Tom's Work Diary (November 2004)

December 2004 -->

Tue Nov 30 09:26 2004

I've written a draft of a spec for a large foundational part of libarch for tla-2.0. It's a kind of generalization of libawk in the current tla-1.x.

./web/communications/tla-2.0-data.html

Tue Nov 30 09:30 2004

Today's goals

Visit the DMV this week

DEAL WITH THE FSF COPYRIGHT ASSIGNMENT PAPERWORK

DON'T FORGET ABOUT ARCH 1.3PRE3

PUBLISH VARIOUS "OWED" DOCUMENTS

MAKE A MIRROR OF LORD@EMF.NET--2002 AVAILABLE SOMEWHERE WHERE JBLACK CAN SNARF IT.

Thursday was a national holiday in the U.S.

Wed Nov 24 2004

Today's goals

Give up on visit the DMV until next week

Deal with the FSF copyright assignment paperwork

Don't forget about Arch 1.3pre3

Publish various "owed" documents

Wed Nov 24 10:49 2004

Here are some notes about rewriting arch for tla 2.0

Wed Nov 24 08:45 2004

Here is my first "programmer's blog success story.".

Below, I publish a link called What's on Tom's radar?. The idea is that if you are waiting with baited breath for me to get back to you on some topic or make progress on some project, but you don't see it listed there, or don't like the way it's listed there, then you know we've had some kind of "disconnect".

Earlier, on that page, I wrote:

Lots of people, from lots of different perspectives, want "windows support".

The catch is that I have to say: What the heck to you mean, specifically, by Windows support, eh?

As a result of that being on my radar page, someone read it and answered my questions. I have a much clearer idea now and I've started to address that in plans for tla-2.0.

Tue Nov 23 08:57 2004

Today's goals

Visit the DMV

Deal with the FSF copyright assignment paperwork

Don't forget about Arch 1.3pre3

Do additional improvisational "programmer's blog" hacking

Here's a brief report about today's cool new programmer's blog feature:

I want to get out of having to constantly explain every little thing that I do as a programmer, again and again, to several different people and groups. I have to report my progress to the guy who signs my checks; I have to report my progress to the guy I'm supposedly supervising; I have to (at least informally) report my progress to the core group of hackers who contribute the most to arch; I have to report my progress to the Arch community as a whole and even, from time to time, to the FSF.

Things can quickly get out of hand to the point where I spend all of my time talking about progress and none of my time actually making progress.

Wouldn't it be nice if, with less work, I could produce a legible, informative journal of my actual progress -- mostly just as a side effect of taking steps like writing careful commit log messages -- and just point all of the people and groups I'm supposed to report to at my journal? "See of yourself", I can say, "it's all documented right there."

One small but significant aspect of my work is that I'm working on some contribution branches for the GNU Arch mainlines. A contribution branch is a branch of the mainline, containing just one set of changes. The idea is that the upstream mainline maintainer can merge or not merge a contribution branch as a unit: it's thumbs up or down -- all the changes on the branch or none.

It's a chore, sure, for a contributor (like me) to have to prepare a contribution branch --- but it's a chore that pays off. It encourages clearer thinking about keeping the mainline in the state of monotonically increasing quality accomplished by clean, isolated, meaningful change steps.

So, how is my progress on preparing contribution branches for the GNU mainline?

Taking advantage of the structure of gtla, I wrote a tiny shell script (I hope your browser manages to show that as text rather than trying to execute it!).

That shell script is a trivial report generator. It produces, as output, what I think is fairly human-readable plain text output

The strange asci-art conventions in the plain-text report are, of course, Awiki syntax. The report translates trivially to a not-so-shabby web page like this summary of my pending contribution branches

Mon Nov 22 12:44 2004

Today's goals

Make Arch 1.3pre2 more widely available -- put it on the GNU FTP site and announce on freshmeat.

Do lots of hacking on my "programmer's blog" -- Lot's of longer term objectives are now focused on this task including: improving the process for maintaining the GNU Mainline; increasing the transparency of what I do as project maintainer; making and keeping available various interesting technical memos; experimenting with new features for Arch; experimenting with the parser I hope to use for XL; and on and on.

Developments

In fact, 1.3pre2 was quickly noticed to have a nasty regression and 1.3pre3 was produced. So, later this week I'll make 1.3pre3 more widely available instead.

Indeed, I've made lots of progress on Awiki and the programmer's blog, not least rapidly filling out many pages on this site, including quickly converting some older writings to the Awiki syntax.

Life interferes, of course. I have to spend about 4 hours today making my mostly-idle car street-legal again, lest it be towed away and sold to some lowlife more needy than me. This involves, among other things, a trip to the DMV to replace a license plate that seems to have disappeared. I look forward to the day (if ever) when all of my poverty-related civic-procedure glitches are well behind me --- one hard part about not having enough money is it the resulting hassles take too much time and there is no way to avoid the hassles. Meanwhile -- I'm still months behind on two personal (as opposed to commercial) debts incurred during the leanest months of busking: that's a hard part about not having enough money but starting to recover from that -- I feel like an ass towards those I'm still putting off for "tactical" reasons.