Still working on the plane, I've tested out a program that makes complex function calls (pass by value, pass by reference, return value) function calls. It works perfectly. Now I need to add loops to the compiler. The first version of the compiler had working loops, which I wrote last December. But, because I ripped up that compiler I need to write the loops again. Most of the code can be kept, so it shouldn't take too long.
Thursday, 29 August, 2002. 08:58:46 PM
I'm on the plane to Dulles right now, and I just got a first test program to run completely through the compiler, assembler, and virtual machine.
Thursday, 29 August, 2002. 12:23:46 PM
Gotta get on a plane today and fly up to Virginia.
Wednesday, 28 August, 2002. 11:33:23 AM
Alex brought home a brand new Samsung 1651N printer last night. It was a little hard to get working because the network card had been knocked loose in shipping. I reseated it and it worked fine with Windows. Then I went over to my Linux box to see what I could do there. The printer supports all the normal interfaces - port 9100, lpd, SMB, etc. I like the port 9100 interface because it's so simple to use. First I considered using lpr but decided that I'd look for something a little more modern. I've used lpr for years and have become used to the arcane configuration file /etc/printcap. Then, I looked at CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System). Holy cow that package is huge. It could easily coordinate and spool the printing for a giant company. Then, I looked at pdq and xpdq. WOW, those little programs come with a few drivers and a very simple configuration file. xpdq can be used by itself to build a configuration file from scratch with an X interface. I picked the LaserJet 5 printer driver because it can deal with both text and PostScript (using gs) and emit PCL, which most printers including the Samsung understand. The thing worked perfectly the first time. pdq is an impressive little piece of software and should be the printing system of choice for Linux users who need easy setup and don't need a complicated printer spool.
Tuesday, 27 August, 2002. 02:34:31 PM
I just won a funny little Yashica rangefinder camera that takes 126 cartridge film. Can't wait to see it.
Sunday, 25 August, 2002. 11:12:16 PM
I bought a Sandisk compact flash reader and got it working with Linux. I used it to finally move the photos off my digital camera. They've been there for a couple months now. They are in the photo album under Columbus vacation part two and summer storm wall cloud.
Sunday, 25 August, 2002. 01:20:24 AM
Forgot to explain why the Hawkeye photos came out so blurry. When I received the camera, I took it apart to clean it. When I put it back together, the lens was installed backwards. I switched it around today, so future photos should look a lot better.
Saturday, 24 August, 2002. 09:10:12 PM
There's a really cool website called Photographia that's set up like Slashdot. Users can submit photos and then others talk about them. Very cool place.
Saturday, 24 August, 2002. 07:20:09 PM
Alex and I picked up the photos from my Hawkeye today. They are scanned in, look in the photo section under "Kodak Brownie Hawkeye 1". We also drove down to Bastrop to see what the big deal with the pine trees is. Yawn.
Friday, 23 August, 2002. 09:38:38 PM
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
Wednesday, 21 August, 2002. 12:14:46 AM
The scripts that are used to generate this website are available now. Click on the link on the left that says "Code".
Tuesday, 20 August, 2002. 11:06:19 PM
Alex and I saw a spectacular meteor tonight. I was outside watering the lawn and she stepped out of the house to watch. We both saw a meteor travelling directly south, about 80 degrees from the Western horizon. The trail started at a low elevation and continues almost to the Southern horizon, glowing brillian white. It was probably not spacecraft debris, because at orbital speeds it would have taken several seconds to cross from horizon to horizon. This object was moving much faster than that, at quite an inclination to the epliptic.
