Crazy Day

After going to bed past 5am, the next day couldn't be too productive, now could it? Got up at 1.30pm! For Christ sake.

Anyway, up to that point it was really productive, Macbook wise, as I finally managed to install Leopard and spend a few hours getting all the apps I need up and running. Much, much better now, as I can smoothly run CakePHP for Hawkeye's sake, after much tinkering with PHP and Apache2.

Not much progress in the MSc front, more to come tomorrow.

Building Speed

Had an immensely satisfying meeting with my supervisor today. Happily enough, it was the first time I was actually able to approach him with something done and so we built from there. Learnt a bunch of Emacs tricks, namely how to compile from within the Emacs window and better frame/buffer handling.

After much head splitting, (mild) desperation and much Flex/Bison refreshment, put together the majority of the scanner/parser duo for wam2c. I'm now in the process of debugging it and gearing up to start devising data structures to hold the abstract syntax tree.

Interesting first day of the week... let's keep the ball rolling, shall we?

Bootstrapping

Proving to be harder than I thought to finally kick the MSc work into gear. It's been an atypical week with D. falling ill and then recovering, but then the weekend got in the way and we've just done a huge bunch of nothing. And let's not even talk about Hawkeye. Zé surely has a lot of on his plate with a new baby and all, but I should have been more active on that front as well.

BTW, I'm afraid this blog will turn quite technical for a while now...

Anyway, first steps for the masters work is writing a scanner/parser pair using Flex and Bison. This should parse a subset of Prolog used in GNU/Prolog to represent WAM instructions. It looks something like this:

predicate('$$find_existing_stream/3_$aux1'/3,41,static,private,built_in,[
    load_cut_level(3),
    try_me_else(1),
    allocate(4),
    get_variable(y(0),0),
    get_variable(y(1),1),
    get_variable(y(2),2),
    get_variable(y(3),3),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    call(current_stream/1),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_structure(file_name/1,1),
    unify_local_value(y(1)),
    call(stream_property/2),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_value(y(2),1),
    call(stream_property/2),
    cut(y(3)),
    deallocate,
    proceed,

Beautiful, ain't it? If I have something working by Tuesday, I'd be a happy man.

Daniel Levin Becker on Isis

"But the clincher is the vocals. Turner uses them not to convey the lyrics, which are all but incomprehensible anyway, nor to fulfill that de facto part of the hardcore formula, but as a honest-to-god instrument. His singing voice is a raspy and by all accounts ugly one, but it blends perfectly with the tuneful abrasion of everything under it."

(Source)