Joy has a new release -- it's up to Joy1, from Joy0. RPN, with more functional programming Joy.

They apparently have a interactive tutorial that runs under Joy, too.

Starting to force myself to learn Ocaml at home for some sound analysis stuff that a friend and I are going to play with. Should be interesting. This weekend, we learned a little bit about how Ocaml structures program code, and we also looked at his sound engineering text, and found out more about PCM, and sound in general.

Still swimming in a sea of ennui.

Work

Trying to gear up my code for eventual migration to using something like struts, while still allowing the client's developer to take small evolutionary steps that he'll be able to grok. So the first thing I've done is set up a generic form listener that is associated with a java bean (much like struts). I don't want to re-invent the wheel, but I don't want to throw too much at him at once.

I'm not sure this is the best thing to do, though. It's too easy for him to take my implementation as holy. Which is not what I want. I don't want too much of the existing code to stay in its NIH mindset. But there is alot of code to change to make it fit something like struts.

Coldstore

My GC implementation for coldstore is stalled. Haven't had much drive to work on it because of...

Life

Life is shakey right now. Still dealing with grief and loss. I've invited my brother to come out and stay with me for a few weeks so he can take some time to mourn, too.

My relationship with my gf is a bit rocky right now. It will be interesting to see how we deal with everything.

Feeling tired.

My father died slightly after my last journel entry. The funeral was three days after my birthday.

While I didn't have a good relationship with my father, it still hit me rather hard. Especially considering that a majority of my family weren't all that displeased to have him pass. I ended up giving his eulogy, and being the only one that could express any love, or compassion about him. He was definitely a hard man to love. And he was an abuser for most of my life. But he also managed to show me things that have shaped me since.

He worked for the phone company before (and after) it fragmented into the Baby Bells. When I was very young (maybe 7), he introduced me to unix on a teletype. Nothing entirely special there, because I was too young to entirely understand it, but its nice to know what happened in retrospect.

Later, he bought me an Apple II (and a Timex Sinclair), which put me on the road towards programming. At the end of grade school, we got a fast (300 bps) modem, and he introduced me to the BBS scene.

There are fragements of memories, wisps of good times that I remember him having with me... pushing me towards a better me then I believed in.

And despite the drifting apart that we did over the years, I miss the parts of him that I maintain in my memories.

Coldstore

Looks like coldstore is almost at its next point release stage. Freon (a programming language in the same style as MOO and C++) is almost fully hosted under the persistance engine. Networking has a preliminary implementation. And we now have a simple MUD with an eval/apply loop built into it (this means that the store can be modified and built up from within the image.

I'm currently working on getting our interning functions, and the rest of the bootstrapping into the persistant store working more cleanly -- at the very least, make the bootstrap a little more platform dependant. It will still be dependant on the platform having the ability to run ELF based executables, and load ELF dynamic libraries, but certain assumptions as to how things work within the compiler for how symbols are mangled will vanish.

Still have to flesh out some of the layer seperation between the persistance engine and the layer 1 ADT collection.

opiate has been working like a madman. Basicly he singlehandedly managed to get the mud working, groked some more of the MOP we're using on top of C++, and then went ahead and extended several of our meta classes. He got networking working in a couple of days. All in all, I'm very, very impressed with all the work he's managed to do.

Life

Got back from London about a week ago. Took this long for me to get mostly back into the right mindset to work here in the states.

The folks at Advocacy Online treated me very well. Made sure that I saw London. Spent a few days just wandering through Hyde Park and Soho. I didn't have nearly enough time to experience it all, considering that I was pulling close to 11 hour days every business day that I was there.

I think I miss being out there, even though I'm happy to be back home. Maybe the opprotunity will come up again, soon.

Project Notes

Have a basic version of Object working until toad and I flesh out the view/filter hierarchy. Shouldn't be too bad, it's just a little repetitive.

I also finished a caching mixin for all the Data subclasses. It will basicly memoize any search result in a (presumably) faster cache collection class. As long as the cost of lookup in the cache is lower then the cost to look things up in the the collection that is using the cache mixin, it's a win in time, if not space. At least the cache stores thing in strong references right now, rather then having a second copy of the data.

Life/Work/Everything

3 days till I fly to London. Hopefully, what I'm current suffering from is allergies, and not a cold. At any rate, I'm gonna need to stock up on decongestants, or risk rupturing one of my eardrums again.

Don't feel entirely prepared -- my slack coefficient at work is rather high, so the ratio of work completed/work that needs to be finished is slowly approaching zero. Blah. Need to finish documenting/exporting the db schema so I can load it up on the host machine once I get there. Worst thing is that we won't have a machine to install things on until midweek. Delays in shipping, I guess.

My stepdaughter is beginning to pull out of her depressive slump. And I seem to be reaching a new level of acceptance. She asked if she could call me 'dad' the other day. That felt good.