Geek

For the last week, I have had one of theeese. The Eee PC, a tiny subnotebook. 4GB solid state storage, runs Linux, has USB ports and a decent VGA output. Most of what I'd want from a take-anywhere machine other than long battery life. Impressed so far.

With little thanks to CityLink, who recently appear to think that attempting to deliver packages is a bit much to ask.

Not really had time to play with it much, of course, as I am insanely busy working on my thesis. The only other thing I've had time for (which is to say made time for) is running; last week was my first to hit the 50-mile mark. Well, I manage to eat and sleep too. Not much choice on that front.

Less than a month to go!

Woo! I have a new phone!

I am writing this entry on the bus. Time will tell what goes wrong.

It's a Nokia 6822...

Bring on the new. I'm posting this entry from XEmacs, via the wonders of XML-RPC and the magic of the following snippet of lisp:

(defun post-buffer (title categories)
  "Post current buffer to weblog with given title/categories."
  (interactive "sTitle: \nsCategories: ")
  (post-text title (buffer-substring) categories))

(defun post-text (title body categories)
  "Post given text to weblog"
  (let ((id (post-entry title body categories)))
    (message (concat "Entry posted: " id))))

(defun post-entry (title body categories)
  (xml-rpc-method-call
   "http://beaneater.org.uk/XMLRPC" 'beanlog.newPost
   title body categories))

If I ever get around to learning more elisp, I guess I might make it into a proper mode (I don't care if such a thing already exists). At least there's a few things I'd like to automate.

It is interesting writing these kind of little thingies in Perl, elisp, and Haskell, as I am at the minute, different takes on typing give a completely different feel. I guess some C and Java could round it off...

I am converted.

I don't know when it happened, but I am a functional programmer. In my third year of uni I learned the lambda calculus, and it made sense. And then that summer I learned ML by writing a compiler in it. For a functional language.

Now I know that I don't know much about functional programming, but I do know that I no longer feel the need to return to the imperative world. I like my strong typesystems and the like. Sometimes libraries aren't the bulletproof things I would like, but the languages are there.

You never know, in a while I may be converted enough to be writing those useful libraries...

I've spent my entire day at work merging compiler changes into the main tree. Oh what fun. Merging changes into files which are semi-autogenerated by a mystical merging process is not fun.

So, I have learned to use xemacs's ediff, and it is good. Much easier than eyeballing diffs, nice highlighting of the different regions in question (and indeed sub-regions and stuff), single key to move the version in one file with the other, etc. It's great! And, as with all emacs, I can spend my entire life learning the rest of the functions and keybindings.

Also discovered an emacs function for generating nice pretty-printed HTML from syntax-highlighted buffers. Will definitely find a use for this in the future :)

Oh, I intend to write more technical stuff here, and resume development on the (somewhat icky) codebase. Started looking at re-writing, perhaps in a different language (functional), will write about this as I go along.

Woo! I'm writing (and posting) this entry from the train back from LizHouse. Had a great weekend, and as usual the trains are running late. Actually, they've been great this weekend, completely on time on the way down even though it was the last train several times. But now there's been a problem on the line (power lines down I believe), and all the trains on this line are running hours late, so that there is actually a run of 3 Edinburgh trains with 10 minutes between them.

Anyway, didn't have to wait long (needless to say not on my expected train), and now I'm using my laptop, with bluetooth and GPRS to my phone for net access. I don't want to see the bill; I'll have to sort out a decent billing plan, and get some network-efficient programs on here (IRC can probably be done directly in less bytes than ssh/screen/irrssi causes, I guess).

Maybe more later. Bye folks!

Typing this on my laptop under linux.

BEGIN GEEK

Initial Debian install went without a hitch, but it took a while to get the network card going. In the end I found that the kernel network driver (b44) didn't work, while the manufacturer supplied one (bcm4400) works perfectly. Graphics were fairly easy to set up once I got XFree86 4.3.0 (for the Radeon 9000 driver), touchpad and USB mouse were fairly simple. Got caught for a while by being unable to compile a working kernel (was having kernel panics at boot), but that seemed to resolve itself somehow. I guess there's just bluetooth to play with, external display to test, make sure my old wireless card works without fiddling, and ACPI settings to perfect. I'm happy :)

Once everything's definately working (many things I've not tested yet) I guess I'll write it up, the existing webpages are either rather incomplete or in German.

END GEEK

Yesterday recieved yet another mail order delivery. The second half of my ebuyer order, a PCMCIA (I really should stop saying that, they're really not any more) 4 in 1 flash memory adaptor. No more need for camera cables.

Downloaded a Debian minimal installation CD for net install. Unfortunately, my net install ground to a halt when there was no driver for the network card (even though it's in the stock 2.4 kernel, broadcom). Funny how net installs do that.

So, jigdo'd a full sarge CD, should hopefully get to install it today. Then I'll have a dual boot laptop again. Yay.