Russ Rocks!

We need a few more people to stand up and have a backbone. I continue to be very afraid of the conservative Christian agenda. My belief is that religion is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, it may be used for both good and evil and it's the latter that I fear.

JNLP

One of the little issues with RobC is that I'm using Java 5.0. Unfortunately, I haven't handled it the best from within the application. Even after fixing it, I still don't, but at least I pop up an error message instead of never showing up on the desktop.

One way to deal with it is to use JNLP and launch from the web. Once launched, a person can launch the application at any time from the launch manager, a short cut, or from the website. Not a bad solution. It even detects which version of the JVM is in place.

What really stinks is that the error messages while putting the jnlp description file really really suck. Who'd've thunk that "href" is telling me that there is a jar tag that requires an href attribute. Maybe if the would speak in English and tell me?? That'd be nice.

Now I'm finding out that Charter apparantly doesn't recognize the JNLP file and doesn't deliver it with the appropriate MIME type. Can't set the .htaccess file nor a PHP script nor a SHTML file.

Anyone with ideas? I'm going to see if I can get tech support to fix it. But first I gotta find tech support. :-/

Slight turn in the ANTLR road...

I've got a presentation in a couple of months and, surprisingly, I spent time to start planning out what I'm going to talk about. I would like to walk through the design of a language, implementation of the lexer, parser, and tree walker. That's a lot for an hour!

Anyway, I've created another tiny implementation of 'C' called 'RobC'. Yeah, not original on all fronts, but it is simplified. I'll probably have to tone it down for the presentation - and probably sugar coat a lot of it. (Plus, I'm pretty new to the topic myself.)

What I've got is a little IDE that runs 'RobC' too. You can type in a program, press Ctrl+R and it pops up in a graphic screen to show the results. Once complete, it dumps variables into a dialog box for a post-mortem. No debugger. If you write a tight loop, you need to kill the process. But, it's functional!

In the best world, I'd like to actually implement it completely within the allotted hour (the interpreter, however, would come pre-made and ready to go). So, I may shorten the requirements to just the expression elements used in the sample program(s), and it may be possible.

Found a bug in Spider soltaire...

I'm sure its nothing new, but I think this is the first time it has happened to me.

If you are able to remove enough cards that you have less than 10 in the playing field, any waiting cards cannot be dealt out because you must have one card in each position on the playing field.

Oops!

(I'm installing software, and believe me, there's a lot of spare time to mess around!)

Time to rebuild

I actually got the replacement harddrive earlier than HP said it would come (which is nice, seeing as I have time this weekend). The harddrive is, of course, blank. Meaning I get to start building it all up from scratch. That's not too bad - just time consuming - and I will be able to keep most of the software I'm not interested in off of the machine.

And another one bites the dust...

This is harddrive number 3 that died for me. :-/

The only good news is that HP has actually been pretty good. After losing two drives last year (February and April), I purchased the extended warranty.

I don't think I spent over 50 minutes total on the phone today. I called from work, and I think I was on the phone about 20 minutes before we concluded I needed to call from home so the technician could have me check some stuff. Tonight I was on the phone a whopping 24 minutes (my home phone has a timer). New drive is shipping out, I swap and send the old one back.

Oh yeah! If it happens again "they'll escalate it". I'm reading between the lines in thinking that they give up on the hardware and we go after another laptop. I actually just want this drive to last forever - this reconfiguring everything isn't fun.

Fortunately, my automated backups are every Sunday at around 2am, so I haven't lost too much data.