paid time off ¶
I dipped into my vast reserve of vacation time and took two days off. It was my first break since last Thanksgiving. I worked straight through the holidays — every day including weekends until the middle of January.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and I was quite interested in the async i/o because it was based on þ designs. But now I wish I hadn't; it sets a terrible precedent, where folks get the idea personal life is disposable.
elves ¶
I was putting together an elf deck to play magic cards with my sons, and I opened a new booster pack on Friday, finding a new rare gold elf with a excellent effect. And the odd part? This elf had my name — a variant I use with h included. It was a wee bit disturbing, but it has to be a coincidence; the designers don't know me from Adam. So it's just a windfall.
Guess I'll have to put an image on this site later.
file descriptors ¶
I'm working a lot on the demos, with new half written fd for file descriptors going up today, and more content in still unfinished iovec. Most of my effort this last week was below the waterline: writing and restructuring þ sources specifically for the demos.
Some classes didn't have their print code written yet in this rev, and pursuit of simple sample code writing as directly to files as possible lead me to expand support for file descriptor wrappers. Slicing iovec iters and printing or writing the result was complex enough I realized a separate page for the fd code was necessary. Most likely I'll have the rest of iovec stuff up next week.
argh ¶
That's my comment about day job experiences: argh. Lately it's very absorbing in not very fun ways. It's life. Things get better again after rough spots. Except when they don't (geek humor).
less blogging ¶
Writing useful code docs on this site feels more productive and seems better at reducing stress than writing funny fiction, so I've been writing a lot. I might just keep at that indefinitely, with little more than a token trickle of comments here.
I fleshed out structure of a large number of new pages indexed from demos under þ, and completed two new pages — todo and names — but I didn't have much writing time this weekend.
I plan to keep grinding through without much pause, likely wishing now and then I'd do a better job on this first pass, and recognizing there won't be a second pass later because life is short. I'll only do it once. (When you're young, you imagine there's time to do things again after lame first attempts; but experience shows many things get only one try.)
Whatever I started this website for, I think I've settled on what I can do in the near term. Then I'll expand into what time allows later. The current docs I'm writing can act like notes I can review to refresh a lot of ideas at one time to resurrect whatever mental frame I want to hold later when coding language stuff.
Also, when I return to coding the programming language, if I hold myself to matters easy to describe in passing here, that'll impose natural limits on how involved parts can get.
code demos ¶
I've been writing a lot, as I've been saying recently. You can go read pages under þ to find new stuff. Some of the pages are just stubs, but several have quite a bit of material. My next big push will be under the demos subsection, since it will feature descriptions of code motivated by what you want to use it for, in context. This looks like it might work well, so I'll focus on that a while.
The new license is done, but I don't actually like it much. I couldn't figure out how to put a financial penalty in the license for folks or companies who refuse to honor the prohibition against changes, but I put in specific terms anyway. It just leaves a bad taste. Maybe I'll adjust it later after I see a better way to say such things.
Here's where I did a lot of writing:
And there's a little more on other pages.
jokes ¶
I seldom relate jokes I tell during the day because — as usual — you had to be there for it to be funny. But my older son created a context in which I told him a joke I made recently at work; telling you about this is almost interesting. And I feel like reminding folks I have a home life often. So steel yourself.
Son1 was watching Youtube videos from Who's Line Is It Anyway?, which is a comedy show featuring ostensibly improvised jokes by comedians prompted by premises supplied by host Drew Carrie. I could link Youtube videos he showed me, but I'm not going to. :-)
He's been a big fan of this show a long time — for a couple years Son1 has been saying I'd be perfect on the show myself because I can improvise stories, and in fact it's hard to make me stop when I let my hair down. I'd hate to be under pressure to perform though; thank you, no. Anyway, Son1 can't get enough of it, so I put up with Youtube videos at night. (This in itself is kinda weird and interesting. It's not like the three network channels of my youth anymore.)
His favorite bit is one where a comedian must act like a girl scout selling cookies on television — while possessed by the devil. We loved the look on the comedian's face when given the assignment. Son1 liked the look on my face just as much. So we started talking about reactions of folks to surprising jokes.
I told Son1: a couple days ago at work a coworker at lunch — let's call him Ned — was telling us all about his uncle who died a year ago, who was a famous Lincoln scholar. For example, Ned told us the true history of what happened with John Wilkes Booth and the conspiracy. Ned said his uncle had been working a long time on a new book, but for some reason decided not to publish it; the book just disappeared. Ned wondered what it was about.
