GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Tuesday 23 August 2005

Scala on LtU

A few interesting tidbits from the Scala world:

Matt Hellige mentioned a relatively new (new to me, anyway) paper by Odersky and Zenger: Scalable Component Abstractions; from which I learned:
(a) that Google has an office in Switzerland; and (b) that Zenger works there.
Kannan Goundan mentioned Scala's Automatic Closure Construction feature, aka implicit lambdas. Cool.

Having worked pretty exclusively with Ruby for the past couple of months, I'm finding ways in which it reminds me more of Scala than of Python. It's probably the blocks.
11:43:33 PM comment/

Monday 22 August 2005

Dusty Decks, bitsavers.org, and the CHAC

A pointer from LtU led me to Paul McJones' excellent "Dusty Decks" weblog, about computer history. He also has a pointer to bitsavers.org, which has a bunch of "... scanned copies of manuals [and] software in source and/or executable form for a variety of machines."

My own (only?) contribution in that direction is an article I wrote for the Computer History Association of California several years ago, about the Sigma 7 at UCLA that was the ARPAnet's Host #1. I recently discovered that the article is online now. Check it out, page 21 of Volume 2, Number 2 of the "Analytical Engine". Other keywords: GORDO, The Sigma EXecutive OS, Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, IMP.
10:59:30 PM comment/

Saturday 13 August 2005

Condor trail

While researching plans for my recent backpacking trip, I came across mention of a new trail/proposal in southern/central California, called the "Condor Trail". It's intended to be about 300 miles long, and to go along much of the backbone of the mountains in the Los Padres National Forest. I haven't found much info about it on the web, just a 2001 article from UCSB's Daily Nexus, and a "Condor Trail Weblog", on the site for the Los Padres Forest Association.

The UCSB article is called "New Hiking Trail Would Connect the Dots".

The Condor Trail Weblog has a few postings from spring and summer of 2004, but nothing since.

I ought to update my Long Trails in North America page, and add it.
1:42:04 PM comment/

Thursday 11 August 2005

Scala kitten

A few weeks ago, Jamie Webb announced that there is now a Tomcat-like Web App container written in Scala. It's called "Kitten".

There are a few other Scala goodies at the Sygneca site, including a "convenience" prelude.

And here, since you've been so patient, is the doc for the Scala Enumeration class.
12:39:59 AM comment/

Wednesday 10 August 2005

Promises, promises

Shoot, after such a promising June and July, here it is a third of the way into August already and this is my first August entry. I've been doing some actual programming language design (for a machine-oriented assembly-like language, but with some curveballs) and documentation. Using Mac OS X's "Pages" word processor. What a breath of fresh air compared with the horridly cluttered interface of the more common word processors!!

I've also been learning Ruby, it's pretty nice. Not a whole lot different from Python, so it's pretty quick for me to pick up.

The big idea I've been struggling with is the intersection among

Haskell's lazy evaluation;
demand-driven compiler intermediate languages (SSA, GSA, PDG, PDW, VDG);
dataflow languages and architectures; and
compilers that find opportunities to do things concurrently.

Home's still a bit of a mess, though it's been improving. My cousin Stacy and her husband Jeff and son Tyler were here earlier this week, and their dog Cody (who used to live here) got to come and play with Penny and Romeo. Big fun.
11:47:04 PM comment/