karltk's neck of the woods

The last few days were spent in Finland. First in Turku, attending the Nordic Workshop on Programming Theory 2003, where I gave a talk, see presentations, then in Helsinki, where I met up with a few friends and had a very good time.

Lo and behold, the ADSL was installed yesterday, on time, and worked (almost) immediately. That means more Gentoo updates in the evenings, I suppose.

Obtaining digital copies of interesting articles seems problematic, especially ones from acm.org. Considering shelling out for a private account, even though I dislike locking up knowledge in private stores when there are heaploads of free hosting services (ibiblio, easynet).

Started serious work on my presentation for NWPT'03.

As I tend to find myself moving between computers a lot, despite lugging my trusty laptop, I figured it would be worthwhile to centralise ideas for my public projects.

After looking around and talking to friends, I decided to give SnipSnap a go, as it integrates both the Wiki and Weblog concepts, that I originally desired. Time will tell how that pans out.

(2004-09-07: The SnipSnap implementation was too horrible to keep running, so I switched to a less maintenance-hungy system.)

Though this time, it was closer than ever before. Been really ill the latest few weeks, so I've read a lot:

• The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, which I found to a very enjoyable book, even tho I've only read Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark yet.
• Quozl, by Alan Dean Foster, which was semi-good. Very childish, and somewhat dithery, whatever that might mean.
• Goedel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstaedter, which is a book first and foremost about intelligence, with very relevant excursions into Goedel's Theorem, intermixed with Eschers paintings and some speculation around Bach's work. Very enjoyable, though it requires some attention while reading.
• Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman, which is the most wonderful physics book I've read to date. Everything is explained in a clear, crisp way (except one passage that I had some trouble getting into).

I've also done some more work on kanga. It (she?) now supports rudimentary spline animations from 3D studio, and renders to OpenGL quite nicely.

Additionally, I've been playing with PCCTS for making a tiny language for writing polygon fillers in. It's not exactly Flex/Bison, which I'm not entirely sure what I think about, yet.

My Fortran was found lacking, so I started a port of Carlos Hasan's MPEGPlayer for Java. It's far from complete, as it turned out to be a huge rewrite and not a port. But now at least I have a more intimate knowledge of the dreary language that should have stayed in the 50s.

Finally, my good friend Vasilij told me about Kiev, a horde of extensions to Java lifted from languages like Prolog and Eiffel, as well as Pizza. I've not had the chance of testing it yet, since it munched all my memory, then crashed. There is supposedly a fix for that.

If they'd just operated.. I've spent the last four days in the annual fight upgrading my operating system(s). I usually try to do this in the summer, but this year I thought I'd start early. RedHat 6.0 was a profound disappointment, crammed with bugs and nasty stuff: ssh won't compile any more, icewm acts up, Gnome crashes, Netscape crashes, the compat-egcs stuff is a kludge, the pre-compiled kernel choked on large file copies, x11amp, the list goes on... kfm was very neat, though.

On a brighter note I was able to install FreeBSD and play a bit with it. But since it apparently had trouble co-existing with my bootmanager, I had to let it go.

I also had some re-revelations with templates in C++ again. Been a while since I've done templates, and just found out that you can parameterize lengths, for instance:

template <int L>
class Foo { int table[L]; };

I tried this out with a generic vector class, but it became more of a kludge than I had expected. Ah, well.

Turns our that my sickness wasn't solely to blame on my working conditions.

Been playing with different stuff lately, mostly Linux-related. The most fun of them was to get Linux working on an Amiga 4000 with a PPC 604e accelerator card. I was amazed at how easy it was to install the precompiled kernels and distos. The amazement continued, but on a darker note, when I tried to recompile the kernel myself. I've temporarily given up, but I advice interested parties to check out the Linux/APUS FAQ and the LinuxPPC site.

Also, I've been examining Qt Toolkit for making GUIs. Made a simple project manager in it at school. Finally, I took down GNU panorama for perusal, and played a bit with it. I expect to do something with this and Qt shortly.

The last months have been spent exhausting myself to the point of total breakdown. I'm now sick as (an unhealthy) dog, so much so, in fact, that I must take medication to function.

However, I have made some progress both here and there. First of all, I'd like to recommend the following books: Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Vlissides and Johnson. It's totally awesome if you do any kind of C++ programming at all. Of course, it's pretty worthless if you don't care a tinker's cuss for the object-oriented methods.

Also in the wind: Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. This one will only be good if you have a solid maths background, and a solid foundation in computer graphics. It is annoyingly terse at times, but where it's not, it's absolutely marvellous. This time, I actually bothered to have a look at the references, so the whole experience was all extremely worthwhile. Get this book if you're really into computer graphics, and not afraid of getting your hands dirty (and printer hot; you will want to download a lot of articles and papers after reading this book).

I've also had the chance to check out Gnome, which was neat but far from finished, POVRay on a Beowulf cluster, which was unstable but extremely neat and fast when it worked, a Cray Origin 2000 which was mind-bogglingly fast, and the chance to set up a web+news+mail server with its own domain name. At least I've learned from the experience.

I've just been working for the last 20 minutes to remove a stupid segmentation fault from a graphics program using PTC. I thought it was PTC's fault all along; some unstable internal bug or something, but it turned out (surprise, surprise!) to be my fault.

The reason is this:

const int myConst;

will (when running egcs 1.0.3 at least) be put into a read-only page, and thus your program will pagefault when you try to write to that memory address. I wanted to have a const GBuffer (bitmap descriptor) to the public, but I wanted it to updated internally (using some casts and pointers). That's not immediately possible without messing with compiler switches and #pragmas. Guess I'll drop the const for now.

This summer I picked up the book "The XML Companion" by Neil Bradley. It was very nice, but at times a bit terse. I'd rather have that, tho, than the usual american 1000+ pages books that don't tell you anything.

Anyhow. That book is the main reason I made these pages. I wanted to try out style sheets, HTML 4.0 and see if I really am functionally color-blind. In my quest for information about these subjects past the book, I tripped over the following URLs:

• The Homesite HTML creator
• The WWW Consortium's pages on CSS
• The WWW Consortium's pages on HTML
• Netscape's HTML reference