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Lately my dreams have been getting worse, really not sure if I should  look forward to sleep or evade it at this point. On the upside, it beats boredom, on the down side it feels hours longer than the actual passage of time. That kind of adds up after a while, tiring.

I’m really not fond of holidays, haven’t been for a very long time, doubt that’s going to change anytime soon. As far as I’m concrened, just getting it done and over with is a good thing to me.

Really looking forward to getting started on the 30th.  In the mean time, I’ve been experimenting with something. In setting up the Windows build for Cassius, I set things up to be able to use the systems lua build (i.e. on linux) or build it as a dependency of Cassius. That’s gotten my brain cooking on making some reusable stuff out of it. Keyed in several libs so far, still need to iron a few things out, like moving header installation from premake time to prebuild time. While doing that and unrolling some loops, I also noticed a bug in some of the path.*() functions that premake uses. Seems that certain paths containing a $ need to be escaped (%$) IAW Lua’s pattern matching syntax, or you get an invalid return value :-/.

Premake was actually my main reason for learning Lua, but never had much chance to use Premake until this month. Kind of been focused on C# the last kind of months, and largely using GNU Makefiles for that stuff. My principal gripes with using C/C++, is setting up Windows builds is a bitch and for most of my own stuff, I require software that works on both. On vaguely POSIX respecting systems, it’s not that bad. One of these days I really need to work on setting up a linux or *bsd to windows cross compile.

One positive thing to come out of tinkering with a library (Cassius) for embedding programming languages. I’ve learned that Lua not only combines most of the features I like about JavaScript with a non CBF syntax, it also is a hell of a lot easier to build/embed then existing JavaScript engines o/. For how much I like the Curly Brace Family versus the irk of embedding stuff, Lua is arguably the better choice in the trade off.

Two ways that I’ve collected so many languages, one is trying to use the tool most appropriate for what I need done, the other is I’m used to juggling between languages rapidly. Whatever the problem calls for and limits implementation headaches, rather than whatever is the ‘mentally’ convienant language of the moment. That’s also some what a necessity of helping people here or there, can’t quite say, “Sorry, brains in C mode, shove your PHP up your arse”, now can I? lol.

Now if only the study of spoken languages were as trivial :-/.

Hmm, can’t sleep. Don’t really feel like coding or gaming. Hmm, maybe a deck of cards…

I’ve got to admit, friends are right in that actually sleeping from time to time is a good idea.  The last few weeks has been spent on minimal sleep levels, as usual for me. Thursday night/Friday morning, I just skipped sleeping, wasn’t tired until like 1100 Friday, and that only lasted like fifteen-twnety minutes, then caught up with me half a day later. I took a friends advice and got some rest, rather than waiting until the 29th, now I’m super charged again. Guess I’ll try and take it easy for a while, rather than focusing on how much stuff I can get done in spare time.

Of course though, my idea of taking it easy is nothing like sitting on my ass, hahaha! Going to get things shifted about, go through my back log of cleaning. I would like to transition to a more normal sleep routine, but that remains to be seen. I also need to get a few things sorted on Cassius, been refining things on the one branch for a while but haven’t had time to step back and prepare it for commit; once things are sorted and I’ve selected a branch to merge into the mainline, I’ll schedule time to sit back and do a review of things. After that I’ll probably find a safe place for storing it, as safe guard against all my computers popping a cork o/. I’m one of those backup freaks lol.

Over the years, I’ve spent enough of my life running on reserves that a little quality R&R gets me pumped up. I’m also not the kind of person who likes to be idle that much, programming at least exercises my thinking muscles a little bit. Right now I feel like I could jog twenty miles, but my feet would keep me if I did that! Actually, it’s kind of funny. When I was a little kid, inside my own head I always used to refer to my energy levels as “Normal”, “Auxiliary”, “Reserve”, and “Emergency” power. As an adult, my batteries don’t recharge so fast any more, sure as hell don’t last as long either: but consistently, the endurance level is still there lol. The real question is whether or not that’ll hold through to when I’m old, grey, and lucky if I can still piss under my own steam >_>.

The things that get me tired tend to differ from “Norms”, maybe it’s because I’m insane or that I hate having nothing to work on, dunno. Either way, time to crank up the radio, get off the PC for a bit, and get stuff done.

Crazy way of relaxing, eh?

