![[lang]](/images/eye.png)
|
|
2003-12-31
|
perl
Coding up a special-purpose application for the radio station I work at. I was originally considering doing this in C, because I've been doing a lot more C over the last year, but found a few nice perl modules I could use.
Then I decided to take this opportunity to learn OO perl and writing modules that way, and it's surprisingly straightforward. I imagine that I'm pretty close to coding python the way I'm going now - so I should learn that soon as well ;)
Anyways, this program needs to send commands to a device over RS/232, and as with any device you have to make sure commands are sent one by one. So I started implementing some queueing stuff, and then I realized I had better use a separate thread to actually process this queue one by one to send it out.
So I came up with a particular piece of Perl Black Magic (at least, that's what it looks like to me) : fork in the object's constructor. This way, the child never exits the constructor at all, and the child gets killed when closing the object. I didn't think this would work, but it just did straight out of the box ! I used some IPC module to actually make this queue object (which is a hash) usable from both threads, and it's been running stably ever since.
Sometimes you gotta love perl.
As a side note, this application also needs to do some string processing and perl is really terrible for that. I hadn't noticed that ever before, but looping over a string in various directions is just so much easier in C.
GStreamer
Release went very well. A bit saddened to see the Rhythmbox guys deciding to not want to release any time soon - one of the reasons I worked so hard on the GStreamer release was because of all of the people asking for good RhythmBox packages.
Currently adding better error feedback to the player, after that it can be released.
People are starting to get interested. I had two people from Alcatel (the company that invented and productized ADSL) come over to take a look at it. The fun thing is, everyone who sees it is incredibly impressed with it. I wish more people would help out though. There's a lot of stuff still to be done.
I see people like chakie work on similar things here, and lots of these projects start popping up just about everywhere.
In any case, I'm having another week off next week, and I hope to release a good test .iso image in that week. Shouldn't be a problem, just about everything is in place already.
Red Hat
Psyched to know that the new 8.0 is coming out next week (this was not a pun btw, only realized this after typing ;)). Like so many I had found a link to the one ftp mirror that forgot to set permissions and managed to extract about half of the RPM's. I was hoping to get GStreamer built for it by the time it came out, but I guess I'll have to wait.
I look forward to the new fontconfig goodness, but I'm pretty sure I'll be turning Bluecurve off. I think it's great what they're trying to do with it, I just think it's incredibly ugly and as cheap a knock-off on the "kiddie toy sparkle look" as the default WinXP theme is.
Really, grown men that aren't kids themselves shouldn't try to make things look like kiddie stuff, or end up making things look like someone trying to make it look like kiddie stuff (in case the first was not the goal).
Comics
Recently discovered Sluggy Freelance. That's one very funny comic - and it has about five years of backlog I can wade through. I dread the day when I hit 'today', though, because from then on it tends to get rather like an addiction you can't get rid of.