Tuesday, 20 August, 2002. 01:25:20 PM
I changed my log archive system to be organized by month and year. The old system was an ever-increasing number of pages, with 30 entries per page. Every time I added a new log entry, all the other items slid down one spot on the page, rolling over from page to page. It worked pretty quickly, but Google doesn't index my site frequently enough to keep things straight. Searches that found my page would often point to the wrong page, because the search term had slipped onto another page. This new system solves that problem. All log entries from the current and previous month are available on the front page. Any entries older than that are available though the link on the left: "Log Archive". Under that link, all entries are organized by month, with the newer months at the top of the list. There are two projects that I currently have underway for this website. First, I want to package up the scripts that generate this site, write some documentation, and make them available for downloading. I think that there are probably quite a few people who would like to have a weblog without the hassle of setting up a webserver with a database. Everything on this site is static, and these scripts can completely update the site in less than 10 seconds. The second project that I have going is the "great scanner project of 2002." My scanner is working with Linux, so I'm going through about 10 years of photographs, and scanning them in. The big job will be to organize them. The easy part will be to drop them into directories to automatically integrate them into the website. I'm also toying with the idea of updating the look of the site. Nothing fancy, it'll still be sparse compared with the graphics-laden hideousness that people seem to like. When I find something I like I'll update my master template and regenerate the entire site.
Tuesday, 20 August, 2002. 11:52:41 AM
This is bizarre. It's a U.S. Army publication out of Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas that argues that to win a war of terrorism, we must take the terror to the terrorists. As moral support it quotes the words of Trotsky; the article is quite short, and has three entries in the bibliography: Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism; Trotsky; and ibid. As someone else said, this article gives the reason why Ashcroft saw fit to arrest 2000 of the 200 al Quida members.
Tuesday, 20 August, 2002. 11:03:17 AM
The Austin American Statesman has an article about the arrests in the Kmart parking lot in Houston. This article puts the number arrested at 278, but it's much more critical of the Houston PD. It's got some statements from unidentified police officers, critical of Capt. Mark Aguirre.
Tuesday, 20 August, 2002. 01:51:37 AM
Uh oh. The Houston Gestapo has really gone and done it this time. I expect that in a few weeks it will be the police who are arrested. Captains M.A. Aguirre and J.P. Mokwa were in charge of the raid. Sure, they certainly picked up some troublemakers in this raid. Whenever you arrest 425 people in a parking lot because they happen to be kids, you'll get some troublemakers. The problem is that there were certainly many kids there who were just going to the K-Mart or Sonic at midnight, which is certainly not a crime. It also seems to me that of the 425 people arrested, some certainly must be children of (most likely extremely pissed off) lawyers...
Monday, 19 August, 2002. 04:43:38 PM
Someone did a search on the string "Chad Ludwig Washington D.C." and found my webpage. I sure hope that was Chad doing a search on his own name, and I hope he or Tracy sends me an e-mail soon. I lost track of them and I don't know where they are now. All my searches have come up empty. Chad and Tracy, if you're out there, send me an e-mail!
Monday, 19 August, 2002. 02:31:18 AM
Just heard my deer sprinkler go off. It was an armadillo digging around for insects. There's some deer in the bushes across the street too, so when they wander over later they'll get sprayed. I didn't have my digital cam with me, so I missed a great armadillo shot. I was about two feet from it and it didn't see me.
Sunday, 18 August, 2002. 06:17:47 PM
Alex and I went to Breed and Co. on Bee Cave Rd. and bought a Contech Scarecrow. This little device has a motion sensor and a sprinkler. When it detects an animal in it's field of view it fires a three second spray of water. We've had a lot of deer digging up a flower bed in out front yard, but now we're ready for them. The videos on their website are pretty good.
Sunday, 18 August, 2002. 03:26:25 AM
I've got my UMAX 2000P scanner running under Linux.
Friday, 16 August, 2002. 06:38:22 PM
Holy cow mortgages are getting really cheap. Might be time to refinance again.
Friday, 16 August, 2002. 06:25:19 PM
I imagine a rail based system that would replace all cars. Scenario: I have a house, with a street in front. In the middle of the street is a rail line, with small 4 or 6 passenger cars passing from time to time. There is a short rail spur in front of my house, where my driveway used to be before I had it replaced with some landscaping. I have a computer terminal in my house. When I want to go somewhere, I press a button on the terminal to call a car to my house. It pulls up less than two minutes later, and stops at my rail spur. It will wait for me to get inside. If I don't come out in 10 minutes, it'll leave, and I'll have to call another one.
So, I get into the rail car. It's clean and private, but not particularly fancy. If I wanted to, I could have my own private rail car, but that costs a bit extra and is actually not as convenient. The reason is that when I'm not using it it has to park at a special railyard which might be miles away from me. Of course, if I'm at home it's on my private railspur.
