So, what have I got on the go?
- School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they'll be delicious and meaty
- CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
- CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
- ...actually, I'm also taking spanish!
- "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I'm really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I'll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I'll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
- BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
- Peter Michaux's Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he's blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I'm following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
- The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.
So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn't be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!
Also, if I haven't mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It's fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast's I've ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.
But now I'm stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I'm actually quite excited to try out.
Finally, I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.
If you're wondering what's been eating my time, the simple answer is school. It's my last year, there are things to be done. I'm helping a lot more, which takes time, for one thing.
The other thing is my CS 416 (distributed computing) term project. It's kind of neat, Douglas Hofstadter would approve. It's a P2P website: a website with a java applet that is a webserver, that can server the whole web site to other browsers, and it also servers it self to itself, and by using AJAX, the website can talk to "itself", or more specifically, the server, which can also talk via AJAX to other servers. So not only does the website server itself and talk to itself, it forms a network of all the websites. I'll probably put it online when it's a bit more finished.
So yeah. I'm doing ok with keeping on top of my classes, but it pretty much takes all my free time that went to coding this summer. I'll be back eventually ;)
Well, with cl-pack sitting in a (hopefully) finished state, I'm turning my attention back to what got me started on it in the first place: attempting to write Lisp support for Apache Thrift. Thrift is the RPC framework Facebook uses internally and they open sourced it a bit ago, and it made its way into the Apache incubator where it resides now getting all kinds of attention. Several languages have been added to it, and its been generally cleaned up. After watching a video on Facebook architecture I got interested in Thrift. When I found out there was no Lisp support I figured I'd take a stab at it. Apparently others have tried but disappeared, so as to weather I'll finish, we can only wait and see but it seems like a good challenge and something I'd very much like to see done.
The digression onto cl-pack was a wonderful little trip. I learned a bit more about Lisp and lots more about packaging software for Common Lisp. It was a good little project to cut my teeth on and hopefully better prepare me to see this through.
So wish me luck, I'll probably need it for this larger undertaking. Approach #1 is reading the Ruby code and then writing similar CLOS Lisp code. It seems like a decent approach off the top of my head.
cl-pack 0.2 is out and can be gotten at the regular place. I've packed a lot of new features into it. More data types supported, and a lot of new syntax and formating rules including grouping and '/' templates. Additionally some bugs were fixed including signed number support.
cl-pack covers most of Perl's pack's features ignoring as far as I'm concerned only weird esoteric stuff. Granted thats up to interpretation but I am very happy with what cl-pack supports and so I am pushing out 0.2 and calling it "feature complete" unless I hear from anyone soon needing anything or with bugs. If not I'll rerelease it in a bit as 1.0. It's a pretty solid piece of work IMHO.
Well, today I made some progress on cl-pack. I fixed a native endian detection bug, wrote some more test cases and most importantly added actually support for signed integers. Not bad for a days work. Then went through all the perldoc on pack and made up a list of all the features I still need to support for pretty much full compatibility. It isn't tiny or trivial but it should be doable and hopefully in not a huge amount of time. I'm at least pretty stoked. cl-pack is really coming along and then lisp can boast fully pack/unpack support like most other languages out there.
I've released cl-pack 0.1.1. Just a few code improvements suggested by Zach. This is just light stuff, some slight tweeks to be more in line with lisp standards and a few small speed up using native functions I didn't know about instead of my own code.
He'd suggested some more radical changes too, the biggest being to turn the two pack/unpack case statements into macro-foo so that I could just go
(define-directive #\i ...)
all on its own. I gave it a good try and pretty much got it working, but it unfortunately spits out about 125 style warnings, increased the code by about 100 lines or ~ 20% and I'm not sure in the end if it really was any clearer, so I scrapped that for now and am just releasing the basic easy changes and moving onto a few more features.
The planned release will be hopefully something like a few more features for 0.2.0 and then if nothing explodes, release it as 1.0 and cl-pack should be done-ish.
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