Advogato blog for parkerc

15 Jun 2006

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 06:00:02 GMT

spammers:

Looks like the spammers have found advogato.

advogato:

Advogato is a relic. A good relic. I like the simple interface and the late 90's style design. Really. Late-90's content-only design is the new black. You heard it here first.

lisp:

I feel so good programming in Lisp, and so dirty at the same time. I am good enough at Lisp now to know that the quality of my Lisp code is not great and that if I tried I could improve it a bit, and I am not good enough to replace big chunks with macros that will dramatically reduce the amount of code I have to write. Lots of my code is shaped like a slug on a wall, with some slugs being fatter than others. I think that this is the equivalent of the everything-in-one-function programming style that C and C++ programmers tend to have.

Speaking of C (not the drive letter, but the language), I have not programmed in C in a few months. I have a few small projects out there that I have not touched (but are being maintained - yea FOSS!) and I am not sure that I really want to look back. Do so many projects really need to be written in C anymore? We have Ruby, Python, Lisp, Java, C#, ....... Do we really need to care about performance all of the time? I used to love the freedom that C gave me as a programmer, and now I love the freedom that Ruby gives me as a thinker. Anything that I dream up, I can implement without worrying about the underlying architecture of my computer. No more mallocs and frees. No more ints and chars.

compiled:

Why do compiled languages have ints and chars and interpreted languages have dynamic types? Shouldn't it be the other way around? When I compile a program, I give the computer extra time to figure out that a number is a number and a string is a string. Most of the time, if I put the wrong type in the wrong place, the compiler lets me know. If I take time to compile an application, I think that the compiler can tell me the best way to represent objects. It is, after all, more familiar with the underlying architecture than I am. I say, let the interpreted languages be static and let the compiled languages be dynamic. Sounds a lot like Lisp.

goto lisp

10 Mar 2006

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:11:18 GMT

I Love Lisp

Remote debugging web applications in real time is where it is at. Here is how to do it. It might look painful to set up, but it is worth it.

20 Feb 2006

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 22:46:41 GMT

Why I Love Python

scp = pexpect.spawn("scp user@remote:/path /localpath")
scp.expect('.*ssword:')
scp.sendline('my_password')
scp.expect(pexpect.EOF)
print scp.before

A hack, but a good hack. Dealing with ssh/scp from an external program is ALWAYS a bitter hack; look at the state of your code after trying the same thing in "C".

I am seriously looking at django for my own projects due to the simple beauty of Python. UnCommon Web always seems "almost there after this feature" and - last time I tried - was a pain to install.

ASP.NET

Great hack of a programming environment. I am having fun using it, but I feel very tied in to the platform. I don't know if I would use it by my own choice, but it is a great learning experience. Microsoft basically took what so many Java-based environments have been doing for years and tied it into their IDE, making it painless to use a very large, complex development environment.

On another note, I am writing an Lisp-based online mortgage app. Right now, it is just for fun. I am using LGPL icons until we finish our own (Thanks for Tuliana! They rock!). I am writing a few cool little libraries that I plan on releasing.

7 Feb 2006

Tue, 7 Feb 2006 20:50:55 GMT

Upgraded to Dapper and it is working, though the initial upgrade removed a whole lot of packages. I have a server that I need to also upgrade from Hoary(!!!) to Breezy.

So I started doing some coding in C# with VS and I love it. Holy crap - this is the easiest environment I have ever worked in. It is like coding in a funky version of Java with a great IDE. In one hour I wrote a pretty complex gui app, a web app, and a web service. Anyone want a GPL Windows app written in managed code? I want to find the warts.

6 Feb 2006

Mon, 6 Feb 2006 19:57:35 GMT

I am upgrading from Kubuntu breezy to Dapper at this moment. Excited and scared at the same time.

28 Dec 2005

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 21:20:25 GMT

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError or Invalid Heap Size:

java -Xms256m -Xmx256m

19 Dec 2005

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:17:30 GMT

for future reference:

dpkg -l | awk '/^i/ {print $2}' | grep visual | xargs apt-get --reinstall install --yes --force-yes

Had a bit of a hardware error and /usr/lib ended up in /lost+found

The above command will reinstall all packages that have "visual" in the name on a debian system. Thanks to Tollef Fog Haan for posting something like this back in January 2002.

6 Dec 2005

Tue, 6 Dec 2005 23:09:22 GMT

I was looking at some patches I submitted, and I noticed some code that I wrote over a year ago just sitting around [Here] for jabberd2 imap_auth. Is anyone using this at all? I thought at the time that it would be useful.

Well, if anyone wants authreg imap jabberd support, grab it and I will walk you through it.

Update:

Should have looked here. Looks like imap will be integrated in 2.1. Cool!

5 Dec 2005

Mon, 5 Dec 2005 20:13:48 GMT

jabberd sqlite 3 authreg is available here:

http://i-vsn.com/share/parkerc/public/jabberd2/

I tried posting this to the mailing list but I am not sure if they are having a problem or I am.

5 Dec 2005

Mon, 5 Dec 2005 15:26:47 GMT

sqlite 3 authreg for jabberd is written. Now I need to test before I hand over the code to jabberd.