Older blog entries for dan (starting at number 34)

I expect there's a fairly limited audience for this kind of stuff, but just in case: CORBA, GNOME, CMUCL, and other macabre tales

clorb client-side stuff now works with :sockets.

Spent most of the evening setting up dns in some semi-sane fashion on my laptop to be able to try this.

gnome-help-browser is taking 9Mb? That's more than Netscape right now ..

(Not that I'm actually needing to look stuff up in it, but it's about the simplest CORBA server in Gnome that does anything at all interesting)

Started work on the CLORB TODO list (doing the first three items simultaneously) during which I released sockets 0.3.5, which fixes an embarrassing bug

Found Richard Gabriel's Writing Broadside in Wiki, and forwarded the URL to oswg-discuss. It's for programmers rather than full-time writers, but the advice is mostly good anyway. Got only one out-of-office-autoreply back.

Got up late. Mooched. Replaced bulb in light on balcony. Walked through the park - in the dark - to Borders. Browsed.

(Do I want to learn Smalltalk?)

Returned home. Drank whisky. irced. Browsed more wiki. Mooched further

Read the CLORB server code, or portion thereof. Wrote TODO list:

• Define & implement uniform interface to socket functions

• Port to :sockets - needed for reusable server sockets and possibly non-blocking accepts

• Clean up clorb-srv.lisp drastically

• Rewrite event loop so that streams plug into it with a defined api which looks uncannily like SERVE-EVENT

• Watch it magically all start working with SERVE-EVENT.

• Write an IR

Posted diary entry. Went to bed late.

rasputin: Beware The Blunt Rusty Saw Of Analogy!

jim: (key: advogato)

begin 664 reply.cs1
MR+FJ>`QT65.%W?RE&(9^54ENG#IRX0U\Q<"/YCOVJUR6$F#T>E/)TYSCAU'`
M@GB`6!GCH.S6R#P"2QW]GG^>5(6X/E/[R)^EX,_'8Z[?'ZXD,$,+*7>%Z,N%
MHJ!JX+CY>Z)=B@?=@A/Z6>6S),N/_N17*R-)J)Z?#4DYZ5S8?'*BW$BT[UIA
IV1%BNX\\0[:&\ZPRN0NRI9170Y'T+8;3>MC:8A)V0W+N?/7`E8S:JJ,`
`
end

Not a lot of interesting stuff got done recently.

I started building SBCL on my Alpha, but it died at random times. Suspecting hardware, I tried building a kernel, and it died too.

I bought new memory, but the machine just sits there and beeps at me when I power up with it installed; maybe 164SXs don't like PC100 128Mb DIMMs - but I thought that's what I got it last time. Hmm.

I spent a lot of time browsing wiki. It's terrifically easy to get lost in. I conclude

• It needs version control: even if the current participants can remember what used to be on a page, it would often still be illuminating for new readers to see the historical context that led to a page in its current form
• It has metawiki worse than this place has metagato. Or maybe I'm reading the wrong bits
• WikiMentors would be neat: a play area for new users, with people who had used the thing a lot on hand to answer questions ("is this good style?")
• Web browser technology has not advanced usefully in the last four years. This isn't news, but trying to navigate a link-rich web like wiki makes it especially obvious.

This diary entry is for for my own benefit than anyone else's. Had you been expected to understand it, it would have been composed of certificate system wibbling

1) CLORB's internal IR is not actually any use to the rest of CLORB: anything in CLORB proper that wants to do IR lookups wants to do them using CORBA

2) I've therefore wasted whatever time I spent writing a program to populate it, given that setting up the internal structures that CLORB itself uses (INTERFACE as opposed to INTERFACE-DEF, OPDEF as opposed to OPERATION-DEF, etc) would have been just as quick. Ah well

3) There's something wrong here that it's too late at night to usefully put my finger on.

4) orbit-ird is not complete enough to be usable, and can be reliably segfaulted on demand. Still, I don't think anyone really claimed it was. Someone recommend me a free IR implementation that does work? I guess I can try MICO and also whatever Berlin use, if they do.

n) Oh, go on then, one metagato comment. I preferred Ryan's diary to lilo's anyway.

* (clorb::invoke *gnome-help* "fetch_url" "toc:man")

Some days are better than others. This is quite definitely one of them.

Now to pause awhile and get the thing neatly into CVS before I forget how it works

OK, the first cut of my CORBA for Impatient People document is out. Feedback solicited (dan at telent.net), but don't expect me to read any of it before I've been to bed.

[edited to fix broken URL]

I spent most of today trying to work out what it is about the recent "collaboration" debate that annoys me so much. I still haven't entirely pinpointed it, even after posting a followup to lilo's recent article, so I'm still irritated.

Maybe I should post an entire article about how modest I am.