It's been (coming up on) three months since I last made a diary entry. What follows is an attempt to catch things up.
Real Life(TM)
As of the first of August, the company I work for has moved from the dreary double college town mecca of
Moscow,
Idaho to the wonderful city of Bend, smack in the middle of Oregon.</sarcasm> But, I'm finally settling down
in my new place. It does feel good to be out of academentia, though.
Work
Well, two more trips down to Denver, and quite a bit of work, but things are going well on that front. Also, I seem
to have fallen into the role of telephone adminstrator (read: actually voluteered for it) at our new building. And it is
a
new building. We've got a beautiful view of the Deschutes River as it flows through downtown Bend from our
second story windows. (There are times that this becomes problematic. My desk faces one of these
windows.)
Obligatory Autoconf Rant
I've been having fun these past few days integrating a program into our build system that we hacked up to suit our
needs with our Sun Microsystems contract. The only problem is that it uses a very home grown build system
(complete with machine generated (non-automake) Makefiles. Add to this the fact that two of the executables in
the suite are built 95% from the same source files (over multiple directories), but with different preprocessor
symbols. So, each file has to be compiled twice, with all the objects of the right flavor being linked together into
.a archives. We then combine the .as into the final executables. What's more is the fact that it
actually works. (At least the upstream authors of this program had the good sense to have a bang-up
configuration
file format that keeps all path names (aside from /tmp) out of the executable. At least it's not a total
loss.)
My coworkers seem to have developed a healthy respect for me and my abilities to bend Autoconf to my whim. As I said when I relayed the news that the above program was tamed:
- "If I ever say something is impossible, don't believe me."
NJS
I haven't gotten too much further on "Resurrection". It's just that I want to do a fair amount of
rearchitecting of the internals of NJS, not to mention bring it to within a semblance of ECMA-262 3rd Edition
compliance. Oh, and a bit of new functionality while we're at it. Slow has been a great help,
looking at things from a slightly different perspective. (That, and the OpenBSD libc has caught three bugs in my
code that I never would have found otherwise. (/me remembers never to use realloc for growable strings.))
<words type="famous last">I hope to have 0.3.0 out Real Soon Now.</words>