Older blog entries for brg (starting at number 1)

I took a break from working on the Instructional Software CD, which is primarily a distribution of free software with source (yay!), to make a release of WebNews, which now gets thousands of hits per day and has hundreds of users (yay!)

In other news, I've almost figured out how to cross-compile NetBSD's C library from a Linux machine; this will be a boon to the eventual release of a cross-compilation environment for VMIPS. Now all I have to do is iron out the various wrinkles and make it into a procedure that anyone can follow.

Lately I've been working on a newsreader with a SSL-enabled Web user interface, which I have given the incredibly creative name of "WebNews". I also wrote a Perl module documentation tool. I intend to release these as open-source, when I've finished with them.

It's amusing to me how anything which requires using a program other than a web browser these days is considered hard to use.

I also seem to have a different philosophy about releasing my projects than other people do -- I try to finish them first, then release them. I guess this comes from my shareware-writing roots. I wish I had more time to work on them, though; then I might actually make releases more often.

Automake and autoconf are my friends, but I don't think they're the best possible implementation. I'd like to have a framework written in something more high-level than M4 and shell, with a repository of useful tests online (like CPAN's module repository.)

At work, I have been customizing STk, a Tk-enabled Scheme interpreter, for UC Berkeley's lower division programming classes. Scheme is a language which depresses me, because of its beautiful theoretical design and the sorry state of most of its implementations. I wonder how much of this results from Scheme being a tempting language to reimplement, because of its simple structure and semantics, and the lack of massive user base for any one implementation (unlike, e.g., Perl). Anyhow, enough kvetching! You can look at my Scheme hacks here.

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