Maciej Ceglowski, maker of Pinboard
I freaking love this guy and his approach. So down to earth and pragmattic.
Frustration and Breaking Through
So, I haven’t made a post for a while, so I figured I should. The last week was pretty terrible, with sandrat going up and down, and generally being unreliable. But, there is a reason, and it should be resolved now.
Over the course of the last week, I have discovered that Amazon Web Services does some stuff with prioritization that is probably of benefit to most apps, but pretty terrible for mine. They give tasks with lots of IO priority over other, long running processes. What this meant for me was that my sandrat server process, which maintained many websockets that get kept open, got priority over the syntax highlighting server which communicated through one connection (a fifo) only. As a result, the sandrat server was idling quite a bit, while the java process was not getting enough time to truly be responsive.
I have resolved this by taking sandrat OFF of Amazon Web Services and throwing it on an old custom server with a ‘vanilla’ version of Ubuntu running on it. It has no special scheduling priorities. What’s disappointing is that for everything except the keystroke handling, AWS was actually better. Page loading was snappier, as was JavaScript and CSS.
In the end, however, sandrat is about handling keystrokes. So it is now running on my own server and handling keystrokes quite well.
Anyhow, now that this is in a ‘resolved’ state, I am going to move on to focus again on the editing experience (better modes, UI work).
Time for another screenshot : edit a mode file from within sandrat itself.
New Sandrat interface with RippleUI js code loaded.
a peek at what’s coming…
Key binding overrides
Allowing all Firefox keys their normal functions, with the exception of :
- ctrl + shift + j [open error console]
- ctrl + 0 (zero) [zoom reset]
- ctrl + l [page info]
These I hold onto because they fit into my key binding / quick mode scheme.
Keystroke fixin’
Just made sandrat let common keystrokes pass through. Took a little more effort than expected, but seems ok now. Will have to review quick mode though…
New IRC channel set up to discuss sandrat
I have set up the a new IRC channel ( #sandrat ) on freenode to discuss development of sandrat.
User Review on IRC
Well, got some excellent feedback from the fine folks on #gwmm on Freenode IRC. Lots of encouragement and feedback.
First and foremost, I will be addressing keyboard behaving badly, and non-webkit browsers. After that, screen resolution and tooltips if I have time.
I will also be keeping a new IRC channel open ( #sandrat ) to get feedback.