Early yesterday morning, I got an e-mail from someone interested in a rounder with some ability at rails, and asking about my availability. Decided to sleep on it after doing a quick review of the company. I wonder what’s changed, that I haven’t been getting so many doors slammed in my face :-/. Spent most of the day focused on a branch of Cassius.

Sometime after setting my laptop on the table and firing up the desktop for a quick game break between interruptions, when checking the laptop, I noticed a pop up message saying something about an incoming call. Loading the stuff on my desktop crashed the game, but well, it was worth it lol. Seems the business that had me in for an interview wants me to show up again, and it sounds like things are going to another level :-). One condition is that I get a GED, which perfectly plays to my favour: that means I can get it sooner rather than later. Since then, I’ve mostly been trying to get stuff in order via an action plan. I figure, may as well have everything sorted and ready to roll, straighten up the car, etc and maybe hit the library a bit, hehe. I like things being organised.

The real twist of my brains interest circuits, the companies name is very similar to someone I’ve known for years. Similar enough that I’m getting finger twisted, and have to re-read the names as I type them lol.

Well ma has managed to interrupt me for over a solid hour, so I’m taking a break. So much for trying to get anything done, o/.

I’ve been experimenting with exporting functions to scripts through Cassius::Engine, one branch oriented towards heavier templating, one branch towards a C++0X only solution, and one towards a more flat method for runtime (ab)use. Now if only I had 36-hour days and some time to myself, that doesn’t involve being buggered off the computer

OK, now I an officially surprised with life. Years ago I had applied to some tech jobs and was turned down via automated emails sometime later. Fast forward to the present, and I actually hear something from one of those companies lol.

Being more than a wee bit suspicious of things coming in out of the blue. Like seriously, what’s the probability? What personal info that I have revealed, can be found trivially about me by any one doing their home work decently, so I’m not worried. The thing that bought that much level of trust out of me, was being told facts about the app’ I had dropped in (when, to where, to what), that no one but me could know: assuming that such a reputable company didn’t bungle their security, and no one was sniffing packets off our wires at the time.  It’s kind of like having a message from someone with a pre shared key that you trust, enough not to redirect to /dev/null but not enough to drop the deflector screen.

The real question is whether or not it leads to a viable job offer; I’ve no idea whether or not that one job interview will bear fruit. The insane thing, lacking a B.S. I’ve largely given up applying to tech jobs a long time ago, so recently I have focused on finding “Conventional” jobs in my area rather than things worth the effort.

Every thing that has come up in the past few weeks, all of them have been tech related!!! Sometimes I really wonder if someone up there has a sense of humour, one like mine anyway. But interviews, calls, and emails, still isn’t being hired, even if it is an improvement. Computers are one of the things that know the most about out of everything I know, computers are what I’ve spent most of the decade glued to and what I’ve been using most of my life. Wouldn’t it be bloody nice, if someone hired me to do something “Interesting” with them for a change?

• Having an occasional link on SpiderMonkey’s docs that actually throws you to MDN, is rather tiresome.
• GDB doesn’t always like dlopen()’ing a library that depends on (p)threads, using LD_PRELOAD fixes.
• Reading a functions documentation over again is more useful than a debugger, especially when you’re tired.
• Lua’s C API is really spoiling me.
• I know better than to git commit without sleep.
• Hmm, I wonder how long it would take this old laptop to compile V8… heh, can’t be that bad.

For now my plan is grab a quick snack, check the server list, and pass out sometime around dawn, then review the files in the morning. Sometime when I’m fresh, I need to focus on an interface between C++ and the engines loaded by Cassius. The partial SpiderMonkey and unfinished V8 support can largely wait until later.

Of course, the reason why I named the base class for embedding a language ‘Engine’ rather than sometime more conventional, is in order to have a ‘Cassius::V8Engine’ in there, haha!

Grrr, almost 0400R. I actually had planned to get to bed early but dinner kind of threw the nights schedule for a loop :-/.

Hmm, food and SpiderMonky or food and Z’s. Problem is I’m more hungry than sleeply lol. I really wish I could get work done in my sleep, or that days were at least 36 hours long.

I love it when someone nudges my brain back into programmer mode 🙂

I don’t really feel like sleeping, so I guess it’s time for a little L4D or RvS. Tomorrow, it’s time to go back to coding. Big question, is whether or not my family will let me get anything done, instead of trying to pump me for information :-/.

Headphones, here I come!