In my usual serious tone of voice, I said it described the secret location of the national treasure.
This caused a few explosive responses around the table as folks tried not to choke on food. Son1 liked this part, about folks snorting in response to unexpected jests.
writing binge ¶
I'm still writing new material not ready for prime time. I spent way too long on a license last night, but I don't like it yet. Don't you hate that? I'll update thorn pages when nothing is still clearly wrong. I made stub pages for several categories of content, with barely any starting material. Little thought is required: very good.
The docs I'll be writing are a substitute for coding a language system for a while. It'll make a good reminder of relevant contexts when I have time to code more at home.
magic cards ¶
In my house it's magic card season again with my sons nagging me to make and tune decks daily. Hours vanish in a blink. My sons interrupt their own interruptions while studying cards to design decks. Interruptions stack three or four deep, and remind me of work at times. A funny assumption: that I'm making progress on one thing when spending 100% of cycles on another, even when watched every second. Maybe my clones are helping in the background.
runtime ¶
I'm adding a bunch of pages, but many are still just stubs, so I won't bother linking them until worth reading. As I fleshed out my plan for site architecture around a toy language discussed 28feb08, I realized I was going to write a lot on the þ runtime first, so I started digging up streets there too.
A fair amount of docs involved will be fiction about devs using the code and why they think one way or another. This use of stories ought to make content memorable enough for long term memory traction in more folks.
Before I get into details of a toy language, the way it gets written in terms of þ C++ utils will come first. Since I don't have quite enough time these days to work on coding a later generation of language than the toy, I can at least discharge some of the literate programming plan by explaining the toolkit I've been refining since the early 90's.
I was going to write this up under the mu section for the toy language, when I noticed þ was already where I planned to discuss low level utils. Okay, so it'll be scattered around a little. Just pretend it's a scavenger hunt. (Zé likes scavenger hunts, partly because they're retro, and partly because they provide an excuse to visit very weirdly different locales.)
vtables ¶
I added a new vtables story in two parts in the story section for fiction, with a left column about vtables as a tech subject and a right column about fictional characters meeting to grow an ensemble cast for later fiction.
The intro to the right column there points here, saying I'd explain what's wrong with the right column story.
It's the first mention of a character named Eli who is Ulf's son of 20 years. I thought Eli up the weekend before when I watched Repo Man again, thinking I'd use it as a motif in future Zé stories. I realized I needed someone with the same functional role as Otto in Repo Man: youthful foil as ignorant newbie in a world populated by older guys in some industry with odd quirks. I had the beginnings of a great story I didn't want to spend time writing. (I can get to it later.) So I wanted to toss off an intro to Eli without going off in the weeds.
There's a lot of things wrong with the intro as it appears in vtables, but the one bothering me most: nothing happens. It's all just characters talking. I hate stories like that without at least a connection to action elsewhere. I like plots where things happen (preferrably strange things).
It's actually a lead up to an action sequence where Zé reveals an ability to put them all inside Repo Man the movie, but with improvisational accomodations for themselves. Either that, or it's Ulf's first demonstration of how Zé intends to make Walter Mitty style fantasy into a game idea with business model prospects Ulf wants to pursue. But Ulf wonders if he was just having a psychotic episode.
However, that would have been too interesting, and I'd have gotten caught up in meshing plot elements organically to support each other. It never really works until a whole bunch of things begin to imply each other in clusters. Then it takes off. But I don't want to go there right now.
So one of the things wrong with the story is gross waste of raw opportunity. But that's easy to get back later.
Another problem was how much I had to discard to make it short, even keeping only talk-without-action parts. Getting it to stop as short as the left column was tough. I had easily three times as much blitz pace material — some I really liked.
First, I lost where Eli realizes they're repo men who go out and collect stories when folks don't pay their bills — or something. Then Eli anticipates what's going to happen by asking who'll do Harry Dean Stanton's Bud, and who they'll get to play J. Frank Parnell in the Chevy Malibu.
You'd have more fun working this out from my showing you instead of telling you. Discussing it this way instead takes some of the magic out of it, and also makes me less kooky sounding, which is kinda the point.
But if you like that sort of fiction, you needn't worry I can't make it plenty odd and surprising later anyway.
