sigsegv

The best fake news show!

Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Hits & Misses

This is so frigging ironic.

Gurkhas

National Post

I thought I had it tough.

a busy week ahead

I'm gonna a pretty busy week ahead of me. Need to focus on my goals this week.

(Based on priority)
1. Get work done at the office.
2. Get my taxes filed.
3. Start getting some exercise again.

(Less important things to do)
1. Electric Bass Practice
2. Read the smalltalk book
3. Read the purpose driven life

java and bistro objects

I'm thinking about one of the problems with Bistro which is that Java and Bistro objects don't mix very well. The problem is that there are two parallel object hierarchies.

I'm thinking that I need to write a Java program that will create proxy objects for Bistro. Wrap the various methods calls for a Java object. I'm not quite sure what the drawbacks are. I tried it out a bit earlier this week but generating bistro code is gonna take a little more work than I expected.

My current plan is to have xml-ify the java class definition and then parse the xml in ruby and generate bistro code. The ruby part is there because I've been meaning to try out some ruby.

priorities

Part of my problem is I have trouble doing things when I come back from work. I'm typically mentally tired that I don't feel like doing anything. That's bad. After work hours are my personal time to do the stuff I need to do. Part of the problem is my lack of exercise in recent months. Exercise is one of those Quadrant 2 activities described in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They are the important but not urgent things that you do so that when crisis arise you will be better prepared to deal with it.

So starting next week, I'm gonna try to do 1 hour of exercise at least 3 times.

HeadlinedNews.com - Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide - Mar. 05, 2004

HeadlinedNews.com - Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide - Mar. 05, 2004

Had to happen eventually. I wonder if they will stop letting me bring my iPod on board flights now?

focuses

Part of the things I've been thinking about is prioritizing the focuses in my life.
This will help me figure out the things I need to do better in my daily life.

Stuff I do:
- Read
- Watch TV
- Veg Out
- Playing Electric Bass
- Working
- Programming
- Going out with friends
- Sleep, Breath, Bath

Stuff I wish I did more of:
- Exercise
- Date

Some how I need to figure out how to get rid of the non productive activities.

Not getting things done

So the things I was supposed to get done, didn't get done. Got distracted by work and other personal stuff.

I really need to get my 2003 tax returns done this week. Cannot keep putting it off.

Also, need to start training again.

java + smalltalk = bistro

Bistro is a smalltalk dialect that runs on a JVM. Overall, it's not too bad if you need a smalltalk like environment to work in. Alternatives are Squeak, GNU Smalltalk or Cincom Smalltalk. All are available free of charge except Cincom Smalltalk (free only for personal use). I would have liked to use GNU Smalltalk but I could not get it to compile on my Mac. If I really wanted too, I could probably get it compiled but I didn't feel like it.

There are some issues I have with Bistro but other than that it's not too bad.
It does have the advantage of letting me use the extensive set of Java libraries out there. The biggest issue is that Bistro doesn't compile code straight to bytecode, it transforms the bistro source code to java source code. It's kind of like how the early C++ compilers where implemented by transforming the source text into C first.

There are also some quirks with integrating a strongly typed language like Java with a weakly typed language like Smalltalk. Frustration with writing aSwing GUI was exacerbated by various compilation errors caused by incompatible types. Further aggravation was caused by having to read the java source code text output from the bistro compiler to figure out what was wrong (I had to think doubly indirectly).

smalltalk

Learning Smalltalk has been a great experience for me. It is just one of those languages that I get. Very unlike my experiences with trying to learn ML. In many ways Smalltalk has the same sort of feel as Lisp/Scheme. There is this elegance, compactness and consistency to the language. It's also interesting to see it's influence on languages like Objective-C (hmm Objective-C may be as old as Smalltalk though), Ruby and F-Script.

Wish I had more time to play with it. So many things to do, so little time.