News

2005-10-22

With the CamelForth articles under my belt, I'm completely redesigning (and then rewriting) gjbforth; hopefully this version will be sufficiently clean and working to be able to actually pass a few non-trivial tests. On the plus side, I've got an implementation of NEXT that seems pretty fast, given that it's written in Perl instead of machine code. If more changes go this way, the new version will be a good deal faster than the old one (which, frankly, dragged).

2005-10-21

I've posted the second entry in the code optimization miniseries. This one talks about why the application may be solving the wrong problem, and slowdowns related to poor choice of algorithm (or poor use of same).

2005-10-21

Well, the -Ofun blog has broken 750 in the O'Reilly blog rankings; it's rising much more slowly now, but I'm still pretty jazzed.

2005-10-18

A kind soul pointed me to a great set of articles about writing a Forth from scratch on embedded processors. Even if you're not planning to write for one of the ancient CPUs he covers, the articles are still wonderful. The author's stated approach is to discuss in great detail all the low-level workings that other authors gloss over, and I certainly understood a lot more about the Forth kernel after reading them. Anyway, I can highly recommend the CamelForth articles by Brad Rodriguez.

2005-10-13

I've started a miniseries on code optimization in the O'Reilly blog. I'm not sure exactly how many entries will be in it, but the first one is now up, covering how to determine how your application performs in various circumstances, and generally where the bottlenecks lie.

2005-10-12

A helpful person on #sdlperl let me know that the downloads area of this site, including the PPM repository, contained corrupted tarballs and ZIP files. I managed to track this down to a problem created when I converted my CVS repository to Subversion. The moral of the story: Before you run cvs2svn, make sure your cvswrappers file has entries for all of your binary file types! Mine had entries for images, but not for archives. I was able to fix this by booting up the old CVS box, copying the correct files over to my Subversion checkout, fixing the properties on all of the archives, and commiting back to Subversion. Sheesh. In any case, the downloads area and the PPM repo should be good to go again. As a side benefit during this process, I have gotten a logbot to join #sdlperl, so we have browseable logs now.

2005-10-12

Thanks to the weekend slashdotting and links from some other blogs, last week's blog broke 1000 in the O'Reilly blog rankings. That's pretty decent, considering my previous best only managed to crack 4000 . . . .

2005-10-09

This week's blog entry got slashdotted, thanks to chromatic (my editor at O'Reilly). This is pretty cool, though the quality of the comments (as usual with /.) varies A LOT.

2005-10-05

The second entry in the O'Reilly blog series is up. Have at it. :-)

2005-09-28

Today I posted the first entry in my new weekly "Perl etc." blog for O'Reilly. You should be able to follow the weekly posts either on the front page at perl.com or on my blog entry list page. Both seem to lag my actual posting a bit, unfortunately -- I assume they are updated nightly.

2005-09-27

I've been spending a decent chunk of time teaching myself Forth, and even implementing a simple Forth interpreter in Perl. It's a fun language to play with, to say the least. Anyway, thought I'd post links to online versions of Leo Brodie's two big Forth books, Starting Forth and Thinking Forth.

2005-08-25

I updated some of the PIGGE docs. In particular, I added and updated some entries in the troubleshooting doc (and a matching entry for installation), and updated several entries (including the data gathered from the Valve gaming PC survey) in the trends.

2005-08-15

I'm starting on a new Autodesk contract, which has been specced at 2-3 months of about half time. Looks to be some fun stuff. I've also been given the approval to open the codebase after I excise all Autodesk references. When I've done so, I'll post it here.

Also, since this is only a half-time gig, I'm available for other contracts as well; don't hesitate to drop me a line if you need a good Perl programmer.

2005-08-09

All of the OSCON blogs have now been posted, over 20 in all! That was . . . exhausting, but I hope everyone enjoyed them.

2005-08-04

Number three in the Perl 3D engine series is up! This one covers profiling, optimization with display lists, and rendering simple text to make a frame rate display.

2005-07-31

I'm heading off to OSCON for the first week of August, and I'll be blogging all of the sessions and tutorials that I'm in on O'ReillyNet.

2005-06-22

I've been spending a lot of time playing with Pugs, a Perl 6 environment that (mostly) works today. Pugs is run in a very anarchic manner, with commit access to the Pugs repository given out freely. This is working amazingly well. In keeping with this, I have uploaded the SDL_perl 1.x tree to OpenFoundry (the same project hosting service Pugs uses). The repository can be browsed at http://svn.openfoundry.org/sdlperl1/. If you'd like to join in, just drop me an email, and I'll be happy to invite you to the project. In the mean time, please come visit on irc.freenode.net #sdlperl.

