Home » Archive » 2005 » December » 14

Archive: December 14, 2005

← December 13, 2005

December 15, 2005 →

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Darren Hobbs: Thoughts for the day (via Bill de hÓra):

Where's the domain specific language for the domain of software programming?

Nice.
¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]
Card Toss (via Keith Gaughan). If you're looking for a way to waste some time (as I am... having to write a paper).
¶ (0)
Avi has a DabbleDB video that I'd like to watch (via, via), though I've been hearing a bunch about DabbleDB lately besides.
¶ (0)

Now Yahoo broke del.icio.us too!

Now Yahoo broke del.icio.us too! The text:

del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we'll be back in one hour.

has been up on their homepage for at least the last three hours, and that's just when I happened to notice it.

Update: Now down at least 5 hours.

Update: Turns out they had a power failure. Joshua writes:

PS -- we are obviously not yet on the Yahoo! infrastructure, and this is exactly the kind of stuff they can do a lot better for us (and you.)

Update: The power failure seems to have had some pretty nasty effects on their servers and data, so I'm changing that to a Also note that, with del.icio.us, unlike with blo.gs, Yahoo hasn't owned them very long so they're not responsible for not having them on their infrastructure yet.

Permalink | Comments? | id 7730

21:31 (utc-5)
edited: 2005-12-15 10:19 (utc-5)

Structured Blogging (via Phillip Pearson, who links to a bunch of other commentary and announcements). Oh crap, a new meme I have to support.

I guess this is what the whole tumblelog thing was about? Or maybe it's the opposite. More structure in blogging! No, less!
¶ (0)
MetaC and the MetaC Compiler metacc (via PLNews):

The MetaC language extends C in a 100% backward compatible way with reflective features and techniques for refactoring, reconfiguring and modifying arbitrary C source code. Therefore, the extensions provide special metadata types for working with source code information, syntactical structures for the definiton of code templates, and metafunctions to gather information about source code and refactor, modify, delete, or insert code.

I suppose this would enable AOP for C?
¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

Python's metaclasses

Dev Shed has an excellent introduction to Python's metaclasses (via DPU). I get it now:

Python's metaclasses are just normal classes that inherit from type
When you instantiate a metaclass the object returned is itself a class
To declare that a class has a given metaclass, set the __metaclass__ data member to the metaclass when declaring the class.
The metaclass' __init__ method is called when a class that has it as its metaclass is declared (__init__ for metaclasses takes (klass, klass_name, base_classes, dict_of_attributes) as its parameters).

And that's it (according to the article). So, it seems that Python very nearly has a prototype-based object system, but not quite. (And I ❤ prototype-based object systems.) With a prototype-based object system the distinction between metaclasses and classes (heck, and objects) goes away, so it seems to me that you could do the same thing as what Python calls metaclasses simply by overriding a particular object's clone method. Am I wrong?

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Metaclasses, Programming, Prototype OO, Python | id 7727

02:25 (utc-5)
edited: 02:34 (utc-5)

Spider solitaire

I just beat a game of Spider solitaire that took me a whole bunch of tries and a whole bunch of undos to finally finish. When I finally finished it was with 334 moves and a score of 996. Would have been one fewer if I hadn't made a stupid mouse slip at the end. Anyway, I've uploaded a copy of the particular game. To play it, just download the .sav file to your "My Documents" folder, rename to just spider.sav, and open Spider and click "File->Open last saved game".

Screenshot of game