10/6

A new boo was released today. Lots of fun new features, including char support, ‘for’ and ‘in’ for enumerators, and a few things I added, including prelim explicit interface support, and destructors. Get it now! I’ll be adding it to portage soon.

On the MonoDevelop front, no major changes really, just some cleanup of parser stuff. Handles things a bit nicer now, has support for events, etc, etc. I gotta figure out how to actually write unit tests for the parser stuff, so i can start pinpointing spots that need lovin’.

I’ve picked a summer project, and am going to ask that anybody with insight please email or comment here. Basically, I live in a pretty low income area of brooklyn, and want to get a free internet kiosk setup outside my apartment. I think (hope) that something like that would be a good resource for kids/people who don’t have the $$ to have computers or high speed internet connections. Having recently bought a new laptop, I have an older laptop that’s a perfect candidate for the project, and the wireless from my 2nd floor apartment should reach out front fine.

I’ve start researching doing ‘kiosk’ type setups with gnome, and it seems possible, but i’ve not found any concrete HOWTOs on it yet. My current thinking is to use a custom user + locked down gconf keys running from a custom liveCD. GDM can auto login the user, and the desktop will have basic things like a browser, maybe an office suite, etc, etc.

Things I’d like from people are more concrete ideas on gnome lockdown, ideas on physical lockdown (yes, this is a less than friendly neighborhood at times), and any experiences people might have doing something like this.

So late last week finally saw mono-1.1.x removed from package.mask. Although I may regret it eventually, I think in the long run this is a big step, as 1) mono-1.1.x is the only thing that actually works on amd64, 2) lots of things *only* work on mono-1.1.x, as the runtime is greatly improved (such as nant (most of the time), boo, etc). Also, finally amd64 users may soon have ‘mono’ out of use.mask, and get all the great lovin’ x86 and ppc do.

On the boo front, I finally got boo into portage (now that mono-1.1.x is out of p.mask), which makes me happy. As for actual hacking on boo, last week I managed to get destructors working for boo in under 24 hours (the codebase is that nice to hack on! /me showers bamboo with rose petals for writing such a cool compiler architecture), and this past weekend I began working on explicit interface implementation stuff. I’ve gotten the parser and basic error checking bits down, but the EmitAssembly step is proving trickier. Soon, hopefully.

And now for your random daily dosage of graffiti from my neighborhood. This truck I’d only seen once before, and finally managed to snap a shot of this morning walking to work. Sadly you can’t see the left side very well, but it’s composed of several very nasty looking gas-masked individuals, looking like something out of Wizards:

Continuing to strive for world domination via the boo shell. For those who had problems with the boo addin causing 100% utilization, this bug should be fixed. This evening I also got the out of process shell stuff moved over to the new CreateRemoteProcessObject stuff that lluis commited today. Makes the whole remoting thing much nicer/easier to work with. I also commited a fix that should keep the shell chugging along after people kill gtk# windows instantiated in the shell, etc.

I’ve started work on providing monodevelop a macro facility, with macros written in, of course, boo. the minimal backend stuff needed is done, now i just need to find time to work up the GUI foo needed for a macro browser, and for placing the macros in some menu item (probably a submenu Run -> Macros -> Foo, but suggestions welcome).

And finally, another item from the wonderful world of NYC. This truck passes me semi regularly on my walk to the subway in the mornings. My sh*tty camera phone doesn’t do it justice at all, it’s really humongous and gorgeous in real life: