Advogato blog for sune

2 Jul 2003

Wed, 2 Jul 2003 20:46:50 GMT

Jup, that's me

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44:

  Procrastinator \Pro*cras"ti*na`tor\, n.
       One who procrastinates, or defers the performance of
            anything.
                 [1913 Webster]

Vanity blog

As a consequence of the above mentioned feature of mine I am depressingly bad at keeping vanity blogs updated. This is clearly evident from my diary here.

Reading

Bugs in Writing by Lyn Dupr\'e and G\:odel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. The former is part of my mission to become a better writer; the latter is good philosophical reading.

Hacking

I got tired of Twisted some time ago. So, in a fit of Hybris, I wrote a network-programming library using stackless tasklets, and built a web server on top of it. Also, I implemented most of Zope Page Templates. Put those two together, and you get a web server that you can easily hack, along with nice separation of logic and presentation. And you get it without the icky frameworks that the Twisted (and Zope, I suppose) crowd like so much. I like it. A lot.

7 Mar 2001

Wed, 7 Mar 2001 10:34:02 GMT

olandgren: The problem with composing addlist and pairwiseMult is that pairwiseMult needs to have signature int list -> int list not int list -> int list -> int list. By wrapping it all up in a function you can fix things just nicely: val dothigh = fn l => addlist o (pairwiseMult l);.

27 Jan 2001

Sat, 27 Jan 2001 12:59:23 GMT

olandgren: About continuations, there is a undergrad course in Programming Language (Theory) at DIKU which have some on-line lecture notes on continuations, among other things.

[ Correction: I s/CORBA/ORBit/'ed in various places. ]

Hacking: [Beware: ugly-ish picturesque langauge] Blech -- I thought I was going to have some Good Wholesome Fun(tm) fiddling with CORBA in Python. Then I discovered that PyORBit is (1) completely undocumented and (2) sucks goats nuts. orbit-python OTOH needs me to patch automake before I can build it, could they at the least not have include pre-autogenned files?

I better see go see if a patched automake will make orbit-python (and hopefully me) Happy.

25 Jan 2001

Thu, 25 Jan 2001 21:29:11 GMT

Hacking: I've finally gotten around to doing some hacking; for the two past nights I've been doing the grunt-work of a freeciv-protcol library in Python. I'm not sure if I want to take it much further, though, or if grokking the protocol (my original goal) is enough. . .

Having a freeciv client (oh no, not another freeciv client!) in Python might be the entire exercise worth, though. Should make scripting a fairly easing thing to integrate. Mmm. . .

Work: Greatness abounds at work. Almost all of today was spent writing a custom, RAID-capable, company-specific Debian installer; just having to enter hostname, etc. and have a Debian base-system on RAID when you come back from the coffee-machine is going to rule. Oh, and the best thing ofcourse is that's it's fun doing :-).

23 Jan 2001

Tue, 23 Jan 2001 13:15:05 GMT

Scheme: What better way to spend the time of your lunch-break at work than solving mbp's Scheme-challenge? I can't think of any, so here's my stab:

-- (define (f s)
  (lambda (g)
    (if (equal? s "")
	(let ((t (g (lambda (h) ""))))
	  (if (equal? t "")
	      ""
	      (g (f ""))))
	(string-append
	 (string-head s 1)
	 (g (f (string-tail s 1)))))))
f
-- ((f "Js nte ceeWnae")(f "utAohrShm anbe"))
"Just Another Scheme Wannabee"

Wonder if not there's a nicer way of doing that then-branch?

And, now back to my regularly scheduled work.

18 Jan 2001

Thu, 18 Jan 2001 18:50:39 GMT

work: I have not been to work in something like two weeks time, exams taking their toll. So, not much to say but that I'll be going back in-to the trenches tomorrow, yay!

comp.sci.: My one exam is finally over; hopefully I'll never again have to hand-craft SLR-parse tables, or convert IEEE floats from binary to decimal.

comp.lang.python: Sadly a lonely post to comp.lang.python is the only hackish thing I've done in a while; it seems I learned something from my first-year comp.sci. programming-and-data-structures course, though, since I cooked up a binary search of a list of numbers in no time (as is only fitting :-).

real programming(tm): I have been thinking about getting back into freeciv-hacking, as I recall it was actually not so bad. I probably spent more time hacking the sources than playing the game :-). <rant> This was probably brough on by my getting pissed with Activision after buying CtpII. CtpII is probably the suckiest Civilization-clone out there. For one thing the AI is so bad it probably could not beat my old, computer-illiterate grand-mother. And don't get me started on the UI, makes me want to cry :-/ </rant>

9 Jan 2001

Tue, 9 Jan 2001 19:44:57 GMT

att. conservation notice: first diary, c.s. student, unix sys.adm.

work: nothing much interesting to say here, I work as (part-time) system administrator for a small web-enabled company, where I am the local *nix guru, Perl hacker and geek in general. Good job, nice people and good perks, and I just got green light to move our servers to Debian (they are being reorganized).

edu: computer science major, with a minor in math., trying to prepare for exam (T-7days and counting). C.S. is generally a full of cool things for me to learn, but there are some really boring things too, for example creating SLR-parse tables by hand :-(.

programming: hmm. . . I did some Windows programming yesterday, needed to somehow get a list of existing drives. It seems one cannot do this, so you have to do something like,

  for(int i=1; i<26; ++i)
    if(_cdrive(i))
      printf("%c exists, whee!\n", 'A' + i - 1);

hackish, to say the least, imho.