Monday, December 27, 2004

Amusing Side Note

So as it turns out, I was in fact not the first one in to the office Christmas Eve. Had I but looked in the main conference room, I would have noticed our newest employee asleep on the couch. Apparently he had worked late for us on the 23rd, gone to his other job and worked until 7 in the morning, and then come *back* to us to collapse onto our (very comfy) couch.

Friday, December 24, 2004

Pre-Holiday Ramblings

So most of this week I've been trying to get over a nasty head cold. I think part of it is caused by the dry air in our house. I wake up with awful headaches, sweating and dehydrated. The heat kicks on, and I wind up with what feels like a hangover, despite the lack of alchohol. Ugh. So I got an overpriced mediocre large orange juice on the way in to work today, and it seems to have helped.

On the way in to work today? Yeah, we don't have Christmas Eve as a holiday here, and I'm trying to save paid time off for March. I'm the only one here right now, though. (Ok, someone else just arrived. He's so new he doesn't have any accumulated paid time off, so he kinda has to be here, or eat the time as unpaid.) I'm going to leave in a bit and help a friend pick up an 8 foot couch he bought for his new apartment. We'll drag that up a flight of stairs, as I don't envision that fitting into an elevator with any grace at all.

The other bit about having a cold is that Ben had one last week. That sucked. He stayed home from day care Monday through Thursday, which played havoc with our schedules, but we got by. That's likely where I got this asskicker of a cold, though. Now I know how he was feeling. Poor kid.

It's very white here. We got a bunch of snow the last couple days, probably close to a foot here, about two feet of it south and east of us. I don't hate the snow or cold weather nearly as much as I did when I was growing up. I think what I dislike most about it is the dry air and how utterly inconvenient it is to discover you're trapped somewhere when you had other plans. Oh, yeah, that and frickin moronic drivers...but that's always true. I never have had much tolerance for idiots, and this weather provides plenty of opportunities for people to display their prowess at the fine art of being a total ****wit.

Huh. I wonder if I better go back and reread the ToS for this place and edit that. We'll see. (Ok, so I did go back and read the ToS, and maybe that extremely versatile word I had in place of those stars could be construed as vulgar or obscene. A pity that this day and age has me self-censoring like that.)

Anyway, tomorrow is Christmas. I was up til 11 last night building furniture for Ben's new room. He's not getting a bunch of toys from us, rather he's getting a new room. We want him to not feel displaced come March. He's got some cool stuff, and one of the things is a train table. That's sitting here in my office right now, and I need to get that home somehow today. Grandparents and a friend are getting hime some Brio train set stuff, and I think he'll love it. We are getting him some toys, too, don't worry, but the bulk of it is getting a new room ready for him. (By the way, Brio is a brand of wooden train toys. No electric trains for a toddler. They're pretty expensive, but I'm told they are also rather durable.) I'll let you know what he thinks of his new room.

I need to get working on Lore. I have projects set up on SourceForge, as I mentioned earlier, but it took some effort to figure out how to get CVS support to work right on my XP (Home, I'm afraid to admit) laptop. Once set up, it seems pretty easy, so now it's down to brass tacks. Lore-gcc is the first bit I'm going to work on. A front end to gcc via lex and yacc seems like a decent route to take. Several of the languages seem to define their own macros for code generation, so there's just one more piece for me to dig deeply into. Hey, if any of you know any good sites for designing MMORPG's, let me know. (As if I have magically established an enormous fan base for this blog. Hah.)

Well, I'm off. Merry Christmas and all that.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

A Vile State of Affairs

I just got an email about this.

You know, it occurs to me that since it is pretty clear that the current state of affairs is being handled in much the same manner by much the same people as it was about 30 years ago, we'd all be fools to think that they don't have the next 30 years planned out in a similar fashion as well.

If that's the case, they should be grooming protoge's at this point, as some of these people simply will not be around in 30 years. It should be possible to identify those people.

Wouldn't be ironic if the first Black woman president was a Republican? It looks to me like there's one possible protege' right there. There should be more. These people are having their power base firmly established and entrenched even as we speak, and if those who believe in denying fear the power it seeks over humanity wish to stop these people from being unassailable in the future, we have an obligation to attempt to do so *now*.

I predict that in all likelihood these people will *not* be in elected positions at present, and will not be so until their power base is solidly established. They already recognize that it would be too easy to remove them from elected positions if they are otherwise weak. Political power that they wield will come from being in appointed positions. They will also be stockholders in companies that profit from the politics of fear.

I suggest that, as vile as it may sound, people who oppose fear also become investors in said companies. This certainly sounds counterproductive until you realize that these people will not sacrifice their own monetary base in order to weaken us. It also allows some degree of information and influence that otherwise would not be available. It also allows for better research into our opponents.

I do not and will not advocate violent or illegal methods to bring these people down. That is anathema to my position. What I do advocate is exposing these people to the light of day, and showing the convoluted network of connections they undoubtedly already share.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

SourceForge

So I now have 5 new projects listed on SourceForge. I'm not going to link to them here just yet, as they are totally empty and will be for some time. I'll take a moment to describe them here, though:

Two are compilers for the same language. This sounds a bit stupid at first, but bear with me: One is a new front end for gcc, and will be written in C. The other will be written in the new language (which I am calling Lore), and will target a few platforms that gcc currently doesn't - the JVM and .Net. Both use a stack based system, and I heard that retargeting gcc to a stack is a pain. The second is a bootstrapping compiler, and I'll add more targets to it over time - Win32 will be the first, but Linux and Mac are also on the to-do list.

The next is pretty obviously a standard library for Lore. It will initially be just enough to get the bootstrapping compiler to work, but after that will be things like data compression and digital signatures. I want the compiler suite to be able to generate modern binaries and distribution units, and those are two mandatory parts.

Also is a miscellaneous category. In the course of creating a compiler, other tools will emerge, like a parser generator (think ANTLR), (maybe even a back end generator, like what lcc uses), plugins for IDEs, and editing modes. That's where all this junk will land.

The last project is a game. Both multiplayer and single player modes allowed. Think of it as a really lame Neverwinter Nights wannabe. ;) I figure that a language needs an application to be useful. Otherwise it's just an exercise in mental masturbation, and while that can be fun, it's pretty pointless.

If you get a wild hair to track down my projects, you now have enough information to find at least one of them, and from that get to my username, and then the other projects. Feel free to donate money once you get there. ;)

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Ben

I have a son that turns three next month. A couple nights ago he got very excited when it was bedtime. We read him his story, and he climbed off the bed and started running around like he was a crazy man. We told him to head to his room, and he took off like a shot. His room has a small entryway where you step in, there's a wall, you turn left and there's the rest of his room. We have a small trashcan by the wall right there. Well, he's running full tilt, not really watching where he's going, and he runs right into the trashcan and smacks his forehead against the wall. I rushed in to console him, expecting a big bunch of tears. He staggers, turns around looking stunned, sees the look on my face, and clear as a bell says, "I'm okay, Daddy." He then gives me a big hug. Wow. He was concerned for me, and wanted me to not worry.

I have a great kid. (He was indeed ok, by the way. Not a mark on him.)