Duncan's Blog

Boundaries

I went to the afternoon sessions of the Lightweight Languages 2003 (LL3) conference last Saturday. Of all the talks, I thought the one on FrTime is the most fun, and the Lua one the most interesting. With hindsight, I wish I paid more attention to Roberto's talk on Lua, instead of just checking mail.

The final talk of the conference is Boundaries. Even though it is a very interesting topic, I didn't find the talk to be all that insightful.

It was fun to connect with the people I met at last year's conference. I got to see Anton, Eric Kidd and Guillaume again. I also met Pedro who is working on dot-scheme, and Ryan from the AI Lab. Hopefully we'll soon be able to get a Scheme implementation working on Mono. I have talked with Prof. Clinger about trying his project to work on Mono a few weeks ago too.

However, the reason that made me post a blog entry this late is not because of the conference, but because of the latest awesome blog-article from Chris Brumme.

During the Boundaries talk, I mentioned reading an interview with Anders about versioning, and that good support for versioning is one of the things we can do to help ease the pain of dealing with broken interface contracts, instead of just saying "well, there is no way out of it, life sucks." Unfortunately there wasn't any good response from neither the speaker nor the audience.

In Chris' new article, I think he gives an excellent overview of what the folks at MS are thinking about dealing with keeping compatibility with aging contracts. It is a Must Read.

As for today, it was a strange day at work. I got some packages built, and more will follow tomorrow. I look forward to getting back to writing code after this release.

Incidentally, for fun, I finally wrote my first simple Web Service using asmx (it adds numbers). It was surprisingly easy. I plan on writing a simple HOWTO soon.

Oh, Mr Electrician is coming at noon. Wish me luck.

Rest In Peace, Chema

I am sitting in my cube right now.

From the corners of my eye, I remember how I used to see Chema, in the cube in front of mine, bobbing his head with his black headphones on, working late in the office night after night.

Thanks for all the advices and insights you have given me, Chema. I will miss you.

Comments

Turns out people have been spamming my comments stuff here. Cleaned it up. I wonder if there's a way to handle this automatically. I like the comments...

Because... RicoM posted to my blog!

Okay, okay... paper time!

Picasso

I have been busy lately. Lots of homework, lots of things to do.

I have been implementing System.Drawing. Got a lot of the drawing primitives implemented using Cairo.

I have been trying to learn the math needed to understand elliptical arcs and get DrawPie to work properly. Right now it's really broken.

Currently, it looks like this:

On Windows:

I wrote the Forms app using Visual Studio. It's nice. I'm starting to like it. Intellisense is addictive.

I spent some time with the Dean this afternoon and we got some of the math figured out.

Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow to work on this. This is fun.

Now time to go home and write a paper.

Source code below...

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;

public class Draw  {

        static void Main ()
        {
                Bitmap b = new Bitmap (375, 175);
                Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage (b);

                Pen p = new Pen (Color.Red, 4);

                Rectangle r = new Rectangle (25, 25, 325, 125);

                g.DrawRectangle (
                        new Pen (Color.Yellow, 1), r);

                g.DrawEllipse (
                        new Pen (Color.Green, 3), r);

                g.DrawPie (
                        new Pen (Color.Red, 3), r,
                        30, 90);

                b.Save ("foo.jpg", ImageFormat.Jpeg);
        }
}