Blog/November 2013/Nov 22nd
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< Blog | November 2013
| Nov 22nd (See this week's devar torah) | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Hi, again!
It was a pretty slow week, in terms of excitement. Just work and more work, which is really a very good thing, when you come right down to it. The weather’s been getting colder, finally getting out the comforters for the beds. Other than that?
Well, I mentioned last week that I had undergone a CT scan of my head because of occasional losses of peripheral vision. This week we got the analysis and the neurologist said that my brain is “perfectly normal”! So there’s now documentary evidence that I am not abnormal, despite my detractors’ scurrilous assertions. It turns out that my vision problem is just visual migraines, and there’s not much I can do about them.
In other news, Esther was interviewed for an article on aliyah, and managed to give Sarah and her school some publicity as well. It’s a heartwarming tale of a small band of intrepid Jews who return to their Land. You are welcome to join them.
Beware! Geekery ahead:
Work on my 8th development platform continues apace. This week I spent quite a while getting the “FFI” working. That stands for “Foreign Function Interface”, and is the means by which 8th is allowed to communicate with “foreign” code (meaning, anything other than 8th). So for example, in order to show a dialog to the user, one needs to tell the operating system what one wants to do. This requires talking to a “foreign” bit of code, and that can be quite a complex endeavor.
Unlike the Reva Forth which inspired it, 8th has its own built-in types — and those types are not the same as the “foreigners” may expect. So the FFI has to convert from the internal 8th types to the external expected types, and likewise convert the returned values to internal types. One of the cool things I accomplished this week was to make the FFI know what types to expect, and how to convert them, so that the user can’t send “bad” data to the foreign side. At least, it’s much harder to do that than it is in Reva or in C. The hard part is making sure it works correctly on all the supported platforms, so I’ve been writing a lot of “test code” as I go along.
The next bit of hard work involves incorporating something called JSON into 8th. This will make it very easy to exchange data with other applications, and will make the data-declarations in 8th much easier to fathom. Stay tuned for upcoming acts of great Geekery!
Last week Esther did a wonderful job of trimming the overgrowth of plants in our garden, and I started clearing the brush away. But as it turned out, I left about half of it un-cleared-away, so now I need to do that before shabbat. So I’ll take leave of you now to engage in some gardening.
We’ve got lots of people here this week. The list includes Sarah’s two friends from her “National Service” days, as well as her friend Dinah and perhaps Dinah’s mother who is “in country” now. We’ll have on the menu:
vegetable soup, radish salad, cabbage salad, eggplant in teḥina, braised short-ribs, orange chicken, vegetable lasagna, roasted root vegetables, zucchini with mushrooms, slow-cooked roast beef, split-pea soup, fruit and brownies.
Until next week,
shabbat shalom!
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