Older blog entries for ahosey (starting at number 24)

14 Nov 2000 (updated 14 Nov 2000 at 02:21 UTC) »

Assume 8-bit bytes and strings composed of 1 byte per character. For an unsigned integer stored in n bytes prove:

(a) 3n bytes will always provide enough space to hold the decimal string representation of the integer.

(b) 3 is the smallest coefficient to provide enough storage for all values of n.

I know this to be true but proving (a) is harder than I thought.

9 Nov 2000 (updated 9 Nov 2000 at 19:33 UTC) »
ajv: I totally agree with your ideas about the "ramp up" time for a free software contributor, and that good architectures reduce ramp up time and make contributing more enjoyable, which vitalizes the project. For example I was able to make my first modifications to sawfish in less than an hour from the first time I looked at the source code.

I have, tucked away, an unfinished essay on pluggable scriptable software, with about half of it devoted to the social (or survival) advantages of such software in the free software world. I don't claim credit for the seed of the idea, I was just trying to flesh out some things that I heard Jim Blandy mention one time.

Chris keeps bugging me to post up the essay even though it's not complete. Maybe I'll do that.

Then sej said:

1) all the external documentation and design documents were no substitute for the direct reality of inspecting the architecture in a debugger. They served as a map for the territory, but were not the territory by any stretch of imagination. A large dose of experimentation, reasoning, and inter-programmer dialogue was required to build up a more detailed understanding of how things actually worked.

This is true. To return to my sawfish example, it was extremely useful to me to have sawfish-client available to examine the data structures of the running window manager, and interact with the window manager in real time and see my results either on the screen or by examining the internals of sawfish using sawfish-client. It was the excellent design of sawfish, combined with the excellent debugger/interpreter, combined with the excellent API documentation, that made working on sawfish easy and fun.

Interpreted languages usually have an advantage over compiled languages here, or at least they do if the language provides some form of eval(). eval() makes available the entire scope of the language from the debugger instead of just limited calls to API functions. This allows richer interaction with the running program.

Back in, oh... let's say the 80s, a slutty pop star was at least recognized as a slutty pop star. They were millionaires, they were successful and popular, they were even admired by many, but they were acknowledged as a sex symbol with all the positive and negative connotations thereof.

But in today's world we have Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera being touted as positive role models for young girls. What the fuck is going on here? Yeah, I know this has already been debated in many circles. What I find interesting/disturbing, the point I'm trying to make here, is that 15, maybe even 10 years ago, there wouldn't have been a debate, they would have been teenage sex symbols, period. Something has changed in our culture since then, and maybe not for the better.

There's something I want to know, vis a vis the whole GNOME/KDE debate: There's more than one free software kernel out there. Why aren't people bitching about that? I don't see anyone saying the FreeBSD guys should shut down and work on Linux. Or the Linux guys should shut down and work on FreeBSD. I bet there are people out there that think that, but my point is that I'm not seeing those people because the kernel project dichotomy is not blown out of proportion like the desktop seperation is. What gives with that?

We rolled out new web services, replacing one machine with three machines. I'm now convinced there are no web problems which can't be solved with mod_rewrite.

I've set up sawfish so a giant gong sounds when a new window is opened. You should hear it when I restart a session and 20 windows start up. I am amused. Chris is appalled.

Do you ever do that thing where you talking to someone about a problem or an idea, and as you bounce around the ideas your brain kind of switches gears and the solution starts to come out of your mouth and you're thinking as fast as you're talking and it feels like you're going too fast but it doesn't matter because you know that everything you're saying is exactly right anyway.

I find that exhilarating.

I could spit a lot of bile about sendmail right now, but I won't. I'll just say that even when sendmail tries to be secure, it does it badly.

If you come home from the grocery with a six pack of warm beer, putting it in the freezer is a good way to chill it quickly. But here's a tip: only put one bottle in the freezer at a time! That way if you forget about it you've only frozen one bottle and not the whole six pack.

Don't act like I'm the only one who's ever done that.

Didn't happen tonight though. One bottle at a time.

Haven't posted a diary in a while. So why post one now? I don't really have anything to say. Oh well I'll try anyway.

Haven't really felt like hacking free software for a couple weeks. Kinda weird, I used to thirst for it like I was in a desert. I need to make another revision of xload-snmp and Miguel said he'd be happy to take my gnome-session patch if I made a couple minor changes. I guess I should get on that.

So instead of hacking I've been playing games. I started playing System Shock 2 and that's going to be a real problem. It's really my kind of game, I can tell it's going to cut into other things I should be doing - like sleep.

I guess I shouldn't worry so much about the hacking/playing dichotomy and just do what I feel.

I feel better about work than I have in a while. I think finally getting my hands on all the hardware components really helped, so that I can move forward at my own speed. Of course the project timetable has slid back over a month, but now I see nothing between me and the goal except my own fat ass.

15 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!