After I get into the railcar, I enter my destination somehow, probably a voice recognition system, and off it goes. The car travels quite quickly, well over 150 MPH where the old Interstates used to be, and perhaps 80 MPH inside of cities. At this speed, it's less than a minute to get to the grocery store. As I pass through intersection the car doesn't even slow noticeably, though I know that the computers controlling it are always varying the speed, to make intersection timing possible. All over the city cars zip at high speed through intersections, sometimes switching from one track to another, but never colliding. They interleave like the teeth on a gear.
When I reach the grocery store, the railcar pulls up into a large spur for the store. Last week, the spur was full, and the rail system rode me around the block twice before it dropped me off. It was only a couple extra minutes, and that delay will go away when the store completes its second rail spur queue. When I get out of the railcar, it does a quick automatic check of the interior cleanliness and zips off to pick up another passenger.
Wednesday, 14 August, 2002. 02:13:44 PM
I haven't gotten that roll of film that I shot in my Hawkeye developed yet. Maybe this weekend I'll take it to Precision Camera and buy another roll to shoot in my Duaflex. There's another model of Duaflex with a different lens that might be nice to have too. Perhaps a very old 35mm rangefinder camera like the Kodak Retina would be the next thing to get. They are pretty expensive compared to the box cameras though.
Sunday, 11 August, 2002. 11:22:09 PM
My bookmarks file was updated on the website.
Saturday, 10 August, 2002. 11:18:28 PM
I just loaded my Hawkeye with a roll of film. I bought a spool of 120 size T-MAX 100 black and white film today. I shut off all the lights in the house, locked myself into the bathroom, and respooled the film onto a 620 size spool. The Hawkeye came with a single 620 spool, and so did the Duaflex II. The process was not too difficult, and it was easy to keep the film straight on the 620 roll. The only tricky part was the hump that forms when the paper backing and film wind at a different rate on the smaller 620 spool. The tape that holds the film to the backing paper has to be pulled off the paper and repositioned before the last part of the paper can be wound up. Something else that has to be considered is that modern films are panchromatic, meaning that they are sensitive to all colors of light. Black and white films that were originally used in Brownies were not sensitive to red colored light. The roll film has frame numbers printed on the backing paper. The film winding mechanism has no framing mechanism. Thus the only way to see if the film has been wound far enough is to look through a little red window that opens into the center of the film frame, and read the frame number directly off the backing paper. When using a modern panchromatic film (panchromatic was the reason that the last-generation films were named Tri-X Pan and Plus-X pan) that little window has to be covered with a piece of cardboard and electrical tape when the camera is outside in bright light. Anyway, my camera is loaded and ready to go. I'm probably going to go out and shoot the entire roll tomorrow. The roll holds 12 shots instead of the usual 6 or 8 because each frame is 6cm square instead of 6cm by 9cm which is more typical.
Saturday, 10 August, 2002. 06:20:10 PM
I just finished cleaning up my Kodak Duaflex II box camera. Also got a roll of 120 film from Wolf Camera. For processing I'll have to take the film to Precision Camera on Lamar. I'll unwind the 120 film from the spool and rewind it onto the 620 spool. After I shoot the entire roll, I'll wind it back onto the 120 spool. The film is the same size, but the 620 spool is smaller in diameter. Kodak changed the spool to encourage people who bought their cameras to also buy Kodak film, since they were the only 620 manufacturers. I've got another camera coming, but that takes 127 size film.
Friday, 09 August, 2002. 06:06:20 PM
Global search and replace on all lines of a file in vi:
:%s/{search string}/{replacement string}/g
Friday, 09 August, 2002. 02:52:15 AM
Didn't get much programming done tonight, because of the updates to the webalizer pages on this site. I started my weblog on August 26th last year, so I've almost reached my 1 year anniversary. Once I had a simple and automated way to add material and new entries to the site it became a habit. I've got some more changes to make to my scripts. Probably the next thing I'm going to do is arrange all the older log entries into a grouping by month. That would allow the scripts to just generate those entries once and then leave them, and it would let me find older log entries more easily. Right now when I do a google search of my site to find something, it shows up on a page that's much earlier than it actually resides on. That's because every time I add an entry to the log, all the entries get bumped down a slot on the page, with the last entry spilling over to the next page. The very first entry is on the highest numbered page. The scripts can process it quickly, but it's not the best solution.
