Tao of the Machine

Things and stuff...

I uploaded some thingies to the download area... this includes development versions of Charm and Firedrop. These programs have been usable for months, but the problem was (and still is) that there wasn't sufficient documentation. Maybe I can get around to writing some, one of these days.

I also uploaded the latest version of Wax, 0.1.32. Like I said before, there's also a wiki now, currently with a bare minimum of information.

Nobody Not many people seem to like the "Self-style" objects. :-) I am currently pondering some use cases for this. One area where they could be useful is adventures/interactive fiction. Long ago I found that traditional classes are not a really good match for laying out an adventure's rooms, characters and objects... maybe Self-style objects will fare better.

The nice thing is that you can "isolate" certain behavior (methods and attributes) in an object, and then grant any other object access to this behavior by making the original object its parent. Objects don't have introspection, cloning facilities, etc, but you can add them at will whenever necessary. This allows for an entirely different design than traditional classes.

Wax Wiki in progress

I've created a wiki for Wax. (Well, and maybe other projects, in the future.) More later, when I've figured out how to use the damn thing. There's zero content at the moment, so no link yet.

Observations 2003-09-21

• (via Michal Wallace) Everyone's favorite kooky time traveller site... http://www.johntitor.com/ Scary stuff, especially since it *seems* realistic enough.

• Two online books that might be worth reading: Using, understanding and unraveling the OCaml language, and Writing Bug-Free C Code.

• (via someone's weblog, but I forgot who it was) I finally discovered Knoppix. Downloaded the latest ISO, burned it on a CD, booted, and voila... a working Linux system, without having to mess with dual boot systems and the like. I should have had this in December 2001, when I messed up my computer playing with partitions.

Wax primer

A Wax primer, in two parts. As always, the latest (development) version of Wax can be found in the download area. By the way, any cool ideas and suggestions for new (and existing) Wax controls are welcome.

Virii

I hear there's a new virus around. Fortunately Microsoft sent me a ton of patches. Very kind of them; they should do this more often. I installed all the patches. Hopefully I'm safe now.