12 Feb 2003
Wed, 12 Feb 2003
Copeland Says You've Got To Visit Dixmont
Dave Copeland advises all you mambie pambie sociopathic-wannabees to get out there and visit the asylum formerly known as dixmont before Wal-Mart has it's way with the property. I, for one, am envious.
Posted at: 01:05 | permalink
Random Acts Of Software
Russell Beattie is moaning about what a pain it is to publish open source and in some regard, he's right. I feel his pain. It's the pain of somebody that obviously takes his work very seriously and has a hard time saying no. But that shouldn't stop anybody from making a contribution, even if it's a small one, to the larger community.
Most of us probably don't have the stamina to take our basement hacking exercise quite as seriously as our day jobs and so I propose a lesser class of open source - Random Acts Of Software. This phrase pretty well describes what I do, which is not an entirely organic process but rather one of synthesizing the means to an end. I'm interested in the end, not the means, and so my source sucks. It is a heinous morass of square pegs jammed into round holes but you know what? I don't give a damn. It runs - and that's a good enough standard of completion for my little hobby projects.
In just less than a year since I released swingin' google, I got exactly one request for the source code, from a college kid in South America. I spent several emails explaining to this kid that it was a horribly monolithic mess that demonstrated that it is indeed possible to write non-object-oriented code in java and that you wouldn't want to design a curriculum in GUI programming around that swing code, but it still was a joy to have somebody that was interested in anything that I do. I, being an old man, forget that these kids have access to an amazing treasure trove of code on the web that in my day in school, had to be learned from a much smaller, less educated, group of peers.
That's been a recurring theme in my work lately. This has led me to seek out tools and environments that put the joy back in code like the good ole' days of hacking personal pascal on my atari ST. In that spirit, I've been spending more and more time exploring Mono and finding it increasingly joyful. Why? Because I can guess ... er .... infer a lot of the class names or method calls that I need without even needing the doc browser. And that's saying something. In my retro-primitive vi -> mcs -> mono development cycle, being able to guess correctly saves time and makes the experience more like scripting than working with a compiler. I think that's why Petzold dedicates the preface in his book to saying how much he likes the new system.
Anyhow, getting around to the code... I've been exploring mono to see what's possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.
In this example, I set out to implement an RSS news aggregator in the style of amphetadesk. I've used amphetadesk for quite a while but what I wanted was slightly different in that I like to be able to expose the transformed content to the world without people being able to add or remove feeds. I'm perfectly happy editing that stuff in vi, as I don't change it much once it's set. Thus, this application is driven off of a single text file called mysubs.txt that has one feed per line such as
This code works with mono 0.19 on linux. Get it here. YMMV. The original RSS parsing code originated here and the web server bits were extracted from here. I am indebted to niel bornstein and imtiaz alam for the original code which I hacked to work with mono.
You'll find the code here.
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
