The Goat Rodeo Sessions

The Goat Rodeo Sessions by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile. These guys are really good. It's absolutely wonderful music. I bought the CD last weekend and just started listening to it this evening. I'm just half-way through the 13 tracks and feeling much better than I have all day.

Edit: Added a scanned image of the CD cover.

99 Hours

We finally have power back. I think 99 hours is a record for us. Let's not have any more of those Nor'Easters in the fall, okay Mother Nature?

I was goofing around with Inkscape this morning and made the frog.

Thinking about Erlang

Erlang looks cool and I like that Joe Armstrong's book, "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World", has client/server examples. I'll see if I can post updates on what I learn, though I get distracted easily. I thought Drupal would be a good topic of conversation, but I never said much about it since I found that I have little interest in learning PHP. I also thought that Qt was an interesting development environment. I may get back to Qt someday soon, but I was caught up in seeing what the Scheme programming language can do.

I spent some time learning Scheme over the past few months.I read, Kent Dibvig's "The Scheme Programming Language" and before that "The Little Schemer" by Friedman and Felleisen. I think I've been bothered by a lack of compelling examples on what can be done - where are the libraries? I want to know what libraries are available, how to read/write/parse files in the language and how to pass data between or among various host computers. I think that the implementations are getting fractured among R5RS, R6RS and PLT-Scheme's own movement toward a Scheme dialect they call Racket (http://www.plt-racket.org). That said, Scheme was my first experience with a functional programming language. That alone was worth the time spent. It's re-opened my mind to programming abstractions I haven't thought about since I learned APL in high school.

Oh, "The Little Schemer" - it has to be the most fun programming language book ever written. It has lots of examples and asks lots of questions like "What does this do?", "Here's one solution, can you think of something better?", all in a light-hearted fashion. It really gets you thinking about the language.

Bugfix: Drupal's Acquia Marina Theme

I like Drupal. It's generally easy to configure and add new content. I've been looking for a nice theme, since I'm not much of a theme designer, and Acquia Marina fit the bill.

I've installed it on my two toy websites, Dragon Affairs Test Site and Dragon Affairs Family and Friends. While I was playing around with it, every now and them I'd run into the dreaded White Screen of Death. The only data recorded by Apache was "child pid 2363 exit signal Illegal instruction (4)". It was quite annoying.

After spending a lot of time disabling and re-enabling various modules (with no luck), I started playing with the performance optimizations. When I disabled the "Optimize CSS files" option everything worked normally. Bingo! Something was up with the CSS files.

Well, they looked normal, except when viewed on a UNIX-like system. I run my sites on an old FreeBSD server. The vi editor showed that the lines in each file ended in CRLF instead of the standard LF character. A quick edit (using tr -d '\r' style.css, and repeating that for each *.css file) and I was back in business. Odd how the littlest of things can cause a complete failure.

QT Build Issue Solved

Stack Overflow is a very useful resource - there were three answers, of which both Rohan McGovern and Ken Rogers provided the correct solution. Many thanks to them both.

I should have known that I either needed to build QT from source with MSVC flags set, get a commercial license for QT and download the MSVC build, OR use mingw32-make. For the time being, I'll use mingw32-make and save rebuilding QT for another day.

Still Frustrated with the testqstring Example

The Trolltech labs forum isn't the right place to post a question about QT Creator. I continued to search for an answer as to why moc.exe wasn't generating a moc file for the testqstring example. I didn't find any answers at either qtforum.org nor Stack Overflow.com, so I reposted the question at Stack Overflow. We'll see what happens.

Playing with QT Creator

I want to branch out from C systems programming and try some GUI programming. Nokia's QT Creator looks like an excellent development environment and QT (originally from Trolltech) has been around a long time. It seems to be a safe place to start.

I tried a couple of examples from the tutorials and they worked just fine. I also want to exercise some test driven development skills. Well, what do you know - QT has QTestLib for writing and supporting the development of unit tests. That sounds like just the ticket.

Unfortunately, my out-of-the-box experience isn't what I hoped for. QT has a meta-object compiler which parses the C++ source code and generates a .moc file. I was trying to compile the testqstring tutorial example, but for some reason moc.exe wasn't generating any output. I could see from the command line that moc.exe was being called, but no output was generated, so the compile phase failed.

I'm not sure how to resolve this (what should be an incredibly simple thing to do), so I posted a question on the QT Labs general discussion forum. We'll see what happens.