What's it all about, Alfie?

Seems there was a little more unrest in the latest update to NetNewsWire. The SParkle update notes said only:

Fixed a crashing bug related to NSURLConnection -- by switching back to NetNewsWire's previous http client.

It's tough to see such a rough release after having years of seamless updates. It's just that, though - a little bump in the road.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 9.0.572.0 was out - quite a step for the Googlers, but it's only release note is that it includes a new version of Flash. Hmmm... how nice. It's not that I'm against Flash as a concept, it's a language - a bad one, and it's a bad build environment, but it's also that it's just not really all that useful in terms of what can be done today in HTML, JavaScript, CSS and the like. It's just a crutch. Anyway... that's the update: Flash. Yippee.

This morning I noticed that Apple has posted an update on Software Updates to iPhoto that ships with iLife '11. THere's a new feature called Calendars, and I'm not exactly sure what that is - other than something that probably shows pics by date. Sounds OK... but I'm more interested in the other existing views. Still... it's nice they are still working on it.

This afternoon I saw a tweet that Transmit 4.1.4 is out, and so I did the upgrade. They were pretty honest in the tweet - it's not got a lot there, but the opening of the external editors to the front is a nice touch. Still... it's a very slick app, and it's great to see that they are paying attention to all the details that make something really spectacular.

Well... it took me a little bit, and I had to re-arrange the code slightly, but in the end, I have the logic I need for the NBBO engine that works when you remove the one NBBO component. It's a little more complex, but it's still very clean.

The previous code was slick, and this is nearly as slick, but it's a little more complex because of the different cases I had to deal with in the change of the 'best values'. Still... it's straight-through code with only the one lock to control it's updating, and I think it's going to be plenty fast enough. But we'll have to see how long it takes in real loading conditions.

  if ((bidExch != '\0') && (bidPrice > 0.0) && (bidSize > 0)) {
    // get the exchange as an index into the arrays
    uint8_t    idx = bidExch - 'A';
    if (bidPrice > myExchData->nbboBidPrice) {
      // with a new leading bid, we are all there is to consider
      myExchData->nbboBidPrice = bidPrice;
      myExchData->nbboBidSize = bidSize;
      newNBBO = true;
    } else if (bidPrice == myExchData->nbboBidPrice) {
      // if we had something in the old NBBO, remove it now
      if (myExchData->bidPrice[idx] == myExchData->nbboBidPrice) {
        myExchData->nbboBidSize -= myExchData->bidSize[idx];
      }
      // ...and we know we need to add in our contribution now
      myExchData->nbboBidSize += bidSize;
      newNBBO = ((myExchData->bidPrice[idx] != bidPrice) ||
                 (myExchData->bidSize[idx] != bidSize));
    } else if (myExchData->bidPrice[idx] == myExchData->nbboBidPrice) {
      // we had something in the old NBBO, remove it now
      myExchData->nbboBidSize -= myExchData->bidSize[idx];
      newNBBO = (myExchData->bidSize[idx] > 0);
      // see if this was the only one in the NBBO
      if (myExchData->bboBidSize == 0) {
        // reset the bid part of the NBBO
        newBidPrice = 0.0;
        newBidSize = 0;
        // save what we have now for the scan
        myExchData->bidPrice[idx] = bidPrice;
        myExchData->bidSize[idx] = bidSize;
        // ...and scan all the data (skipping this guy)
        for (uint8_t e = 0; e < 26; ++e) {
          if (myExchData->bidPrice[e] > newBidPrice) {
            newBidPrice = myExchData->bidPrice[e];
            newBidSize = myExchData->bidSize[e];
          } else if (myExchData->bidPrice[e] == newBidPrice) {
            newBidSize += myExchData->bidSize[e];
          }
        }
        // make sure we have something
        if (newBidSize > 0) {
          myExchData->nbboBidPrice = newBidPrice;
          myExchData->nbboBidSize = newBidSize;
          // we KNOW this is a new one
          newNBBO = true;
        }
      }
    }
    // no matter what, save the bid for the next time
    myExchData->bidPrice[idx] = bidPrice;
    myExchData->bidSize[idx] = bidSize;
  }

There are a few neat things in this guy. First off, we look for the obvious winners - if we have a brand new best bid, or an addition to the size on the existing best bid. We needed to be careful when looking at adding the value in (line 11), and especially careful about sending out a new NBBO message out (line 16).

But the really new part is the scanning of the existing exchange data (line 31). This is done only when there was a single component to the best bid, and he's just taken himself out of the mix. For those cases, we have no choice but to start all over and see what we can come up with. The wrinkle was that we need to add back in our current data so it too was included in the scan. It's possible, after all, that it's still part of the best bid, just ad a different price. And maybe with some friends.

All told, I really liked this code. It's fun, and the test frame for exercising it was a blast to write. I have the ability to throw any number of sequences of ticks to the engine and test each subsequent value. It's nice. Good, fun, work.

