larsivi

A few weeks ago, I entered Tango as a project for the Hackontest - a 24 hour hacking contest for 3 select features for various open source projects. The hacking will be done by teams of 3. For those attending, there will be cash prizes and most likely an exciting trip to Zurich, Switzerland.

Now, the catch is that a jury will select the 3 projects/features that will be part of the competition proper, and these will be chosen from those entered at the site linked further up.

When I registered Tango, there was a

A recurring complaint against D, is the quality of the compilers. Currently there are two in a usable state - DMD and GDC, with LLVMDC, Dil and Dang as follow ups.

This post is about the first two, as I don't consider a D compiler usable until it can compile Tango and its examples.

DMD is quite stable, especially its 1.0x branch - but the most annoying bugs - those that it is hardest to find workarounds for - tend to have a low priority. The reasoning seems mostly to be that the fruits are hanging to high. Also, it does have fairly unstable optimization - while developing Tango XML, just moving a function in the source could

KeYeR (Piotr) called upon me in #D and said that my statement "This is one of the worse decisions among the bad ones in the D history." was bad English. No, not really. He said that it was a strong statement, and sure, it is. I tend to be (unnecessarily so?) strong in my rather few statements on design choices in the D language. Peter added that he was afraid that I was right.

As I see it, Walter here is willingly implementing a solution that 99% of the community seems to hate. He even had a different implementation, the manifest keyword, that was applauded

When I talked about the three T's, the last one stood for TODO. Well, in the Tango world, i probably should have made that Ticket. Since our latest release, the reactions have been relaxed, mostly due to the holidays I guess (and partially because the contents were well known). Only 9 tickets have been created since then, and at least 5 of them were web and documentation related. The web part is natural, as I redid the layout of the Tango frontpage, hopefully for the much better (at least visually, I believe we could do it in a more proper styles based manner, please join us if you think so). I think the tickets related to this change were all resolved.

As for the docs, one ticket was about private members in the DDoc output. Now, this is easily removed by changing the style of the source code comments, but do anyone know if this is

My deepest condolances to those back home in Fosnavåg and the surrounding area, who lost their loved ones in the Bourbon Dolphin capside outside the coast of Shetland.

Mine djupaste kondolansar til dei heime i Fosnavåg, og elles på Sunnmøre, som mista sine kjære i kantringa til Bourbon Dolphin.

When at work, I usually listen to Radio Paradise, an internet radio channel without commercials. It is supported by it's listeners through donations (I gave the first amount to them just a few days ago) and goods like t-shirts.

Now they, and other channels like them, face shutdown after some ridiculous pricing models from the music publishing companies. It seems to mostly be a problem for legal internet channels in the US, but since California is where Radio Paradise is situated, the problem is real for them. The new pricing model will if effectuated cost them 125% of their income, which comes in addition to other expenses like bandwidth, personnel and more.

I have no idea whether it is possible to reach through to where it matters, but at least I hope that you do your share by spreading the word, and digg this blog post detailing the matter.

The upgrade is complete, it went fairly well, although I had to fiddle a bit with some of the more esoteric "fixes" I had for the previous version.

Also, I haven't looked up the old favicon from my backup yet. If something looks totally out of hand, please tell me.

Sometime, probably tonight, I will upgrade the Drupal installation. Although a minor reason, it has been one of the reasons for me not writing too much lately. This version is not particularly capable of preventing comment spam, leaving me with about 1000 SPAM comments to deal with (to get through to any possible real comments) over the last couple of months.

I've heard that 4.7 has a very good filter, which I want to try. It also makes it easier to mass delete spam comments without leafling through each and everyone.

I might possibly also upgrade the theme if all else goes well.

The

For the second time this year, I've been to the eastern parts of Europe. Last time in May, I went to visit h3r3tic in Poland, whereas I this time I played the role of the tourist in Prague and Budapest, although the D connection was far from lost. Through some lucky travel configuration, I was able to meet and travel with Kris, the project lead of Mango, for all of the week I spent there.

Kris is a truly inspirational and intelligent individual with some long and solid experience in the software business. He has worked with major (and legendary) actors in the business, ridden the dotcom wave, developed software in many languages and for the full range of hardware. Being a Scot on the bottom, he's also just a really funny and cool guy.

Well, after the hacking a couple of days ago, I thought things might be better, but alas. When I woke up again, the site was hacked again with a somewhat updated defacing page. This time it took ages before I first was able to remove the new design, and then another two ages before I started to hear anything from the hosting company. There still are some "suspicious" pages in the adminstration part of the site, but hopefully things are working better this time around ... I only was able to restore this site due to a drupal index file for my version that I found in some backwaters of my disks,