Older blog entries for dan (starting at number 31)

Got up late. Mooched. Replaced bulb in light on balcony. Walked through the park - in the dark - to Borders. Browsed.

(Do I want to learn Smalltalk?)

Returned home. Drank whisky. irced. Browsed more wiki. Mooched further

Read the CLORB server code, or portion thereof. Wrote TODO list:

• Define & implement uniform interface to socket functions

• Port to :sockets - needed for reusable server sockets and possibly non-blocking accepts

• Clean up clorb-srv.lisp drastically

• Rewrite event loop so that streams plug into it with a defined api which looks uncannily like SERVE-EVENT

• Watch it magically all start working with SERVE-EVENT.

• Write an IR

Posted diary entry. Went to bed late.

rasputin: Beware The Blunt Rusty Saw Of Analogy!

jim: (key: advogato)

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Not a lot of interesting stuff got done recently.

I started building SBCL on my Alpha, but it died at random times. Suspecting hardware, I tried building a kernel, and it died too.

I bought new memory, but the machine just sits there and beeps at me when I power up with it installed; maybe 164SXs don't like PC100 128Mb DIMMs - but I thought that's what I got it last time. Hmm.

I spent a lot of time browsing wiki. It's terrifically easy to get lost in. I conclude

• It needs version control: even if the current participants can remember what used to be on a page, it would often still be illuminating for new readers to see the historical context that led to a page in its current form
• It has metawiki worse than this place has metagato. Or maybe I'm reading the wrong bits
• WikiMentors would be neat: a play area for new users, with people who had used the thing a lot on hand to answer questions ("is this good style?")
• Web browser technology has not advanced usefully in the last four years. This isn't news, but trying to navigate a link-rich web like wiki makes it especially obvious.

This diary entry is for for my own benefit than anyone else's. Had you been expected to understand it, it would have been composed of certificate system wibbling

1) CLORB's internal IR is not actually any use to the rest of CLORB: anything in CLORB proper that wants to do IR lookups wants to do them using CORBA

2) I've therefore wasted whatever time I spent writing a program to populate it, given that setting up the internal structures that CLORB itself uses (INTERFACE as opposed to INTERFACE-DEF, OPDEF as opposed to OPERATION-DEF, etc) would have been just as quick. Ah well

3) There's something wrong here that it's too late at night to usefully put my finger on.

4) orbit-ird is not complete enough to be usable, and can be reliably segfaulted on demand. Still, I don't think anyone really claimed it was. Someone recommend me a free IR implementation that does work? I guess I can try MICO and also whatever Berlin use, if they do.

n) Oh, go on then, one metagato comment. I preferred Ryan's diary to lilo's anyway.

* (clorb::invoke *gnome-help* "fetch_url" "toc:man")

Some days are better than others. This is quite definitely one of them.

Now to pause awhile and get the thing neatly into CVS before I forget how it works

OK, the first cut of my CORBA for Impatient People document is out. Feedback solicited (dan at telent.net), but don't expect me to read any of it before I've been to bed.

[edited to fix broken URL]

I spent most of today trying to work out what it is about the recent "collaboration" debate that annoys me so much. I still haven't entirely pinpointed it, even after posting a followup to lilo's recent article, so I'm still irritated.

Maybe I should post an entire article about how modest I am.

Taking a slightly different tack on the whole CORBA/CL thing now: I stripped down the libIDL/C stuff so that all it does is print out sexps. Then i read said sexps in CL and create IR objects there

As it happens I'm not actually using the ORBit IR any more either. I'll switch back to it and see what breaks when I'm happier that my own code is working.

UK folks are hereby notified of and encouraged to check out the UKUUG Linux 2000 UK Linux Developers' Conference in July. This is nothing to do with the "other" Linux 2000 - except, I guess, for the year it happens in .... Provisional speakers here

:sockets Version 0.3 is out and works with SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp, forked from CMUCL about a year ago by one brave William Newman, and has a reproducable build process. This is good)

According to the CL standard, READ-SEQUENCE is supposed to read the number of bytes you ask for, not just block until it gets some bytes and read those. It seems that the only way to get traditional Unix-style "block until something is available and return it even if it's short" is to write it yourself using READ-CHAR followed by repeated READ-CHAR-NO-HANG. If this is true, CMUCL gets it wrong. Rewrote :sockets tests until they work even with a READ-SEQUENCE that gets it right.

I was right about having broken it for CMUCL, incidentally, but it was a trivial fix

dhd is getting sexpual urges ...

Ankh may be claiming that rms hurts the open source community, or may be claiming that some people might want to claim that. I should probably not rise to that, actually. But, for the record, I don't. I did laugh at (but didn't participate in) the esr dimwit-fest, on the other hand.

yakk, the weird diary ordering you observe is probably a result of people editing their past diary entries.

I read the non-coding contributions article and was going to follow up saying ``surely this is stunningly obvious?''. Am moderately taken aback to hear that in many projects it's not - but then, other people's projects probably have several orders of magnitude more users than mine. Yes. :sockets version 0.3 - download it and be the second user! I'll reply to your mail, promise ...

More socket stuff, of all things. We now have it working on SBCL (though I fear I've broken it for CMUCL in the process, but I can fix that after a break/food/sleep or whatever seems appropriate)

It has a neat Makefile ...

New release when it works again, unless I get an answer from ORBit people first.