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I’m feeling one of those moods best marked as, “some people train cockroaches, I write things” in nature.

I think if I don’t find something to do right now, pretty soon I’m going to go stircrazy1. I’m really not in the mood for games, I know it too well… I reckon the best thing atm is continue to kick my operating environment into a higher order of work flow.

Lately a lot of things have been passing through my mind, until the marbles resemble scrambled eggs better then brain cells; and as much as I enjoy thinking, sometimes one can overthink. I’m all thunk out at this point, I can’t take anymore. As such, I really need something to focus on right now…. which is problematic with being driven crackers in this place at every twist and turn :-/.

Since I’ve been spending a lot more time on my desktop lately then my laptop (I miss the late nights with my darling Dixie :'(, but SAL1600 compiles faster). This again puts me in the old boat – sharing data between systems; as well as having to deal with shuffling between tools. After 3 weeks of using Windows XP for development tasks, I’ve learned a few new curse words and how to use the childish cmd.exe for automata needs.

Basically the problem at hand is thus:

  1. operate on the ‘same’ fundamental data set across all ‘working’ environments
  2. be capable of going mobile (laptop), and continue to work even without access to ANY network
  3. make the usage of backup and version control packages more uniform
  4. further refine the Standard Operating Environment (SOE) to my ever evolving needs

The biggest problem of them all, is Windows XPs user interface really kicks a huge freaking battle-ship sized hole in my ideal work flow…. lol. Alas, at least I can always build up tools as I go. GOD bless Perl, Python, and the rest ;). In the end, I hope to likely be using rxvt/rxvt+tpsh or console2+tpsh for my main user environment; rather then console2+cmd.exe and rxvt+screen+zsh.

1 In reading further on this issue, I can’t help but wonder if the way life has been, has influenced why I so often take pleasure in being out in rainy weather lol.

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Several hours of testing has shown where the problem lays in regards to the kinks in tpsh’s basic control flow…. a strict ficken implementation lol.

Without a few extra ‘;’ between language elements, the parser doesn’t see the keywords as keywords, and instead they get fed into the code generator as arguments to the preceding keyword. Testing the same test code against the version of bash with MSYS1.0, their shell doesn’t give a hoot, nor should any other bourne-style shell I have access to. So in a way, you could say my code took a stricter interpretation of the sh script syntax, then what is required (and desired).

Somehow this actually makes me feel better, lol.

Also something that needs working on, is dealing with crappy old-style paths like CP/M, DOS, and Windows NT use.

$ P:/Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe
tpsh: command not found: P:/Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe at S:Visual Studio 2008Projectstpsh-dirtpsh line 883.


$ cd P:

$ P:/Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe
tpsh: command not found: P:/Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe at S:Visual Studio 2008Projectstpsh-dirtpsh line 883.


$ /Editors/Vim/vim-personal/gvim.exe

$

It seems to have a bit of an issue about drive letters.

In more detail, the search_path() function that converts an external command name into the direct path to it (done in order to avoid a dependency on the systems shell, e.g. /bin/sh or %COMSPEC%), fails to find a valid file when the drive-letter: notation is used. Since the function returns undef to indicate program not found, simply put search_path() needs fixing. The change should be trivial though.

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I managed to get some coding in today, maybe that’s why I’m feeling a bit better. On the down side though, my cable connection seems to be running half as fast as normal lately, games were nearly unplayable for much of this afternoon for some reason.

I think my shells codegen branch has lived to the virtual extent of it’s usefulness. Today I sorted a few minor things and enabled nested control flow for statements using the ‘then’ and ‘do’ keywords, e.g. control flow statements can contain control flow statements as well as commands within their block. There are still a few kinks to iron out but the most important are done; I’m currently uncertain if the remaining problem lays in the code generation phase or somewhere further up the processing chain, but I expect it lays in generating the perl code.

Basic conditional flow and looping is ready, which was the primary purpose of this branch of development: to explore implementing the shells scripting language by dynamically generating Perl code for it, as well as replacing the static command sequence executor by generating it as well.

Oddly, the main things that need doing in the short-term are actually script related, rather then interactive. But then again, tpsh has always been meant for interactive usage first and support for batch jobs as a secondary concern. Main points of lacking at the moment, is a concept of “exit status”, in Bourne shell parlance the $? variable isn’t used for a hill of beans yet. Likewise all $variable expansion is done on the fly during tokenization, so:

for X in 1 2 3; do echo $X; done

The value of $x in the loop body would be expanded before the code is evaluated, resulting in the following:

for X in 1 2 3; do echo; done

because X is not defined at the time the statements are being parsed, the expansion is “”.

I haven’t decided how this will be solved yet. Solving it however, is well outside the scope of the codegen branch. I would say the only thing left to do in the branch, is implement the break num and continue num to enable a way out of the while/until loops. The former will take a bit more testing but the latter, is not likely to be to hard. Perl supports a robust way of breaking out of loops that can be easily used. Once that stuff is done, I’ll likely merge the branch into master and move on to other tasks.