I've got to spend more time getting my compiler working. It's almost there. The virtual machine is almost in place. Once I have all the basic things implemented properly I'll work on the interface between my scripting language (named Shipster) and C++. I'm starting to get all the pieces together. I wish that I had kept track of when I started it. I think it was sometime early in 2001, but it's hard to remember now. It's not important anyway.
Friday, 09 August, 2002. 12:27:34 AM
I added a reverse DNS logfile processor to my Boa configuration. The Webstats page should now show real domain names instead of IP numbers. Boa relies on a small Perl script to process the logfiles, rather than doing the lookup inside the webserver.
Thursday, 08 August, 2002. 11:24:11 PM
Oh yea, forgot to add that the web statistics are updated by a cron job every hour.
Thursday, 08 August, 2002. 11:17:52 PM
There are two new sections on this website. Bookmarks is the bookmark file from my web browser. Everything old was deleted, so for some categories there are few entries. I'm adding things all the time, so this will change frequently. The other new section is the Webstats section. You can see graphical diagrams of the traffic to my website. There are lots of stats broken down by month (click on the month to get to the month detail view).
Thursday, 08 August, 2002. 10:44:30 PM
There really is place called Dildo, Newfoundland, Canada
Wednesday, 07 August, 2002. 10:09:08 PM
Edsger Dijkstra has died. He was a pioneer in computer science, and is probably best known for his 1968 paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful. He also wrote How do we tell truths that might hurt?, A Parable, and over 1300 other things. He's also known for his creation of the Dining Philosopher's problem, solving the shortest path problem, and P (proberen) and V (verhogen) semaphores. By his own words, this is how he would like to be remembered:
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
Wednesday, 07 August, 2002. 07:55:46 PM
Here's another great article about the current political climate surrounding circumcision in the United States.
Wednesday, 07 August, 2002. 12:00:37 AM
Tuesday, 06 August, 2002. 12:45:02 PM
Monday, 05 August, 2002. 10:30:05 PM
Happy 72nd birthday to Neil Armstrong.
Monday, 05 August, 2002. 06:43:58 PM
The website scripts were upgraded. The site looks the same, but the mirroring is done with unison instead of my custom ftp diff script. I can also regenerate the logs separately from the photos.
Monday, 05 August, 2002. 02:13:25 PM
Yesterday (the 4th) was our anniversary. Alex and I both were thinking it was the 5th, but we were married on a Monday, and according to 'cal 8 1997' the first Monday in August that year was the 4th. We went out to eat but we didn't realize that it was our anniversary. We were also finished stripping the finish off the front door. Next week we're going to stain it. The door is also getting new hardware. The nasty old brass handle and locks are being replaced by new ones with a nickel finish.
Friday, 02 August, 2002. 01:12:37 PM
I decided to become a permanent regular employee of Sector 7 USA. My job requires quite a bit of travel, and because of that I was considering a change. I'm a troubleshooter. I move from project to project and fix problems as they show up. The job market in Austin isn't very hot right now, and I doubt that I could find a similarly challenging and fun position at another company - I've looked for a couple months now. Contract work has been a lot of fun, but it's time to make a change. I was always looking for that place where I can settle in for more than a year or so that most contracts last, and Sector 7 is the place. We've worked out the salary that I'll be paid, and now all I have to do is sign the contract. The only thing that I need to put in is a clause that says that the programs that I write on my own equipment on my own time belong to me.
Friday, 02 August, 2002. 01:29:03 AM
HP backed off their threat to use the DMCA to stifle a report on an insecurity in their Tru64 operating system. I imagine that all the angry letters sent to Carly Fiorina made the difference.
Thursday, 01 August, 2002. 01:24:20 PM
This site has a lot of interesting things on it: www.skuncle.com
Thursday, 01 August, 2002. 12:19:57 PM
The Law of Land Warfare