« Cobra Verde and The Audition | Main | Update: Papaya Sucks »
December 18, 2004
Misc Updates
Food
Tonight, Alex and I had quail. It was really good, though kind of a pain to eat. Stringy, greasy, tasty.
Lately we’ve been eating a lot of fruit and yogurt. I finally caved and bought some plain yogurt to make lassis with. We got some mangoes, and those have been fun to, once you learn the proper way to open them:
- Cut the top and bottom off.
- Peel it with a potato peeler (unless it’s too ripe, but none of ours have been).
- Note the orientation of the “stone” within, which is a big flattish seed in the middle.
- Slice the “cheeks” of the mango off by slicing across the stone downward.
- Slice the meat away from the edges of the stone.
They’re also pretty easy to pick. Find a firm one that doesn’t look bruised. Ignore the color. It’s ripe when it yields a bit when you squeeze it.
Ah, the magic of the internet.
Alex and I are sort of on a tropical fruit kick, to try and find fruit that Alex likes. She apparently hates most “traditional” fruits: apples, pears, oranges, etc. She also hates a lot of weird fruit like kiwis. She seems to like mangos OK. Next we’re trying coconut, papaya, and some other weirdness we found at Wal-mart.
Work
I inherited the server version of iAnswer a month or so ago from Dean, who basically stopped developing it. The reason why is kind of clear when you look at the code: it’s a tangled fucking mess of booleans and case statements in an essentially asynchronous environment. Events are flying around, he’s going “are we in mode X with option Q or mode Y with option B? If so, delete the file.” It’s utterly unmaintainable.
We’re going beta tomorrow.
I have 12 “little” bugs to fix first, and then we’re releasing it to a small group of Dean’s own assholes. Then I’ll probably wind up massively refactoring it to work with the State design pattern. Dean might want back in on it then. I hope so, because I really don’t understand the structure, and interfacing with the hardware directly is something I’m not very good at or familiar with. We’ll see.
Next week: Spamfire 2 beta. This goal is much more achievable. Of course, we also have to produce 42 pages of changes for Nina’s catalog. They called us about a month ago to say we’re doing a new catalog. The price of silver combined with the sheer amount of outdated information seems to be forcing the issue with them. Originally, they wanted it in print by January first. That was a hard one to swallow, but then they backed down to January 31 when they admitted they were going to send us beads to scan.
Spamfire 2 is in great shape. It’s the first product that we will have done from start to finish since I’ve been there. That means it’s the first one that’s incorporated my database abstraction layer and Michael’s knew Cocoa Bindings-esque MFModel abstraction. In short: it took him about a week to get the interface to 90% done; the rest of the time UI-wise has been redesign, icons, and general fiddling (unavoidable). I wrote the Bayesian filter, essentially transcoding SpamBayes (thanks guys!) into REALbasic, which was strange and depressing, but I’m glad it works. Initially it was quite slow, we’ve got it operating at a reasonable speed now. The only issues that remain are basically tying it all together, implementing a transparent proxy, and fixing some of our threading code. It’s going to be rock-solid and excellent, and I’m really happy about it.
Unfortunately, SF.net has been troublesome for a few days. Navdeep was fired for four reasons Michael won’t tell me, so he’s gone and we have no idea what all he was doing to keep SF.net operational, or even what he did after he rebooted it. We’re pretty nervous, but it seems to be stable for right now. SF.net was Navdeep’s, essentially. So we went from 4 programmers down to 2 in the space of about a month. Michael seems happy with me. I am very fond of the job, but working on things I don’t know, trust or understand is iffy. I especially like it when I’m handling our new Linux server.
Ruby
I’ve got 3/4 of a Ruby C extension tutorial written. Feel free to glance at it but I’m aware of some problems with the formatting (I wrote it in Textile, because I suck or something) which I’m keen to fix but haven’t found the time. The extension itself is basically ready, but I’m stalling for various reasons.
Io
I went back to Io a couple days ago. Emailed Steve, chatted with him on AIM for a bit. Apparently NeXT people have a strong loathing of BeOS and everything Be. :) He’s a good guy, I feel bad about not having prepared the DBI layer sooner. The list traffic was starting to piss me off, so I left for a while, got caught up in other things, etc. Not sure how much interest I really have in Io the language, so much as prototyping the concept and a general need to contribute to the community in some capacity. I like Ruby better, but I keep coming back to it. I guess I like the clarity/simplicity. Some things are going to have to change before I can really consider it a worthy language:
- The build system needs to be unfucked.
- They need a real system for loading C extensions at run-time, like every other language
The build system is fucky because Io comes with the sources for the libraries it can use. Steve has a vision of a turnkey language solution, which is great and all, but it really should be a spin-off of the main language. Io claims to be small, yet the download is 20 MB compressed, nearly 100 MB decompressed. This is inconsistent. It’s also a very fragile build system, because it’s basically recursive make without Automake around to generate it. If they get a library path wrong, I have to edit about 4 Makefiles to fix it. This sucks. Oh yeah, it also means that Io winds up depending on the weird versions of these libraries that came in the package rather than, say, ones you have installed.
And it sucks more than is reasonable, because IoVM is small and doesn’t actually depend on this cruft. IoVM could be built from a regular Makefile on damn near any system. We could have a build system written in Io and it would be cross-platform and glorious.
I mentioned this to Steve, he said someone’s working on it. But he apparently also told some French magazine that he had somebody working on DBI, like a week ago. We’ll see.
As for the extension thing mentioned, exactly that: right now, every library for Io is compiled in. Pick a flavor: VM, Server or Desktop. Server is what we’d call “normal” for most languages we use like Ruby, Python, or Perl. Desktop is like, all that plus your toolkit, your OpenGL, your crypto, etc. The goodies. High-level libraries for GUI, graphic, audio and video work. It’s very nice. VM is basically what you have in your Python or Ruby without importing any of the standard library.
It’s very interesting, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid. VM = builtins, Server = standard library, Desktop = 3rd party libraries. Oh well. I’m not like mad at Steve, and I’m sure he’s aware of how weird this stuff is, but I don’t care enough to fork the code over it and spend the time to implement it, and nobody else does either.
The aforementioned list traffic which was pissing me off basically came down to a single post. Some guy emailed Steve, telling him he should add some feature to the language. I think he wanted lines beginning withto be considered comments. Steve was like… uh, why? The dipshit said, because he had SSI on his server, and it would make it easier for him to do CGI with Io. Change the language… so he didn’t have to do any work on his server. And this asshole was persistent about it! I guess I just get enough stupidity in my daily life, I don’t need extra. Or maybe it was just one of those days, and that was just a bit too much. I don’t remember. :)
Happenings
Yesterday, Alex and I had to go into Santa Fe. When we got back, we decided to eat at Dairy Queen, a block away from our apartment. The Socorro girl’s basketball team was there chowing down after winning some sort of tournament or something. We thought nothing of it at the time, but tonight Alex mentioned her throat is sore, I recalled Major saying that strep is going around in Socorro, and think we might be about to get strep throat.
Tonight, there were a lot of weird sirens going off outside. Eventually a fire truck with lights on it drove by, and a cop car, and a fire wagon of unspecified type. A parade, if you will. It was nice.
Everything is very nice.
Posted by FusionGyro at December 18, 2004 01:37 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.clanspum.net/~fusion/blog/admin/mt-tb.cgi/68