Since I’ve been stuck working more often on the NT machine, development of tpsh gets a slightly higher priority lol.

Pondering: should I ever go back (regularly)?

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I used to spend a lot of time at the PC-BSD tech support forums (forums.pcbsd.org). As some should know, it is not one of my ‘favorite’ projects for numerous reasons.

I haven’t been active there in I guess, nearly a year now. Should we say, shuffling though like 50 threads a day and being one of the few paying attention got quiet old, when I’ve so much else to worry about after work. Ending up as little more then a spam-patrol man wasn’t very interesting either. Although things have been realitively docile since FreeBSD opened their own forum, I hang my hat over at DaemonForums.org – a place that’s worth visiting.

One of the alarming things about forums.pcbsd.org even while I am inactive, I still have several orders of magnitude more posts then everyone else… Man I used to check that forum several times a day. At one point, I may have been the last skilled snook left, I hope that has changed….

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Just woke up about 15 minutes ago, thought I would jot down what I was dreaming before I fall asleep and it washes away. Unfortunately between having to admin our servers and bumping into a few people on IRC, I ain’t so half a sleep any more lol.

I was dreaming that we were visiting a friend of my mothers, when her son Alex and his wife dropped in. I went off to get dressed. The next thing I can remember is walking around Walmart with my brother, we went to get a drink; juice in his case, water in mine. When the jackass tried walking out the door, I reminded him that we had to pay first <_<. I then asked my bro to spot me a dollar, since I forgot my wallet; remembering that it is in its usual place (H.R.P.s purse lol) Almost everyone linked up at the store front, we went out and started to pile into the car; Ma, her friend, my brother, and his ex wife; and to much crap that there wasn’t room for me. I was told to catch a ride with Alex and his wife, and pointed in the direction of the car to wait by, so went towards it.

Only thing is, by the time I’ve crossed the parking lot, it doesn’t seem to be there anymore :/. So I go back inside, only to a few minutes later find that the store has become a Publix instead; so I go back outside and everything has changed: different lot and from night to day. I then see the aforementioned car coming in, and flag it down, and then we all went inside and joined everyone—standing in line at a Chinese restaurant. More people around, including some additional parts of my family.

We stood in line, and then there was something involving in egg plant, but not quiet an eggplant; imagine an Italian eggplant that is smaller and covered in an almost cabbage or spinach like wrapper :-/. Chinese eggplant is smaller, but not like that, in so far as I’ve ever encountered it before…

Fudge, between this and IRC, I’m wide awake now lol.

Writer’s Block: Proven by Science

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Do you believe everything has a scientific explanation?

Submitted By mesnyder_92

Live Journals Writer’s Block

I believe that virtually everything has some logical explanation if you are willing to look long and hard enough to find it, but you just might have to be Dutch in order to understand it.

(and no, if you don’t get it, I’m not going to explain it lol)

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sigh, woke up a bit early compared to normal, and still about an hour left until it is time to leave for work :-/

I hate this

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It’s starting to get around that time, when I know it’s time to go to bed… I don’t feel like going to bed, because I know it’ll be a while before I fall asleep, and just a bother period. Even worse, there’s nothing left to do that I can get done without being up all night, and I’m to tired for that.

It’s some what alarming for me, that I really haven’t been writing much code this past week; I’m usually happy when writing lots of code or trying to evade misery for a spell. Either way, it usually works out more positively.

Projects of current interest, namely are furthering the development of my command line interpreter (shell) and experiementing with OGRE. There are also several projects on the fore and back burners (comparatively), but these two are the most interesting right now. And I’m to tired to code right now :'(.

I’m not fairing the nights very well lately, things are getting worse in my opinion. Days, eh; hard to tell sometimes. I really need a very long rest, with nothing to trouble me, but the odds of seeing that, oh… are probably closer to the odds of Earth getting slammed by a lethal-sized asteroid in my life time. For some strange and sick reason, an old expression comes to mind, and I spit on it. There just seems to be no relent, from the way things are here; and I struggle to find logic in it. Also coming to mind, is a very old form of torture: have a man dig a hole, them fill it back up, repeating it endlessly.

Hmm, I’ll never understand how I can write a journal entry, and see as I type: in my mind little wikipedia [1] like references to memories in my brain :-/. Maybe I just spend to damn much around computers…

time to crash to pillow, be it for better or worse.

I knew it was going to be a bad day

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When we got to work last Wednesday, the person we work for wanted Ma to take some clohs home and iron them; this time ma decided to use their iron because it is supposed to work much better.

As such, I was ordered to put the iron in the basket in a way that it wouldn’t leak over the cloths; easy enough, although what kind of asshole wouldn’t drain the thing first 8=).

Ma has left it sitting there until today, Tuesday.

Guess what, the iron leaked all over the cloths ^_^.

In response to her trying to pawn the blame off on me, I told her that no one told her to leave the damn iron in there the whole time.

and her technical incompetent still continues to annoy me. I don’t have a problem with people that don’t know better per say, but I do dislike *leeches and assholes*.