Advogato blog for kjw

30 Dec 2005

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 01:51:43 GMT

Javascript

Javascript isn't as painful as I figured it would be. It's quite easy to pick up details from references and idioms from other peoples' code, which is certainly a testament to the simplicity of the language.

After some picking around with the W3C DOM implementation for Javascript, I'm starting to look at JSON as an alternative. At the very least, it seems easier to debug and to dump data structures out of. There's probably just something I don't get about the DOM that is making it so annoying, but hopefully I'll find it with a fresh set of eyes after checking out an alternative or two.

23 Dec 2005

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 22:53:25 GMT

Bowing to XUL

Got started learning XUL and figuring out how to write extensions for Firefox 1.5 and Komodo today. After a little bit of bang-head-on-monitor debugging, I've got a simple "hello, world" sort of thing happening, all nicely bundled into an XPI package.

The final product is going to be a front-end for a test framework I'm writing at work. Because the test framework is largely in Tcl, I originally envisioned a Tk front-end, but most of our developers don't have it installed. All of them have Komodo or Firefox installed, though.

My first impression is that things seem to have become much simpler as of Firefox 1.5, and I like that. Internationalisation is easy (so far -- I'm only handling one locale right now), and things seem to make fairly good sense so far. That being said, I haven't really done much with it yet, but time will tell.

The only downside is having to learn Javascript, which I have been lucky enough to avoid until now. Hopefully I can pick that up quickly.

22 Dec 2005

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:02:13 GMT

It's all fun and games...

Not really, but you knew that already.

For those who don't follow my blog, I am now living in Vancouver again, and a few major life changes have happened. Check the blog for details.

ObjCI is currently on hold while I get up to speed with Tcl/Tk, which I am using fairly intensively in my work at ActiveState. So far I'm pretty good with Tcl (been working with it for around seven or eight weeks now), but need to learn most of Tk (been working with it for about three days over the course of the last several weeks).

Speaking of work, I also have a work blog, which contains somewhat-coherent ramblings on various stuff mostly related to ActiveState. I'm going to try to post an interesting entry about once a week there, though it may only be interesting to people who use ActiveState software.

At any rate, I'll try to update here a little more frequently.

3 Aug 2005

Wed, 3 Aug 2005 23:35:54 GMT

Problems solved

A good session with ElectricFence solved the problems I was having everwhere except on OS X. The problem there seems to be that the Objective C runtime is somewhat different than the GCC runtime, even though they use GCC. Go figure.

I may drop support for Mac OS X in ObjCI altogether if that's the case -- I have no plans to use Mac OS X once Apple's Intel migration is complete and the FreeBSD PPC port is released.

At any rate, a search for ObjCI on Freshmeat will turn up the project page there, if anyone is interested.

3 Aug 2005

Wed, 3 Aug 2005 21:36:29 GMT

ncm: You are absolutely right on one count -- Linux detected the problem immediately. The immediate problem is that I am a moron, and memset from the wrong index, thereby overflowing my buffer. :) The code now works fine on Linux and FreeBSD.

However, Mac OS X is still claiming that an object returned from the array is an object of the expected type, but somehow doesn't respond to a message that it is supposed to. Very strange, and I'm not quite sure how to debug it. I'll figure it out, though.

3 Aug 2005

Wed, 3 Aug 2005 19:14:26 GMT

The joys of C...

Working on a new release of ObjCI, and having lots of fun. Kind of.

I've managed to create code that works great on FreeBSD/x86, but breaks on Linux/x86 and Mac OS X/PPC. The odd part is that the only functions being used in that section of code are memmove and memset.

If you've got time on your hands and feel like having a peek, check out revision 64 at http://kjwcode.com/svn/objci and tell me where I'm going horribly wrong. :) The username is "anon", and it has a blank password.

Edit: The fun part is replaceAllObjects:with: in class OIArray. Sorry for not including that sooner.

27 Jun 2005

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:59:36 GMT

C++

The mysteries of C++ are beginning to make some sense to me now. There is a project that I am working on that makes the most sense to write in C or C++, and I chose the latter -- I don't feel like reimplementing most of the STL in C. I've been at it about an hour a day for a week now, and I'm making progress. The progress is mostly exploratory code at this point, though.

Though I've read a lot of C++ code and several C++ books over the years, I've never been one to write a lot of it. I have a feeling this is going to change, though. With some practice, I think I can be almost as productive in C++ as I can be in Ruby. Hopefully I'll be able to set aside a daily study time.

14 Jun 2005

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 02:50:17 GMT

That was odd...

My account died. However, on re-creating it, I still have all of my diary entries and my project link. Weird.

kjwcode.com

kjwcode.com replaces squeakfan.com as my personal website. I'm using the same template as my other sites, so I will soon be getting a CGI put together to show ads for cool FS/OSS projects, rather than the Google ads that currently haunt it.

RST

RST has been moved over to the new site, and with it comes read-only anonymous access to the Subversion repository. I haven't touched the project in days, but will again soon.

I will likely recombine FL and FIT into one utility -- file listing and file information really are too tightly bound to make sense as separate utilities. Oh well, you never know 'til you try.

7 Jun 2005

Tue, 7 Jun 2005 05:45:58 GMT

gnutizen: regarding web hosting

I host my domains on Textdrive. I love it. It has all of the characteristics you mention, and it's run by people who are actually active in the open source world. Check them out.

unixkb.com

Three hints in two days. Not bad, but I'm not sure it's sustainable. The most recent hint is about using OS X/Darwin's lookupd to run queries from the command line. Hopefully it will save someone some Googling.

RST

With the above being said, RST will soon support proper user/group lookups from FIT. I had a bit of a rant on my blog about the whole NetInfo situation, and this at least quells most of the anger.

I may still move forward with a pure-Ruby NetInfo interface, but don't count on it. With the recent announcement of a move away from PPC, I am much more likely to invest the effort in RST or other projects.

That being said, if anyone knows of a pure-Ruby NetInfo interface, please let me know.

Back into the swing of things

I commented to my partner last night about how it's nice to get back into the swing of development. She is an aspiring developer -- she wants to learn how to program, but is contemplating how she'd like to do it.

I think that would be the thing to make it complete for me -- to be able to teach her. I have no doubt she would ask questions that would shake my understanding of quite a few things. I need to be shaken to keep learning, or I get complacent.

ruby-talk

I joined the ruby-talk mailing list today, and am so far doing well under the heavier-than-normal load in my GMail mailbox. I have a minor nit about accidentally deleting entire threads when I have one message archived (and want to keep it, but not new messages in the thread), but I'll live.

6 Jun 2005

Mon, 6 Jun 2005 02:38:38 GMT

Ruby and NetInfo

I can't seem to find a Ruby interface to NetInfo anywhere. At least nothing that's documented in English, and my Japanese sucks. This marks the start of another project, methinks -- RST needs such an interface for displaying information on file permissions.

10.3 is installing on the iBook as I write. Hopefully I'll be able to turn this into something worthy of RubyForge.