Matthew Walton’s Blog

The last few days I’ve been reading ‘Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials’, 2nd Edition, in order to get a better handle on this whole Perl 6 design issue. A lot of the language design I kind of knew, but bits of it have changed since I last looked at them, and it’s nice to have everything set out in a book, although I know for a fact that some of the bits of the book have now changed as well, because Larry Wall was talking about them on perl6-language the other day. But that’s life when you’re following an under-development language.

Anyway, I mostly got the book to get a decent introduction to Parrot, the Perl 6 runtime, and such it is. Such a good introduction in fact that I’ve decided that, just for fun and to do something different and because I’m pining to write code in a functional language, I’d pick up my final-year project (a compiler for a toy language called Triangle, written in Haskell), rip out the code generator (which doesn’t work very well anyway), and replace it with one which produces Parrot assembly.

Remarkably, this is turning out surprisingly well. I suspect I’m going to have to delve into Parrot’s object definition system in order to simulate records accurately, but most of the rest of it is quite easy — easier than generating C was. Wish I’d done this to start with, I might have actually finished the generator in time for hand-in. I couldn’t have got more than a first for the project of course, but I could have got a higher grade anyway. I like playing with languages, and I like high grades too.

Forgotten how much fun it can be. I know I should really be working on Towel or Westlands, but neither of those really enthuse me at the moment. Towel’s in C++, which I do a lot at work, and Westlands is in PHP, which after doing Perl so much at work is just confusing. Programming professionally has its drawbacks.

If I get all the Triangle compiler up and running to target Parrot, I think I’ll send it over to Graham Hutton, who was my dissertation supervisor. Just to prove I’m still doing things. Maybe I should do that PhD after all…

So yesterday was the first anniversary of me starting my job with CacheLogic (for a while apparently the top referer to the company website was my blog, isn’t that worrying? Hopefully the press tour corrected that, it certainly boosted the traffic). Nothing special happened. Today we ate doughnuts and croissants, but that wasn’t because of me either. I don’t know why we did that, possibly just because someone felt like buying them. It’s that kind of place. Saviso work on the other side of the office, are an unspeakably talented bunch of people and are at least pretending to be recruiting people at the moment.

Archery this evening was good until it got rained off. My bow is currently in my sister’s bedroom so that it gets properly dry before I pack it all away in its box again. Hopefully the weather will be better on Tuesday, as this evening I was shooting very well indeed (by my standards anyway), putting in several 2 and 3-gold ends, with only the occasional arrow going wild (one white, one black, a few blues but mostly reds and golds). Still only shooting 40 yards though, I reckon I’d be fine at 50 but the 50 yard target was quite crowded this evening. Hopefully there’ll be space there on Tuesday, if not maybe I can persuade them to put up two — if I get there early enough. I really want to get back up to shooting at 60 regularly as soon as I can, but I don’t want to leap 20 yards up in distance all at once.

Of course, the big news in archery recently is the bronze medal Alison Williamson won in the Olympics, and the bronze medal Larry Godfrey almost won. It’s great, and will probably result in another upsurge of interest in the sport. More beginners courses on the way methinks. But that’s okay, because I’m not qualified to teach them. Not that I wouldn’t teach them, but I doubt anybody would actually want me to.

I need to get some more gadgets for my bow. People keep saying to try things and I’m very tempted. Definitely going to start using a clicker, my draw length is a bit erratic, and it helps hold the arrow on the rest in windy conditions like we’ve been having recently and will increasingly have as the outdoor season draws to a close. A doinker seems useful too – worth a try, and I guess I could eventually find someone to sell it to if I don’t get on with it.

For those who are wondering, a doinker is a flexible rubber bit which goes between the end of a stabiliser rod and the weights generally attached to the rod, giving a point where the weights can flex without the rod having to move. It substantially changes the vibration absorbtion characteristics of the rod, and I could do with some more dampening really. Added more weight to my longrod, which seems to have helped, but not really in the way I was hoping it would.

The other thing to try is a V-bar extender. This basically moves the whole stabiliser arrangement a few inches away from the front of the bow, changing the balance point. That’s something else that seems like it might be useful, so I might just get all three and see how it goes.

Archery’s got as much potential for gadgets as computing. I love it!

I got Doom 3 today. Not played much — keep dying on the lowest difficulty level, very embarrassing. It’s very dark, very atmospheric and very very scary! More later.

After playing with WordPress for a while I decided I rather like it, so Movable Type is out of the window and WordPress moved into the root of the site. Enjoy!

If anybody has any problems with the site rendering, let me know, but if you’re not using a decent web browser (and I’m wavering on whether Internet Explorer 6 counts as ‘decent’, I’m thinking no) don’t expect me to be particularly sympathetic. This site is not designed to be handheld-friendly, it’s not designed to scale back gracefully on older browsers and it most certainly is designed for browsers with mostly complete CSS2 support.

And if I thought I could get away with it, I’d be using XHTML 2 – but I can’t, so I’m not even going to try yet.

Edit: none of the archives or comments URLs are working until I get mod_rewrite up and running.

Edit 2: mod_rewrite rules are now working.

I need to get my acquisitive instincts under control. I decided it’s about time I had a memory upgrade so I went for another 512MB stick, to bring the total up to a healthy 1GB. Very nice. But I ordered the wrong kind of memory (stupid, stupid boy) and when it came time to order the replacement memory I just couldn’t resist (the right kind is cheaper anyway) so I’m now waiting on two 512MB sticks. 1.5GB of memory enough for everyone?