Mike Austin's Blog

200K of stringstream

2008-11-15T00:06:00.000-08:00

stringstream needs iostream, which needs ostream which needs...

Simply change uses of stringstream (and iostream) to snprintf() to shave 200K off your app. Impulse, trying to be a minimalist language, can't afford this bloat.

gcc version 3.4.4

Impulse: C++

2008-11-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

One of the goals of Impulse is to make bindings and glue code easy to write. Taking advantage of type constructors and operator overloading in C++, you can create a dynamic "language" that's fairly small:

val n = val(5) (pow_, 2);

range(1, 5) lambda (each_,
  cout << args[0] << endl;
)

The first line above without sugar would be:

val a = { 2 }, Args args(&a[0], &a[1]);
val n = val(5).perform(_pow_, args);

Eeek! The second? well... let's not go there :) Actually, it's not bad - just 1 nested class macro.

Impulse and predicate dispatching

2008-11-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

With a few days off from work, I had some time to renew my interest in predicate dispatching. Impulse is a language I've been toying with for a few years - here are a few more example (sorry, no runtime available :)

Impulse 2: Language Examples

Forth as a Haskell DSL

2008-11-06T23:31:00.000-08:00

Forth as a Haskell DSL

Forth supports function composition by nature. It's interesting how many things they have in common, even though the languages are very different.

Forth and Haskell dualities

Finally

2008-11-04T21:21:00.000-08:00

PolyD - A flexible dispatching framework in Java

2008-11-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.cunei.com/polyd/

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

2008-10-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

Video: The Mindscape of Alan Moore
from Steve Dekorte's blog

Windows XP: The future

2008-10-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

This page seems to have a confusing writing style - defensive, yet promoting Vista, and confusing.. it doesn't even seem like a page from microsoft.. is this a blog or corporate page?

Windows XP: The facts about the future

WII ad

2008-09-24T17:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

Erlang and Object Actors

2008-08-24T15:07:00.001-07:00

Is there any difference between actor objects and message passing in Erlang? From looking at an example chat server in Erlang, it seems not. Below, I've converted a chat example in Erlang into my theoretical language I call Impulse, which is an object-functional language. My friend Steve Dekorte also has the same opinion about Erlang.

Erlang and Object Actors

Holodust

2008-08-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/holodust/index.html

Tesseract

2008-07-29T23:43:00.001-07:00

Moby

2008-07-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

...because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Moby

2008-07-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

iPhone Projector

2008-07-20T16:53:00.001-07:00

iPhone Projector

Not the greatest size screen or contrast, but a cool idea.

Hacked AppleTV + SSD pagefile drive?

2008-07-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

The AppleTV has a 1GHz processor and a decent video chip, but only has 256MB or ram. I was looking around for cheap DRAM Solid State Disks, but the only one I could find is an older (2005) Gigabyte i-Ram DRAM drive. The problem with Flash SSDs is the speed and number of writes over its lifetime. A Mac Mini is much more expensive and has crappy video, but has more than 256MB.

The Imperial March on Floppy Disc

2008-07-05T00:58:00.000-07:00

Link

iPhone - cheaper, but more expensive

2008-06-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

They just moved the numbers around: Link

Quote of the week...

2008-06-13T23:24:00.001-07:00

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

— Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

Don't rent movies from iTunes

2008-06-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

They had some problems with people changing the clock on their computer, but their fix seems to have lots of false negatives. After downloading the entire movie, it would not play - I can't remember the error code at this time, but it seems to be a common complaint.

Altoids tin guitar

2008-06-07T22:23:00.000-07:00

http://blog.makezine.com/ archive/2008/03/ altoids_tin_guitar.html

Exploring Enron

2008-05-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

http://jheer.org/enron/

Microsoft patents teapot ui

2008-05-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Link

LED Wallpaper

2008-01-27T15:31:00.001-08:00

http://mocoloco.com/archives/002534.php

Don't forget your "var" in JavaScript for loops

2008-01-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

for (i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++)

"i" is now a global variable, and mixed with recursion... well, it's not good.

It should be:

for (var i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++)