. There’s also a good Erlang FAQ.

Update: Jay Nelson also has some great material on his Erlang web site, including some presentations at ICFP.

“Controlled Chaos: Linux in the Visual Effects Industry” was a talk I presented at the Linux.conf.au 2006 Digital Arts miniconf, with Anthony Menasse of Rising Sun Pictures. We discuss using Linux in the VFX industry, of course, but also talk about problems encountered in VFX in general (e.g. mammoth data storage requirements), and how we manage the day-to-day technical issues that crop up. The slides are now available online, for those interested!

Download: Adobe Acrobat PDF

Abstract

As a Linux user or developer, you probably know a few programming and scripting languages: shell scripting, Perl perhaps, Python, C or C++, and maybe Java or XSLT. Once you’ve learnt one systems language or one scripting language, you’ve learnt them all, right? Especially because of that “Turing-complete” thing …

In this talk, I’ll explore the research and developments that have happened outside of mainstream programming languages in the past decade, in languages such as Objective-C, Haskell, O’Caml, and Nemerle. The scope of the talk is broad: I’ll touch on many topics, such as meta-programming, generics, type systems, and proof-carrying code, without going too in-depth into any of them. (Believe me, you don’t want to hear me talk for seventeen hours about type systems.) Most of the topics covered (such as meta-programming) are not language-specific, and can be directly applied to your own work, increasing your own programming expertise and repertoire of techniques.

Download

Slides: Adobe Acrobat PDF

Chiba is a markup language I’m currently working on, which is inspired by many other markup languages, including the syntax used by HTML, SDF, POD, lout, AFT, APT, Wiki, DocBook, and of course, LaTeX. It’s written in Haskell.

It’s nowhere near finished (and don’t hold your breath), but the framework is currently there. Some very simple functions have been written, so it’s currently possible to convert a Chiba DOM to HTML markup.

Here, you can find all the source code for my presentation in the chiba-20020603.tar.gz file, or you can browse the contents of the tarball . The actual presentation can be downloaded in two formats:

• on-line presentation, with overlays
• printable format

Hicki was the working name for my thesis project, which is a case study of writing a WikiEngine in Haskell, before I decided to change thesis topics.

Here are the slides and handouts which I used in my Thesis Part A presentation (22/10/02), if you’re interested:

• Slides: hicki.ps

• One-page summary in Acrobat or PostScript format.

• A tarball with all the files. You can also browse the directory with all the files; all the original LaTeX files are there too.

What’s zsh?

This is a talk I gave on zsh (the Z shell) at SLUG, the Sydney Linux Users’ Group. You can find more information on this great shell on the zsh homepage, which is at (drumroll) www.zsh.org . Briefly, zsh combines all of the (in)famous interactive power of tcsh and bash’s standard Bourne shell syntax, with its own most utterly crazy and useful word completion, globbing, redirection, and editing features. Once you start using it, everything else seems annoyingly … useless.

You can find a copy of my current zsh configuration files at

• http://www.algorithm.com.au/wiki-files/talks/zsh/config/

My zsh presentation

Feel free to take a peek at the slides that I used for my presentation, in html or MagicPoint format.

Other zsh tutorials and advocacy documents I used for my talk include:

• Paul Falstad and Bas de Bakker’s “An Introduction to the Z shell” (intro.ps). This is also on the zsh homepage.

• The FEATURES document that comes with zsh (taken from 4.0.1prerelease). This is actually a superb quick reference to all of the useful features in the Z shell.

However, you really want to drop by www.zsh.org and see the documentation, FAQs and scripts there.