This morning I see that the release of NetNewsWire 3.2.8 was a bit shaky and already there's 3.2.10 (I guess I missed 3.2.9 yesterday). This guy sports the following changes:

• Fixed (probably) a crashing bug related to favicon caching.
• Made it so that Flash should work again for people running OS X 10.5.x. On those systems, the app runs in 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit. (But it's still in 64-bit mode if you're running OS X 10.6.x.)

But I can't even find these release notes on their web site - only in the Sparkle update notes. So I guess it's a very fast moving target. I'm OK with that.

It's been a hard day. I've been working on my NBBO Engine all day, and the vast majority of it on the persistence of the engine to the Broker's configuration service. It's really a very nice way of doing things - give that I already had the Broker connectivity down. You can simply send variant values to the config service, and it'll store them under a key. Simple stuff - if you can get everything organized properly.

The problem today was that the trie and it's structure. I needed to be able to pack up all the individual components of the trie, but I also needed to be able to pack up the connectivity structure. This means that I needed to be able to put a little more metadata into the packing than I had originally planned, but it all worked out - I think.

I need to get this code to compile - I'm sure I forgot a dozen namespaces here or there, and then I need to build a test frame that will take messages and record the output NBBO messages. It's not very hard, it's just going to take time.

It was a hard day... but I'm glad I pushed through it.

I checked this morning and the iTerm fork called iTerm2 released a new update and it was chock full of a lot of updates and bug fixes:

Alpha 12

Featurepalooza! And bug fixes, too.

New features:

• Instant Replay: This feature makes iTerm2 behave like TiVo. You can press cmd-opt-b to step back in time and cmd-opt-f to step forward in time. If something is erased from the screen, it's no longer lost forever. This feature can be turned off in Preferences as it does take a bit of extra memory and has a small performance impact (less than 1%).
• Paste History: When you copy or paste text in iTerm2, it is now saved in the paste history. You can pop up a window at the cursor with cmd-shift-h which shows the last 20 strings in the clipboard. The list is searchable Quicksilver-style.
• Mouseless Selection: Do you often copy-paste text within the same window? Now you can do it without using the mouse. Open the findbar with cmd-f and search for the text you wish to copy. When part of the text is matched, use the tab key to expand the selection to the right by a full word and shift-tab to expand it left to the previous word boundary. It's automatically copied to the clipboard, or you can use opt-Enter to paste the selection immediately.

Enhancements:

• Findbar appearance improved.
• Add undo/redo to edit menu.
• Add zoom shortcut for cmd-opt-=.
• Read larger chunks from the network for better performance.
• Idle CPU usage reduced.
• Refresh rate adjustment removed, dynamic refresh rate added.
• Input Method Editor wraps at end of line, scrolls window if necessary.
• IPV6 support for Bonjour.

Bug fixes:

• Memory usage growth when Bonjour enabled (hopefully, 43).
• Toggling Bonjour takes effect immediately (89)
• Make resize look better (98)
• Restore colors on exit of Vim (99)
• Make bookmark window resize properly (114)
• Select name field when copying/creating/editing bookmark (127, 128, 181)
• Scroll by selection in fullscreen window (133)
• IME improvements (163)
• URLs with i18n chars can be selected now (174)
• Tab lables updated when toggling compact tabs (196)
• Better multi-monitor support (201)
• Set localization vars better (204)
• Fix return to default size (223)
• Improve i-bar cursor appearance (235)
• Numeric shortcuts displayed properly (241)
• Prevent 100% transparency because it doesn't focus (250)
• Fix bugs with AquaSKK (263)
• Fix bug where page scrolling sometimes broke.
• Fix creeping window size when toggling fullscreen.

Quite an impressive list. I'm excited to see how it plays out.

This morning I saw that NetNewsWire 3.2.8 was out, and the biggest improvement by far is that this version is 64-bit, and that any crashes in Flash will now not crash the entire app - just the Flash container. That's nice, but I can't imagine when I'm using Flash in the app, but maybe I am. Either way, nice to see an update to such a great app.

Seems this morning that the developers at Google released Google Chrome dev 9.0.570.0 and with it a significant version number change. Maybe this bodes well for the browser. Looking at the release notes, however, leaves me wondering:

Mac

• Make sure the dock icon is updated after closing an incognito window with an in-progress download (Issue 48391)

and then there are several "Known issues" with the build:

Known Issues

• REGRESSION: Windows media player for Firefox doesn't load - Issue 61603
• Regression:accelerated compositing slows down the whole machine - Issue 61520
• google.com/wave : "Page Unresponsive" dailog box appears - Issue 61533
• myspace.com : Cannot enter a character in Comments field - Issue 61513

which, to me, sounds like the major version number is really just a sham, and the third number - 570, is the one to look at. They aren't using the major numbers to indicate anything other than what they consider to be dev versus beta versus release.

Kind of disappointing...