Archive for July 15th, 2005
Gnus, the Emacs mail/news/whatever reader, has built-in support for RSS, which, in theory should allow one to read blogs like this or LtU without having to leave the comfortable surroundings of Emacs.
The instructions at MyGnus were good enough to get me going, but the result is quite unsatisfactory. Firstly, gnus throws a fit when trying to retrieve the RSS for this blog, though the LtU blog is fine. TonyG suggests this may be due to namespace prefixes. Secondly, the body of RSS feeds tends to be HTML, which looks hideous when rendered by Emacs.
So for the time being I’ll stick to web browsers for blog reading.
July 15th, 2005
matthias
This is a simple-minded (and slightly weird) Lisp interpreter for Squeak Smalltalk. It doesn’t have a REPL under Morphic, but I’ve hacked on it to provide a minimal Morphic UI.
It got me thinking about Lisp Machines again. What if the existing Squeak infrastructure could be exploited to build a Scheme Machine? The minimal addition required to the Squeak VM would be a tail-call opcode. Once tail calls are possible, a compiler could be written to take Scheme code to Squeak bytecode. A full module system could be implemented fairly easily, thanks to Smalltalk’s non-separation of compile-time and runtime. The mapping between Smalltalk constructs and Scheme Machine constructs might be:
| Scheme Machine | Smalltalk |
|---|
| Module | Class |
| Module instantiations | Instances |
| Global variables | Probably wouldn’t be implemented — you’d use module-local variables instead, just like MzScheme’s module system |
| Module-local functions | Instance methods |
| Module-local variables | Instance variables |
Integration with the debugger might be tricky. Many system utilities expect to be able to decompile bytecode into Smalltalk; a major refactoring might be needed for multi-language integration within Squeak. One would have to tag each method with the decompiler to use, update each UI widget to display these annotations etc.
July 15th, 2005
tonyg
TiddlyWiki is a wiki that runs entirely within a single page, on the client side of the browser. Javascript and CSS are used to control the visibility and layout of the various subpages. Normal WikiLinks provide linkage between subpages. It’s a very elegant piece of work - and since the entire site is contained in a single document (editable directly in your browser) it seems almost ideal for version-controlled project documentation. (Merging and conflict resolution might be a little more manual than is usual for code.)
mikeb and I have been toying with the idea of some kind of hybrid between (Mac OS) Stickies and Wiki ideas — TiddlyWiki might provide a good start for something of the sort.
July 15th, 2005
tonyg