Older blog entries for lolo (starting at number 13)

I've not done much lately, as I've been absorbed by real life. I even completely failed to deliver mod_virgule patches I promised to lkcl (sorry about that).

I'll be able to actually code a little in the next few weeks, and I've decided to work on implementing unlimited undo/redo for the geometric engine of Dr. Genius. And of course I'll try to finish my patches for mod_virgule.

Food for thought for all the "Advogatos": Requirements Elicitation in Open-Source Programs.

Raph: your pictures are awesome! The baby is sooo lovely. I'm moved...

<joking>Could you translate the mensurations of your little boy to the metric system, please. It makes it hard for me to appreciate the result of your hard work</joking>.

I've been experimenting recently with a Wiki clone named pywiki, which has version control implemented with RCS. I like it, and now I think I will do something like that for mod_vigule, but using XML datastructure as the backend instead of RCS. I'm pretty confident that this can be implemented with only a limited number of lines of code.

I've been really interested by the diary of Christopher Blizzard about performance tools for Linux. <wish>I think that would be great if someone knowledgeable could write an article for Advogato on the subject.</wish> This would be of great interest for all free software developers.

Congrats are in order for you raph and your wife.  Being a young father myself (my son is three months old now) I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do :-).  Have a nice day.

Andrei is probably looking for a book about or by Paul Erdos. Isn't this diary thing turning into an IRC-like forum? :-)

During this week-end I've been thinking about what new functionnality could be interesting for Advogato, and I've come up with two ideas:

  • A voting system that could work in the same way Usenet votes work or as an option in the same way as Debian votes (I like the way the Debian people are resolving multiple choices).

  • An RFC section, where articles could be collaboratively written, and reviewed, and the resulting article could be proposed for vote to be accepted as an "official" Advogato production...

I'll make a try at writing some code for a voting system.

Sent my first patch for mod_virgule, and it works! Good day.

I've not been very productive lately, but taking care of a baby turns out to be a very time consuming activity :-)...

Here's a summary a short summary of the things I've done and that are relevant for this Advogato diary thing:

  • Started looking at the mod_virgule code. My idea is to add a ChangeLog-style page that would show on one page all the latest diary entries updates. This would make it easier to follow what's going on on Advogato.

  • I'm making great progress on my small prolog-like interpreter idea. The thing is 1200 lines long for now and does almost compile. All the core logic is implemented now. (Note: It's a complete rewrite).

  • I've been looking at the gnome-print code lately to learn more about printing in GNOME. I will implement printing support for Dr Genius's geometric figures in the next few weeks.

  • I've thinking about how it could be possible to redesign all the basic UNIX utilities (like init, inetd, cron, lpd, pppd, ...), to make a system that is much more user friendly. Looks like there are some good ideas in MacOS/X in this respect. Apple is using a UNIX kernel in their system, but they have "updated" some of the "historic" UNIX user-space utilities. Interesting perspectives.

I'm currently just doing support by mail for Dr. Genius, and thinking about what I'm going to do next.

I will probably resume programming soon, now that my wife and my son are back at home (this is sooo good :-)).

I've found the code of a small prolog interpreter, and my plan is to improve it somewhat and turn it in an embeddable AI engine that could be easily used in various applications.

It currently has a very small footprint (exec size is less than 50k when stripped), but a really poor memory management. My first priority is to improve this, by adding a Garbage collector and efficient dynamic memory allocation.

This code is currently public domain and I will turn it in a GPL or LGPL library.

The funny thing to note about this interpreter is that it has been used by Microsoft, and modified version of it is hidden somewhere in Windows NT network setup code :-).

Best wishes to all of you for this new year!

I'm writing this small diary entry from work where I am currently busy checking that all the servers are ok :-).

On the Dr Genius front I have some changes in store that I will commit soon now: full implementation of the various line styles, and improvement to various dialogs.

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