Earlier this week, I read Scott Hanselman's article about the Microsoft DLR team's LOLCODE implementation for the DLR. It's a good a read, and excellent news for the LOLCODE community.

Not wanting to see Mac (and Linux) users being left behind, I decided to get the DLR implementation of LOLCODE running on OS X under Mono. The tools required for this job are:

• Mono 1.2.6 (Preview 2)
• IronPython 2.0 Alpha 6 (for the Microsoft.Scripting assembly)
• Gardens Point Parser Generator (GPPG)
• Gardens Point Scanner Generator (GPLEX)
• LOLCODE for the DLR (Source code)
• This Makefile

Unzip everything, and place the Makefile in the LolCode directory, where the LolCode.sln file is. You may need to edit the paths at the top of the Makefile to ensure the referenced assemblies can be found. With a terminal window open in this directory, run make.

You should now have a working implementation of LOLCODE for the DLR on Mono. Please note, that although this can compile with Mono 1.2.5, it needs 1.2.6 to run properly.

A brief Wildcat BZR update...

Today I fixed the branch dialog in Wildcat BZR which was displaying correctly on OS X but not on Windows and Linux. Here is what it looks like now, running on Ubuntu:

I went to the Troon Real Ale festival on 5th October with some other ScotLUG members. Although it's much smaller than the Paisley Beer Festival, it still had a good variety of ales. Here's what I tried while I was there:

• Broughton "Clipper IPA"
• Glenfinnan "Standard Ale"
• Traditional Scottish Ales "Ginger Explosion"
• Tryst "Brockville Dark"
• Windie Goat "Peden's Cove"
• Dent "T'Owd Tup"
• Wyre Piddle "Piddle in the Cold"
• Newton Court Perry

The Newton Court Perry tasted exactly like one that Kevin, Scott and I had at the 2005 Paisley Beer Festival, which was the best perry I've ever tasted.

While I was in Troon, I had a discussion with Andrew about T-shirts for the next ScotLUG beer festival trip. He suggested T-shirts with a list of previous beer festivals the group has attended, and something like a SQL statement to go along with this "table".

After a bit of playing around, I managed to create a couple of tables in MySQL and a query that mentions both ScotLUG and Beer Festival which produces the correct output. The query looks a bit weird since the inner join is completely unnecessary, but it's the only way I could think of to get both phrases in.

Now I'll have to look around on the web to find what the dates of the previous beer festival trips were.

I set up the Bazaar distributed version control system on three machines today (two Macs and one Debian), after Kevin mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Iplayed around with merging and branching - it seems pretty similar to Git, and I'm not sure what all of the advantages and disadvantages are. Git seems marginally faster, but Bazaar seems to be simpler to install on different platforms (it has a native Windows version, and doesn't need Cygwin like Git does). On OS X and Linux, Bazaar's installation was as simple as Git's.

To get SSH support in Bazaar, it needs the pycrypto and paramiko Python libraries installed. They're available from Debian's repository, but on OS X, I had to install them manually.

I plan on using Bazaar for Wildcat COBOL's version control, so I'll be able to give a more detailed account of how good I think it is and compare it to Subversion later.

The aKademy conference is now over. I was part of the local team, helping with the organisation, and had lots of fun doing so. I helped out with networking, recording a couple of videos (1 2) and moving stuff around. I managed to see a couple of presentations, and met a lot of people. Here's a photo with some of the local team in the office. More photos are available here.

Ever wondered how to get screenshots of web pages that show the whole page, exactly as it would be viewed in your browser, even though the page is too big to fit on your screen?

Today I found the perfect application for doing that...

Paparazzi!.

It even creates thumbnails by itself like this one...

Paparazzi! was inspired by webkit2png, and for those of us running Linux, there is a khtml2png available as well.

apt-get install dpkg-dev patch dh-make debhelper devscripts gnupg lintian diffstat
I'm now ready to make my first Debian package. I've spent most of this morning/afternoon reading up on Debian and Ximian development mailing lists. Unfortunately tonight I also found some more problems with Mono on Debian/SPARC after running 'make check', so I don't have anything of interest yet.

Yesterday I began looking at technologies to use for a new project at work. I've narrowed my preference of programming language down to Java or C#, based on the systems the software will need to run on and what it needs to do. As a bit of a challenge, I thought I'd start off by getting the necessary tools installed on my Debian SPARC workstation. After much messing around with Jikes and the GNU Java compiler, I ended up using Jikes, Kaffe and Jikes-kaffe (a wrapper allowing Jikes to use Kaffe's classpath). On SPARC, Jikes segfaults unless Jikes-kaffe is installed, although Jikes-kaffe is not a dependancy.
Today I started looking at the C# approach. I installed Mono on Mac OS X and wrote my first multithreaded C# application using my favourite text editor, SubEthaEdit. I've started building Mono from source on Debian SPARC, but pthread support is b0rked, so I'll need to fix that myself - I doubt if many people care about Mono on Debian SPARC.