2005-05-20

Wayne Keenan has done it again -- SDL_perl is now up to 1.20.5 and has its own homepage here. It's also available once again as a PPM package for the Win32 crowd. Wayne's releases now have significant bug fixes and new functionality beyond that supported by SDL_perl 1.20.3 (Wayne's tree started with Debian's 1.20.3-1 package); once we've fixed a few minor issues, we're hoping the *nix distro packagers start to pick up these improvements as well.

2005-05-13

In a continuing effort to make life a little less sucky for Win32 users, I have added a PPM repository to the downloads tree. It currently contains SDL_perl and a couple of my modules packaged for ActivePerl 5.8 on Win32. Over time, I will be packaging more of my stuff (including PIGGE) for Win32 and throwing it into the PPM repository. Source tarballs will of course always be available, since *nix is my primary development environment.

2005-05-11

Wayne Keenan has sent me an updated SDL_perl for Win32 package. This 1.20.3 release should now fully support the code in my Building a 3D Engine in Perl articles. Partial PIGGE support is also in place and Wayne's tree contains additional fixes for PIGGE-required functionality, to be released soon.

2005-05-10

Coded up a few changes and released PIGGE 0.1.2 today. New releases now come with a changelog, which is linked from the main PIGGE page.

2005-05-09

Last week I finally got around to creating an account on use Perl. This week I put up my first journal entry there, hopefully to be followed by many more in the future. Also, I had forgotten to link the PIGGE source tree from the main graphics downloads area. That's fixed now.

2005-05-05

Finally uploaded the PIGGE source tree, along with some prerequisites. W00t.

2005-05-04

Managed to find some time today to fix the code that autoconverts the PIGGE docs from the source tree to HTML and uploads them here. Time to package the code and upload it as well. But first, some sleep.

2005-04-21

The Autodesk contract has picked back up again, so the PIGGE uploads will be delayed. I have managed to update all of the code and docs to use the new project name, but now the automatic conversion of the docs to HTML is not working.

2005-04-18

Version 0.1.17 of my TRISLAM Perl/OpenGL benchmark has been uploaded. Speaking of versions, downloadable scripts now generally have a $VERSION so that readers can tell at a glance if they have the latest revision (granted, things in urandom won't be updated that often, but still).

Also, I have updated all site references to use PIGGE instead of the old working name, which had been claimed by other graphics projects. Until I can finish converting the code and docs to use the new name, the documentation and downloads links for PIGGE are offline, but the screenshots are available.

2005-04-14

At this point, I think I've got most of the old trash reorganized, updated, and generally beaten into submission. It's far from perfect, but at least it's generally consistent, and my online resume now includes the last three years of my career. Shocking, I know. Now to start adding new stuff.

2005-04-13

It's been almost 3 years since this site was redesigned; I guess it's about time, eh? OK, off to trash (recycle?) the old junk.

2005-04-07

The Autodesk contract has morphed from just fixing existing breakage and documenting everything in a more non-programmer friendly fashion to adding a number of new features to the system. To get even the highest priority remaining features developed, tested, and pushed would take more time than remains in the original contract I took over. So while I wait for a signature on the new PO I'm back doing my own thing for now. Ahhh . . . .

2005-02-17

Number three in the Perl 3D engine series is up! Three more to go, once the Autodesk contract is finished.

2005-02-01

Feedback on the first couple of articles has been light, but positive, so the editor at perl.com has agreed to extend the contract out to six. <quake>W00t!</quake> There will be a break after the third article, because I just took over a contract at Autodesk to continue development of the change management system I'd built for Autodesk IT in the spring of last year.

2004-12-29

The second article in the Perl 3D engine series went live today. It includes a correction for the fully expected braino in the first article. Sometimes it sucks to be right. :-/ Ah well. Onward and upward! (And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.)

2004-12-01

The first article in my series describing the creation of 3D engines in Perl was published today. I've got a contract for 3 articles, with an option to extend it if my readership and feedback are good. Giddy doesn't describe the feeling; there's too much abject terror mixed in. Someone once told me that the probability of saying something stupid rises with the size of your audience. This is a bigger audience than I've ever addressed before . . . .

2004-10-15

Today is my last day as a full time employee of Autodesk (by choice, thankyouverymuch). I'm going to spend some time writing articles for perl.com and working on a from-scratch 3D game engine written entirely in Perl (of course). Wish me luck!

2004-10-14

In preparation for tomorrow's news, I've been working with the editor at perl.com to get a contract for a series of 3D in Perl articles. Today, they published my writing sample, FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits in Perl.