Older blog entries for dan (starting at number 40)

The story so far

After spending a weekend in Nice (variable weather, sunburn, nice forested hill with remains of ancient settlement on top, small stones all over beach making it marginally less comfortable than it might be) I decided that it was time I got some inline skates. I used to be able to ice skate, so how hard can it be?

After two attempts, I have the following to say:

  1. Actually, not very.
  2. But harder than ice skating. The important thing to bear in mind is that ice skating requires merely that you can skate in a straight line and turn left at the end of the rink. It doesn't involve speeding up, slowing down, or stopping to give way to traffic.
  3. I started under the impression that stopping was the hardest part. This is not true. Staying stopped (and upright) is the hardest part.
  4. There is no point in messing about with the brake thing (chunk of rubber attached to back of right boot) until you are moving at a high enough speed to make it worthwhile. If you brake from a slow speed, you will become stopped very quickly and start wobbling or rolling slowly down the kerb again. You may as well slow down by aiming for something inanimate to grab hold of, because you'll need it a minute later anyway
  5. Once you are moving at reasonable speed, the chunk-of-rubber is a lot easier to deal with
  6. Choose somewhere smooth to practice. Rough asphalt can really shake the ankles. `Level' is also a good attribute.

Look out for the next thrilling installment of "Dan attempts to sprain his ankle" later this week.

I could almost believe that this CLiki thing is actually taking off.

$ grep POST /var/log/apache/access.log | grep -v my ip |wc -l
15

(The log last rotated at 04/Jun/2000:06:43:24 +0100)

Not bad for a dead language!

In other news, somebody got :sockets running under Solaris with what looks like comparatively little pain. Though it was always supposed to be portable to different OSes, this is as far as I know the first time anyone has tried it in practice. It's kind of gratifying

shapr:
Open Source seems to be more about kicking something out the door and letting people play with it.

That's Open Source? I thought that was ContinuousIntegration and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork ;-)

gd&r

Long time no update. I've been busy. Not to mention lazy.

Most of my spare time recently has been consumed getting CLiki off the ground. It's not exactly CPAN, but it's a start. Common Lisp doesn't have enough projects going on to need a CPAN yet, anyway. Yet. It will.

Oh frabjous day. Oh CLORB, OK?

CLORB server side rudimentarily working and patch available and original author contacted. Also minor but necessary :sockets update

After a long time spent fiddling with sockets again, I get to

:; name-client  `cat /tmp/NameService ` list .
CORBA system exception.

Did I expect that? Should I have done?

. . .

CLORB server-side code is not only putting its sockets into non-blocking mode in order to poll them, but it's busy-waiting between polls. As soon as I get it to work at all that'll be the first thing to go out of the window

. . .

In reference to the quoted example in the OOP Considered Harmful thread, I also have to say

* (floor 11 7)
1
4

Not every language is limited to returning one value only from a function

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!

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