Older blog entries for lolo (starting at number 10)

Andrei is probably looking for a book about or by Paul Erdos. Isn't this diary thing turning into an IRC-like forum? :-)

During this week-end I've been thinking about what new functionnality could be interesting for Advogato, and I've come up with two ideas:

  • A voting system that could work in the same way Usenet votes work or as an option in the same way as Debian votes (I like the way the Debian people are resolving multiple choices).

  • An RFC section, where articles could be collaboratively written, and reviewed, and the resulting article could be proposed for vote to be accepted as an "official" Advogato production...

I'll make a try at writing some code for a voting system.

Sent my first patch for mod_virgule, and it works! Good day.

I've not been very productive lately, but taking care of a baby turns out to be a very time consuming activity :-)...

Here's a summary a short summary of the things I've done and that are relevant for this Advogato diary thing:

  • Started looking at the mod_virgule code. My idea is to add a ChangeLog-style page that would show on one page all the latest diary entries updates. This would make it easier to follow what's going on on Advogato.

  • I'm making great progress on my small prolog-like interpreter idea. The thing is 1200 lines long for now and does almost compile. All the core logic is implemented now. (Note: It's a complete rewrite).

  • I've been looking at the gnome-print code lately to learn more about printing in GNOME. I will implement printing support for Dr Genius's geometric figures in the next few weeks.

  • I've thinking about how it could be possible to redesign all the basic UNIX utilities (like init, inetd, cron, lpd, pppd, ...), to make a system that is much more user friendly. Looks like there are some good ideas in MacOS/X in this respect. Apple is using a UNIX kernel in their system, but they have "updated" some of the "historic" UNIX user-space utilities. Interesting perspectives.

I'm currently just doing support by mail for Dr. Genius, and thinking about what I'm going to do next.

I will probably resume programming soon, now that my wife and my son are back at home (this is sooo good :-)).

I've found the code of a small prolog interpreter, and my plan is to improve it somewhat and turn it in an embeddable AI engine that could be easily used in various applications.

It currently has a very small footprint (exec size is less than 50k when stripped), but a really poor memory management. My first priority is to improve this, by adding a Garbage collector and efficient dynamic memory allocation.

This code is currently public domain and I will turn it in a GPL or LGPL library.

The funny thing to note about this interpreter is that it has been used by Microsoft, and modified version of it is hidden somewhere in Windows NT network setup code :-).

Best wishes to all of you for this new year!

I'm writing this small diary entry from work where I am currently busy checking that all the servers are ok :-).

On the Dr Genius front I have some changes in store that I will commit soon now: full implementation of the various line styles, and improvement to various dialogs.

Changed the way the style dialog is managed internally, but this has not changed radically the way it looks and feel. There are only a few little "improvement".

As I said it previously, I think that we will need someone to redesign our dialogs, and make sure that they are good enough to be used by childs.

Reworking the Dr Geo macro creation and macro playing dialogs look and feel. I think we will have to ask someone else to review this, because I feel that I'm not really a competent when it comes to good UI design.

Starting writing down some ideas for an Advogato article about existing Free Software tools for profiling, memory leak detection, and their proper use.

Committed one week of work on Dr. Genius. Now playing Dr. Geo macros is almost working. Final tweaking is still needed, but won't take long.

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