Alec’s thoughts

Wow, I’ve just started reading Ars Technica’s first look at Tiger. Needless to say I’m impressed. It sounds like they’ve done quite a bit under the hood this time around, making for a really interesting platform. Between that and trying to make ugly apps pretty with wxWindows, I’m getting jealous of people writing mac-only apps.

A few of my favorite things in Tiger that I’ve read about:

• Incrementally better support for 64-bit addressing. Not tremendously interesting in itself, but its helping Mac keep pace with ia64 without completely revamping the whole OS like you have to do when running linux-ia64.
• launchd - very cool replacement for the umteen different ways unix-like OS’s use for launching processes not directly invoked by the user. It replaces inetd, cron, initd, and more. Good riddens.
• Awesome filesystem support - ACLs, strong lightweight metadata, etc. I think WinFS is such a cool idea and I hope OSX and Linux can eventually follow suit.

And that’s just the beginning. I need to finish the article. Next stop, I might have to get myself a personal Mac.

Man I love Python. I came up with a neat trick yesterday that also couldn’t be done in any static language. Needless to say, I’m pretty pleased with myself. This trick isn’t slow or hard to understand, and actually makes a lot of my code very simple, and avoids a lot of boilerplate that I would have had to write in another language

I needed a way to given a basic color to a class, and then have easy access to various tints of that color for painting different aspects of an object. The tints are based on HSV, not RGB, but all the callers need to deal with RGB.

The solution: wrap the property() descriptor with my own descriptor.
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So now that I’ve been working with python for a good 3-4 months, I’m starting to understand why people like it so much.. a bit part of it is that its just so damn simple. Its so easy to write code that works very quickly. The syntax is very elegant and easy to read. I’ve come to actually prefer the indent-based code grouping over most other language’s braces.

But one thing that has been plaguing me is how a dynamiclanguage could actually be faster than a static language like C++ or Java. I have faith in the theory, but its just that: faith. Until today, I didn’t have any real world examples. I needed something that you simply can’t do in a static language without bending over backwards. Conversely, I needed something that required the dynamicism of a language.

I just picked up the Python Cookbook the other day and I’ve found a very concrete example about how a dynamic language can be fast.
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So where have I been? On January 10th of this year, I started working at the Open Source Applications Foundation. (http://www.osafoundation.org/) Its been quite an experience, and maybe I’ll actually start posting about THAT since I don’t seem to post about anything else here.

This being my first signifigant workout of the year, I’m starting a trianing log on here. So without further ado, the year begins…

Rode the 3 bears alone today - 41 miles roundtrip from home in about 2:50, followed by a 13 minute run on the flats of my neighborhood.

The ride was tough - definitely a wakeup call for the season. Started out riding through berkeley and up spruce. The climb took longer than I expected, about 40 minutes from my house to what I think was the top. Heading out (clockwise) around San Pablo Res, I had a lot of headwind and it was very cold. Many bikers passed me going the other way, so maybe the wind swirls counter-clockwise in the winter? Need to try the other way next time. The three bears themselves weren’t bad - I think they were 3/4 of a mile to about 1.5 miles long each, but I was pretty wiped out by the end of them. Headwinds and hills were tough on the brain, but I didn’t stop and only slowed down when I lost concentration. I passed maybe 4 people on the loop, but by the time I started climbing Wildcat Canyon road, I was so wiped out that 7 people passed me - a few from a Diablo Cyclists group. Returning through berkeley, bumped into Amanda who told me she was trying to get chris to call me for a ride today.

Got home, was going to run around the park. During the transition I realized my three big toes on each foot were completely numb - not even any pins and needles. Headed out around the park but I didn’t feel my toes until 9 minutes in. Got similar leg cramps that I get in races - front interior quad, mostly on the left side. Ankles got just a little of that heavy, stiff pain I sometimes get when I don’t warm up enough. Felt somewhat fresher switching sports - I wasn’t too tight though my effective range of motion was not great.

Recovery with a Powerbar protein bar and gatorade - hip flexors and quads are tired. Tried to stretch a bit.

Now that I’ve been able to tell a few people in person, I thought it would finally be appropriate to post here that Heather and I have returned a bit early from our Honeymoon! We had a fantastic time but are glad to be back in the Bay Area. We’re currently looking for a house in the Berkeley/Oakland area, as that seems to be the only place that has anything affordable whatsoever.

I’m also looking for a job, finally. I’m returning to software engineering with the hopes of eventually integrating my interest in education.

I haven’t posted here because I’m on the road. You can read about my travels with my wife at www.flibbs.com. I probably won’t post here anytime soon, at least until the trip is over.

I recently ran into this crazy ActionScript scoping issue, that drove me so crazy I decided it needed a post. ActionScript is an ECMAScript language so learning it has been very fun. I’m able to use all my JS knowledge and then extend it to a much richer language.
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A long time ago, people were bitching about Hungarian notation in code. Its a rediculous convention perpetrated by Microsoft in the early nineties. During some debates on a mozilla newsgroup, circa 1999, I made this comment:

prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat’s artThe adjBig nProblem?

Well, I had no idea how this goofy statement had been passed around. A quick search on google turns up all sorts of hits where people have used it in their e-mail signature. I even found a guy offering T-shirts with the quote.

Anyhow, I just found the whole thing funny.

I’ve spent more time with OpenSP/OpenJade trying to get everything working under Cygwin, and I think I’ve finally got it.

Here’s what I had to change:

• OpenSP 1.5.1
  1. Edit config.h.in, and comment out #define SP_HAVE_LOCALE OpenSP will work with this turned on, but OpenJade will break. Better to just disable locale support in OpenSP and let OpenJade figure it out later.
  2. Run configure --with-included-gettext Cygwin’s gettext support is lacking bindtextdomain or something.
  3. Ditch the #pragmas Cygwin doesn’t support #pragma interface and #pragma implementation, and it results in undefined symbols during linking. This is in a lot of the source files, you’ll probably want to write a perl or awk script to take care of it.
• OpenJade 1.3.2
  1. Edit grove/Node.h, and change the #ifdef SP_WCHAR_T_USHORT to #ifdef SP_WCHAR_T_USHORT_ OpenJade defines it’s Char type as a Unsigned32. This is apparently incompatible with grove’s definition of GroveChar as a wchar_t. Cant’ we all just get along?
  2. Edit msggen.pl, and add a second chop; - gotta love window’s CRLF linefeed sequence, and the way it confuses perl.

At this point, I know I can run the openjade.exe binary. I haven’t really fiddled with it any more, but I have an article I want to format as HTML.. so that’s next.