Older blog entries for julesh (starting at number 1)

Got some time over the weekend to do a bit of organisational work. Had a look over the current state of NASM and checked up on what bugs had been fixed and hadn't. I'm going to organise an interim release, so that developers can tell whether or not their patches have made it into my code and whinge at me in case they haven't.

Had a play with an old scripting language I wrote for my company a while back, and got it to compile with modern compilers & glibc. I don't think the company is interested any more so I may be able to persuade them to release the copyright back to me, at which point it's open season :-)

If I can get it to work properly, I'd like to incorporate it into Helium, which is an experimental project I've been working on lately, a web application server similar to ColdFusion... it definitely needs a scripting language, and I'd rather not rewrite from scratch or have to learn how to incorporate someone else's code into it.

Also got a chance to play a bit more with QT; I've started on a personal finance tracking application to replace a spreadsheet I've been using with something a little more usable...

All in all, a rather busy weekend!

Well, its about time I got myself an account here. I've been an occasional reader for some time, but haven't got around to setting an account up until now.

I'm sure some people reading this know me (Hi!), but then again most of you probably don't, so I ought to introduce myself a bit better than the dry description I just wrote.

I've been involved with free software for many a year now. The first project I worked on was NASM, the Netwide Assembler. While most of the code in the earlier stages was written by Simon Tatham, I worked closely with him on the architecture of the system and have been strongly involved with most of the design decisions that has brought it the acclaim that it (I think rightly) has received over the years. Despite rumours to the contrary, Simon's departure as head of the team hasn't left the project completely dead in the water, and a new version will be released some time soon. Especially now I've got myself a new PC at home :-)

Anyway - I'll chronicle more of my life story for those who don't know me at some point later. For now, I'll bring myself back to the present with a bit of a status update on what I'm working on now.

I recently discovered the delights of QT, and have been working on a few little test applications with it, getting to the guts of how it works. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it yet, but it's good to be able to do this kind of thing when you need to :-)

MOSCOW, my pet operating system, has progressed a little. I now have the core of the microkernel running with a couple of tasks doing weird things on the VGA text mode display. Making it a bit more stable and adding debugging support is the next step, following which I can start implementing the IPC parts of the system call interface.

Erm... I've been doing a bit of research into video compression, but that's my paid work, so I'm not sure if anything free will come about from it (my company would probably not appreciate me releasing the results of their research!). That seems about it for the last few weeks... if anything else happens, I'll be sure to let you all know :-)