lumensoutdoors.org - Page 20

• Beyond Inteldome - February 27, 2006

  Several weeks ago, I bought my first new desktop computer since I cobbled one together out of parts back in 2000. Since it was the first new one in so long and I can have nice things, I went with the Quad G5. It took a little while to deal with the order placement, paying, and shipping but I finally got it last week.

• But who's chasing me? - February 22, 2006

  At work, we’ve been talking about this grand plan to be hiking up in the White Mountains every weekend this summer. And a lot of those hikes are going to be pretty intense trips across entire ridges. So, it figures we have a lot of training to do before we’re able to do that without dying.

• Mutually assured destruction - February 11, 2006

  I promise that as long as David doesn’t start working on Fedora for Sparc, I will not start working on an Alpha port. Of course, if he does start doing that, I might have a hard time restraining myself from repeating six years ago and consuming what free time I have.

• Mitchell preview 5 released - January 11, 2006

  Once again, this is the first preview release of the mitchell compiler and programming language for quite some time. It’s been just about a year without any updates, but this one is finally ready. The two big reasons for this were life and the complexity of what was involved with this preview. On the life side, my new job has been keeping me very busy and not too interested in programming in my free time as well. On the complexity side, this release includes support for exceptions and performs a series of abstract syntax tree conversions to simplify the structure. This includes several things I’ve never written before including lambda lifting.

  This may not be the highest quality release, but I felt like if I didn’t just get something out there, it might be a very very long time before anything at all gets released. So enjoy and hopefully the next preview will take much less time to finish up.

  The Mitchell language and compiler home page has more information and documentation.

• That didn't work so well - January 9, 2006

  Well, that sure was a failed experiment. However, it’s a new year so let’s try this again like that means something. The last several months have been pretty crazy at times but since I’m so far behind writing about them and most people already know about everything, I’m just going to ignore talking about it. Ask if you want to know.

• Sarah is almost back - July 27, 2005

  I’m very excited that my good friend Sarah will be back tomorrow afternoon. I’ve missed her a lot these past three weeks while she was on her trip. She’s supposed to call me from Newark whenever she gets there (I can’t remember if it’s noon or four or what). I really only use my cell phone to talk to her, so it’s gotten almost no use recently. Like I said, I am very excited about this. I think I am going to burst.

• Only partially a disaster - July 24, 2005

  I decided it was time for some good southern cooking up here in NH, especially after we spent all last week at work talking about chicken fried chicken. So, I decided the menu would be that, hush puppies (fried cornbread must be the most perfect food ever invented), green beans with chunks of ham in them, and sweet tea. Well, it turned out as only about half of a disaster.

• DSL troubles and other computer stuff - July 18, 2005

  I was at work on Monday when I noticed my SSH connection home kept dying. It’d be up for a few minutes then suddenly timeout and I would have to reconnect. It was aggravating as hell, but I figured it was just a problem with the DSL bridge and I’d solve it by power cycling the thing which would obviously have to wait until I got home.

• Segmentation violation (core dumped) - July 17, 2005

  My Gamecube crashed earlier today. While I knew it was possible for such things to happen (games are pretty complicated anymore), I don’t think I have ever experienced it before. I was playing through Wind Waker again and had just sailed all the way across the world and sat through a bunch of boring talk since my last save. So after all the talking, I picked up a barrel and went to throw it. The barrel got about halfway through its flight before the screen froze and a low pitched tone came from the speakers.

  There it sat until I got up and reset the machine. Unfortunately I had to go through all the sailing and talking again, this time making sure to save much more often and not throw any barrels. I’d heard tale of this sort of thing happening but never really expected it to happen to me. I hope video game console reliability doesn’t end up sucking as much as computer software. That sure wouldn’t be much fun, and that’s what games are supposed to be around for.

• Another weekend, another city - July 12, 2005

  I spent this past weekend in Chicago. The reason I was there is because Ted and Nikki are getting married, and I’m one of the groomsmen. That means I need to go to do various things like run off to wedding showers when announced. That’s what went on this past weekend. Let’s see if I can make this entry not be as crappy as the others.