Older blog entries for motb (starting at number 3)

A quick update...

No, I'm not dead. I'm not doing much on the open source front, either. Reading the endless licensing flamewars has left me feeling pretty unmotivated. Got an idea for a new project, but don't see the benefit in starting a new project that will soon be left half-way done. The "take my toys and go home" urge has hit a few times, but the reality is closer to "abandon my toys and go home". Rewriting Unix in O'Caml is sounding like a good way to spend my spare time.

That being said, has anyone been able to get efuns working under O'Caml 3.01 or 3.02? I think it will work if I fall back to an earlier version of O'Caml, but that's not quite the elegant solution I was hoping for. I don't know enough about O'Caml's module and interface system to fix the build.

Not working for Pibase anymore -- seems the CFO doesn't like to let people know when their pay is going to be late, and is afraid to talk to someone who isn't a doormat. I've been picking up hourly consulting, and it meets my needs. I can make rent in a day's work, and that will leave me with more time to study.

Speaking of studying, I've been mulling over doing it for credit again. I've been assured by my brother and a few friends that I'll be bored silly at a community college, so I'm looking at UBC as a potential place to go. If anyone in the Vancouver area knows a university college (college with decent transfer credit to university) that doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator, please let me know.

Musically, just checked out Bad Dreams, the second album from Swollen Members (via BattleAxe Records). Reading through the shout-outs in the liner notes, it seems that Mad Child grew up in my old neighbourhood (North Vancouver), or at least had most of his friends there. If you like rap that is (usually) well thought out and literate, give it a listen.

2 Sep 2001 (updated 2 Sep 2001 at 21:58 UTC) »
So I'm not alone!

dan, you just made my day. I thought I was the only one who still owned a copy of CLtL.

Certs -- can't just buy 'em at your local 7-11

mobius, the update in my entry should have been placed after the rest of the material on the subject of certs, as it was supposed to update that to "it's all good". Points well taken, though.

pcm

I have begun to rewrite pcm in... *drum roll* Perl. After a short internal battle about using the right tool for the job versus toying with it endlessly as a way to improve my Scheme or O'Caml, I decided that I actually want to use the darn thing sometime soon.

Among the improvements already going in are a sane plugin system (everything is a plugin, so I don't have to keep a separate dtable for them), the ability to add new commands without having to deal with the rest of the sources (comes free with a plugin system), and using Term::ReadKey to accept commands, and having plugins get the data from the user themselves.

In short, where pcm was once a clone of mailx, it is now a copy of something resembling a really limited mutt.

2 Sep 2001 (updated 2 Sep 2001 at 10:07 UTC) »
Certification strangeness...

Update: Thank you for your support, mobius -- I'm happy to find that I'm not the only person who finds interest in diverse computing environments (which was the main part of my earlier entry, so I'm guessing that's your interest). If that's worth a Journeyer cert, then so be it , and thank you for letting me know where the cert came from. I would imagine that the trust metric works the other way, too -- that future certs will be given to put me in the category in which I belong. Hopefully raph tuned that side of things, too. [end update]

It seems that mobius has been having a go at playing with raph's adjustment to the trust metric.

No offense, mobius -- but if you certed me to Journeyer from Observer as part of an experiment, please drop that cert, and certify me to whatever level you wish to based on my contributions to the community.

I've never been one to ring my own bell, but while I have made contributions to the community, I don't think a bunch of bug reports and patches and a couple of crappy projects make one a Journeyer. Or do they? Part of the reason why I finally created an account here (after seeming aeons of lurking) was to discover to what extent a random codegeek is known in the community.

I look forward to that discovery, and more. But please, undeserved certs do more harm than good. For all anyone knows, I could be the most obnoxious troll and cunning liar on the planet.

Unofficial bug report

A proper one will follow, raph. It seems that if a tag (I noticed the behaviour with an href, but the rest are likely candidates, too) gets wrapped in the diary submission form, it gets interpreted as not being a tag. I just about wound up with the HTML of a link being posted, rather than the link. I'll have a look through mod_virgule (if that's even the right place to look -- I'll find that out soon, I guess) and see if I can understand the code, and send a patch if I can.

Update: I think I have found the right file (nice_htext.c), but it's time to go meet up with friends for a farewell for a friend who is leaving town. I'll look at it tomorrow. The patch will be against virgule 1.1, the latest available on SourceForge. [end update]

Further update: Agreed, raph. Also, thank you for clearing up (for me) which version of the code actually runs Advogato. Next time I will know which project to patch. [end update]

2 Sep 2001 (updated 2 Sep 2001 at 01:56 UTC) »

Messing around with pcm (pretty crappy MUA), a crock of a Perl script that I wrote when the MailTool in OS X started encoding my outgoing English messages in ISO-2022JP. Given the choice between trying to figure out Objectionable C and writing one from scratch, the latter option seemed easier to wrap my brain around.

Having second thoughts on the development language, though. I'd like to redo what's been done in O'Caml, but I miss Perl's nifty regular expression enhancements. Another thought is to write it in Scheme (because I can't find a CommonLisp environment that works under all of OS X, OpenBSD, Linux 2.2 and 2.4, WinCE 1.1 (or is that 1.01? Japanese Casio Cassiopeia with a Hitachi SH-3, greyscale screen, copyrights up to 1997) and 3.0 (Compaq iPAQ with a StrongARM 1110), and small enough for the core to fit in 8 or 16 Kwords (12-bit), so I can port it more easily to some hardware I'm working on.

A close friend is leaving town soon, so I must go meet her -- more later.

Searching my archives for a copy of the sources to KSI Scheme. I seem to remember it as a really tight implementation (or at least very lightweight), one that could possibly work well in an embedded environment. I'm also interested in having a look at the X18 (search Slashdot, was posted a few days ago), even though I know next to no Forth. With such a tight bond between language and hardware, it sounds like a good potential platform for my little projects.

Whatever language I decide on will become my new passion, to replace Perl in my language quiver. After seeing the plans for Perl 6 (Visual PerlBasic, as far as I'm concerned), I know that I don't want to put a lot of effort into learning the new territory there.

Methinks I'm going to go do a bit of study on Forth. Don't I wish I had enough money to develop my LispOnAChip idea... *sigh*

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