Well as always with us things have been catastrophically failing one after the other! A while ago now we tried to open the bedroom window and the wood gave out and the pan of glass creaked - well the guy came to repair it and yes the whole frame was rotten and I think really the entire window should have been replaced as did he but Barbara thinks the rest is ok. So we had a borded up window for a while and he was going to touch up some paint that was peeling on a window in the office whilst he waited for our new window to be made.
He went to flake off the old pain and oh! The stupid window frame disintegrates and is pretty dangerous really - the reason? The last painters that were got in had just painted over the rot and probably have been doing so everytime they've come to paint - these are the same painters who painted the windows shut in the first place.
Anyway with alot of umming and ahhing we decided to panel off the bottom half of the office window as it used to be a door and went right down to the window - this has taken a while and has ment the place has been a bit of a building site. He basically finished that window yesturday - he still needs to put the gloss on the first window.
This morning however I am sitting downstairs with the rain sheeting down outside when what should I hear but thunk, thunk, ping, thunk... i tracked the source and too my dispair saw quiet alot of water dripping through the alcove ceiling right onto the cubs papier mache projects that hat been placed there to dry!
I think its cuaght severally damaged the wooden window seal which is like a foot and a half deep the kids projects should dry out again ok - I hope.
Sigh - the reason for this last window? Well the cutter has a little kink in it and can't cope with the amount of rain and so is just sort of pouring it down the side of the house where it is running in some dodgy 'pointing' i.e. were the cement/morta stuffs fallen out from betwwen the stones. Its also ruined the plaster on the inside.
Ho hum....
Ontop of that it is still raining and we are probably about to have the thrid flood of the year!
Back when I was a kid, I designed a low-level macro system for purely functional Lispy languages, based around a cunning use of partial evaluation. I called it meta.
Since I was a dreadfully lazy student, when I had to do a final year project, I suggested it as an idea and then pretended to think of and develop it all over again, before spending far too little time writing up a report on it, and a sample implementation. Which may have been why the sample implementation broke in the demonstration...
But at the time, I didn't think much of macro hygiene. All I'd seen of it was that Scheme at the time had a hygienic macro system called syntax-rules
that, as far as I could tell, sucked - it was limited to basic-seeming rule-based substitutions, and did not use the full power of the Scheme language as a macro language.
However, things have changed since then. The Scheme community has come up with hygienic macro systems that let you write macros in Scheme, such as syntactic closures. And so I've found that hygiene is a desirable property, rather than a terrible design tradeoff.
So, I wonder to myself, can my meta macro system be brought up to date and incorporate hygiene?
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I program computers for a living, mainly. This involves writing programs - instructions for the computer on how to do things, written in a "programming language".
There's a lot of programming languages out there; mainly because it's easy to create new ones, and an interesting exercise to do so. But if you browse a programming jobs site, you will see a lot of people who say "I am a Java programmer". Or PHP or Perl or C# or C++ or Python or Visual Basic. This means two things: that a few programming languages hold the majority of the "market share" and that people consider "their language" an important part of their identity.
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Ages ago now - about six weeks or so my perants came up for the weekend and we went for a day outing at Crickly Country Park - there is geology, archeology and lots of wildlife there so it was lots of fun. I was also impressed with the visitors centre! though it needs a little cafe/shop thing really and the loos were a bit - hmmmm.
Jean loves collecting rocks!
Alaric decided he'd roll down the hill I can't remember why - this was on the back were the old Roman Hill Fort used to be.
Dad spent alot of time drawing cats and the like and reading all the notices - he was especially enamerred with the fossils and models at the visitors centre.
Jean became jellous of other children she found as they had hats and she didnt - this was how she ended up wearing Alarics fold-up hat!
I kept trying to photograph this poor creature but everytime it felt safe enough to venture out some one with a dog or small child would come walking through and scare it away again - hence no good pics!
The visitors centre had a giant snakes and ladders with velcro attatched to the wall and big cloth dice - Jean loved it though we did have a minor tiff about returning the dice to the little room were the game was!
I read this today:
Structured Streams
It looks like somebody's implemented a stream protocol that lets you create substreams at will, sharing congestion control information with the parent stream but having their own redelivery queues, so missing messages will only stall the one (ordered) stream they pertain to.
Good to see that great minds think alike. When I get some time, I'll read their results in more detail, and see if there's anything useful to be learnt for MERCURY 🙂
Building Maintenance | sarah | 
Fri 20th Jul 2007 12:02 pm | 
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