Update 20 mins later...
I've got pthread support working in Mono now. Looks like a configure script error causing things not to be defined properly. I'll make a patch for that later once I've found out exactly why it went wrong.

This weekend was my 25th birthday. I was out for a meal with my family on Friday, followed by seeing a few bands at King Tut's with Neil and Michelle. Satruday involved McPhabb's and The Goat, and Sunday involved the Lansdowne Bar, Bean Scene on Woodlands Road, then ending up at Otago for dinner with Edward and Neil's family. By that time, I couldn't handle any more going out and had to go home shortly after Edward.

I've also been messing around with Sun Ultra 5s and now have Debian running on one as a desktop with NIS and NFS set up.

I'm halfway through recovering from an injury to my left thigh which resulted in having a large haemotoma removed, spending several days in hospital and requiring to be on crutches for a few weeks. My attention span hasn't been great over the last two weeks (probably as a result of lack of sleep) so I've not been up to anything interesting.

Photos of the incision and the wound are available.

Today I thought I'd play around with JSP, but so far haven't figured out what to download. The debian box that runs my web server had run out of disk space which didn't help either.

I bought a sextant today. It's an ornimantal one which probably doesn't work very accurately, but looks interesting. I spent yesterday playing Sim City 2000... Oh, the memories!

It's been too long since I wrote anything here. I'll start with this weekend...

Friday: Dad's bithday - went to Elliot's on Bath Street for food. The food was amazing, and the live music was good too.

Saturday: Vikki's birthday night out. Vikki, some friends, Neil_ and I went to Arta for dinner, and stayed late for drinks too. This was my second day in a row of eating mussels in a restaurant... yumm!

Sunday: Went with my family to a garden party just outside Perth for my dad's cousin's silver wedding anniversary. I probably recognised less than 10% of the people who were there. It was a good day though, and draught beer on tap in your house is always a good thing ;-)

I'm now attempting to have a quiet week in. Tonight I'm dist-upgrading a debian server (to the newly stable Sarge). This box will be used for hosting sorn.net while I'm moving to a new flat. I was quite surprised to find that the version of PHP on MacOS X Tiger has no image manipulation support, so I'm currently installing MySQL on a Gentoo box for messing around with a database-driven website with dynamically generated images.
And now the biggest news for me this week (aprt from Sarge going stable) is: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors

To get video working at the correct resolution with the i810 chipset and an HP1902 monitor, I used this xorg.conf file.

To install NIS, I did this:

 

   sudo apt-get install portmap nis
 

 

In /etc/nsswitch.conf, I changed this:

 

 passwd:         compat
 

 group:          compat
 

 shadow:         compat
 

 

to this:

 

 passwd:         files nis
 

 group:          files nis
 

 shadow:         files nis
 

 

added this to /etc/yp.conf:

 

 domain domainname server servername
 

 

and restarted NIS.
Finally, to allow me to log in as normal, I had to install zsh, nfs-common, and autofs.

Saturday involved breakfast at Ikea with ScottMac followed by lots of MTV and coffee. Sunday involved putting Kubuntu onto the laptop. A Debian-based operating system that's aimed at KDE users. Nice! |

I switched my broken Linksys router from NAT Gateway to Router and back again, and now I can connect through it to machines on my 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. Hmmm... Maybe I won't need to replace it after all. Now to blog how I set up routing to my Apache servers with private IP addresses on that subnet...

I have a machine (home.sorn.net) with a public IP address (81.86.17.116) running an Apache server. This machine acts as a gateway to the other servers. I have a NAT Gateway (wireless.sorn.net) on the same subnet as the Apache gateway server which has got various ports set up to forward to port 80 on each web server on the private network. Setting this up depends on which router you use. If the Apache gateway machine is running Linux (or any other Unix-like system), you could make it do the routing to the private network too.

The Apache gateway server has had entries like this added to its apache2.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net
ProxyPass / http://wireless.sorn.net:84/
</VirtualHost>


And make sure these lines aren't commented out:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

And finally, I have DNS set up so that a host name points at the Apache gateway server for each machine behind the NAT gateway. The host macmini.wireless.sorn.net has IP address 192.168.0.4, and www.macmini.wireless.sorn.net points at 81.86.17.116 (the gateway server). The above virtual host directive in the Apache config tells apache to redirect requests with this hostname to port 84 on the NAT router. The NAT router then forwards the request to macmini.wireless.sorn.net where a web server will server up a web page.

A side-effect of this setup is that Netcraft now things the server's OS is Linux and it's running Apache on Darwin. I'm sure some fun could be had with this type of setup with a Microsoft/IIS host behind the gateway.