Tuesday, November 12, 2002

I'm moving No, not to Redmond :).  I've decided to host my blog over at DevelopMentor instead of on Radio's server.  Sorry for the inconvenience - the new URL will be: http://staff.develop.com/jasonw/weblog/ This should take effect sometime around 9am PST.  I don't think anyone's actually linked yet but if you have please update your links to point there.    11:49:50 PM      comment []

Ingo writes: Please, don't misunderstand me - I absolutely love Rotor ...But ...  as long as one is not able to really use any CLR implementation on a different platform [1] due to licensing restrictions, I guess thinking about doing so has a fairly limited appeal to the conventional business developer. (enphasis mine) I love Rotor too, but as anything but a research and experimental vehicle it certainly isn't usable.  There was an article on idevnews last month that quotes Jason Matusow of saying that MS is at least considering releasing Rotor under a true open-source license.   Would this lead to a nightmare of twisty little runtimes, each one different?  Who knows. 3:41:18 PM      comment []

First I hear that a recent Mac conference had a lookalike contest to see who most resembled Janie Porche. Now in one day I've seen two "switch" parodies  - one I found on Ingo Rammar's blog and one on John Bristowe's. A genuine cultural phenomenon :)   2:46:36 PM      comment []

from the "Jason has too much free time" department Top ten signs youv'e been spending too much time hacking Rotor... 10 You wish the rest of your life had a convenient env.bat file too 9  You go to a nice restaraunt and wish the couple at the next table    would turn the log level on their infant down from LL_EVERYTHING. 8  You ran "sn -k" until you found a keyfile that looks like Claudia Schiffer    when viewed as a bitmap. 7  When you see an attractive woman you think "I sure would like to crawl *her* stack." But then you realize you'd probably find a top-level Deny marker anyway. 6  You've hooked up the JIT Compiler to the PC speaker and wrote a program that makes it play "Fur Elise". 5  Your 13 year old daughter seems distant, and you worry that she is not dealing well    with the transition to Gen1. 4  You've ported the runtime to your Tivo so you can hack and watch    "Buffy" at the same time. 3  You're lobbying to have fork() added to the PAL and have implemented it    for both Windows and FreeBSD. 2  Two words:  Managed iPod. 1  You lay awake at night worrying that somewhere, someone has just released the last    rooted reference to you. 10:41:40 AM      comment []

Intel's ORP and OCL Toolkits I spend a lot of time mucking about in Rotor and Mono.  A friend recently told me about Intel's Open Runtime Platform (ORP) toolkit up on SourceForge.  Very cool, they're building a pluggable VM that easily allows plugging in different GC and JIT compilers.  Read the PDF describing it and see how far you get before you realize that ORP currently targets the Java platform!  Hmm, I wonder how hard a port would be... :) Also interesting to see is Intel's set of  Open CLI Libraries (OCL), a collection of "300+ classes defined in the compact profile of the ECMA spec" (from the docs). Geez, .NET class libraries are sprouting like weeds. Interesting things to note: The class definitions are generated directly from the ECMA XML description (according to the docs) Doc Comments describe what exceptions any given method throws. An abstraction called Platform.VirtualExecutionSystem is used to virtualize OS services.  This is  provides a pretty readable definition for what is expected of an OS - more readable than a PAL. Implementations are provided for Windows and for Linux, although the linux implementation doesn't seem to do anything yet beyond stub out functionality. Just for fun, here's the definition of Thread.Start() that pretty much says it all: ///<;summary> Causes the operating system to consider the thread ready to be scheduled for execution.</summary> ///<;exception cref="System.OutOfMemoryException">There is not enough memory available to start the thread.</exception> ///<;exception cref="System.NullReferenceException">This method was invoked on a null thread reference.</exception> ///<;exception cref="System.Threading.ThreadStateException">The thread has already been started. </exception> public void Start() { System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Thread: Start(): Stub Method"); if (false) { throw new System.OutOfMemoryException(); // There is not enough memory available to start the thread.} } if (false) { throw new System.NullReferenceException(); // This method was invoked on a null thread reference. } if (false) { throw new System.Threading.ThreadStateException(); // The thread has already been started. } PlatformKernel.VirtualExecutionSystem.Start(this); }   10:39:05 AM      comment []

Chris Sells writes: Borland Investigating Mono for Kylix. "Borland is investigating use of Ximian Inc's Project Mono in Kylix, as a possible means for Windows developers to move .NET applications to Linux." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News].  Wow! Way to go, Miguel and crew. 10:11:30 AM      comment []

Monday, November 11, 2002

Geez, I post one little entry and don't tell anyone I've done it - next thing I know Sam Gentile notices and puts up an entry.  Guess I'm committed now - better write out that check to UserLand. :) 10:47:23 PM      comment []

Radio blogger #115946 I'm finally taking a foray into Radio after my friend Peter Drayton told me about it.  Lots of my friends are using RSS aggregators these days and I decided to get with the program.  Radio seems like a good fit if for no other reason than the jaunty Saguaro logo - plenty of those around my place ;) 8:35:21 PM      comment []

© Copyright 2002 Jason Whittington.