Gary Kings unCLog

Where did I go?

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 11:06:03 -0400

Blogging fell through the gaping cracks between work obligations, home obligations, a crashed hard drive, travel and other minor insanities, Some of those have now leveled (home and work), been partially ameliorated (crashed hard drive) or completed (travel). Others (minor insanities) are just the things we have to live with .

I've only had two casualities from my hard drive collapse: my GPG key and my blogging setup. The first is being regenerated even as I type; the second is a bit of a bother. I've been using Tinderbox and am relatively happy with it (though it has it's peculularities that sometimes drive Zach Beane over at Planet Lisp rather mad (sorry Zach)). Now, however, I've lost my registration information (and it was really from my previous job) and I don't use Tinderbox enough to want to buy it again. I could get with the program and just use one of the existing blog engines but... I could use CL-Blog or blitzblog but... I could write my own but...

Anyhow. My new key is over at metabang.com and several software updates (all minor) are in the works.

Keep peace.

RDF Triples in XML

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:06:03 -0400

(After all, where else would you put them?).

Even after everything is in RDF, you still need to find someplace to put it and a way to write it down. Big disks answers the first question but the second has turned out to be surprisingly hard. Since XML has become the one (markup language) to rule them all, it was no surprise that people turned to it for the answers. Unfortunately, dealing with everything has a way of pulling in competing constituencies and those pesky subgroups tend to pull things into a muddle. This left RDF/XML of several diverse forms each very successful but each with its own problems. This paper presents another way to look at stuff that, as far as I know, has gone on to become quite successful.

IT Conversations

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:01:39 -0400

Tara Lemmey talks about US security in the age of "terror". If these ideas are actually implemented, then things might become better. My guess, however, is that we'll just have more technology without thought scares.
Ray Lane talks about software and stuff stream of consciousness style at Software 2006. His stream is moderately interesting.
Elias Torres talks about the Semantic Web (RDF, OIL, SPARQL, oh my!) with Phil Windley. Torres does a good job explaining why we care though I can't help but hear shades of the "AI will solve everything" from the early 80's whenever I hear about the Semantic Web.

more "real" C++ macros via template metaprogramming

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:09:37 -0400

If it didn't end up being so ugly, it would be cute.

Although this technique might seem like just a cute C++ trick, it becomes powerful when combined with normal C++ code. In this hybrid approach, source code contains two programs: the normal C++ run-time program, and a template metaprogram which runs at compile time. Template metaprograms can generate useful code when interpreted by the compiler, such as a massively inlined algorithm -- that is, an implementation of an algorithm which works for a specific input size, and has its loops unrolled. This results in large speed increases for many applications.

This is from a longer article by Todd Veldhuizen referenced by Scott Meyers (it's on the web somewhere but I seem to have misplaced it ).

Someone should create a language that lets you do this without having to jump through so many hoops. It could work per taking source code as inputs and writing out new source code with the whole power of the language behind the transformations. A language like that would blow C++ out of the water in terms of popularity. What's that. Oh, sorry. I went off my meds again.

SPAM on the lam? Not for me!

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 20:20:39 -0400

It used to be that most of my SPAM went into junk. Lately, however, a great deal of stuff that looks as if it should be easy to categorize is ending up in my inbox. Grrrr.

I'm guessing that I should try retraining my SPAM filter (in OS X's Apple Mail) or switch to something like Michael's Tsai's SpamSieve. I used SpamSieve once before and liked it -- but why pay when Apple Mail seemed to be doing as good (or at least nearly as good) of a job? Is anyone else experiencing this?