The Code Vaults

Patent annoyances

Reading over at BoS I saw something rather near and dear to my heart, discussion on the mp3 patents, as I had been looking into writing a player app of some sort (the player was secondary to some UI concerns I was considering, but it was music related) but had put it off.  However now I don’t think it’s worth the bother, considering some time this year the mp3 licensing changed to be a MINIMUM of $15,000 for licensing, more if you sold enough copies.

I can understand wanting to make money off of your patents, but 15 THOUSAND, minimum?  Really?  And I thought I wished Ogg Vorbis was more popular before finding this out.  Hell the mp3 player I finally bought for listening to podcasts while going about my day (SanDisk Sansa Fuse 4 Gig) doesn’t even support Ogg, but it had everything else I wanted, and none of the podcasts I listen to are in Ogg so that was, unfortunately , negotiable.  Seeing this, though, I regret that decision a bit more.

Now I think I need to do some research on how much longer before the various mp3 patents start to die, as the impression I have is it shouldn’t be TOO terribly long.

Long time no post

With my day job being so hectic I haven’t had much time for intellectually stimulating programming (vb6 = not stimulating, at all).  However I recently picked up a copy of PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp) thanks to a 40% off coupon with Borders (40% off?  Um, yeah going for the EXPENSIVE books).

While I’m not necessarily sure I want to do any projects in Lisp, getting my hands on another of the books many feel are great for expanding the mind from a developer perspective seemed too good an idea to pass up, as you can never know enough in this field.  However I’m being “punished” for my time spent with scheme.  I keep trying to do things the Lisp-1 way (map funcname listvar) instead of (mapcar #‘funcname listvar) and getting syntax errors… making doing the problems in the book rather… entertaining.

I wonder how anyone can manage to use both, or if it’s really reasonable to be fluent in both rxrs (assuming 5 or better for X, I didn’t try scheme prior to that point) and ANSI CL at the same time, considering the level of syntactic similarity.  Time will tell, since knowing my dabbling nature I will almost definetly give PLT another spin at some point.

Interesting site

Hm, saw this on HN recently and I have to say I found it rather interesting.  When I have more time I intend to take a look at it more fully.

http://videolectures.net/ 

Language musings

I got an idea for a project I want to work on, and have started speccing it out.  However I’ve realized something.  No particular set of development tools gives me quite what I want, at least not ones I can think of in a price range I’m willing to spend right now. 

C++?  Too many potholes and not that fond of the UI development with it, from past experience.

Python?  Server portion at least I’d like to write it in something faster, plus having to either basically give away your code or obfuscate it doesn’t really appeal to me.

Lisp?  None of the sanely priced ones (either free like SBCL or lower cost for pay ones like Corman) do everything I want across Linux and Windows, and even better if I can get Mac support too out of the box.  Allegro and Lispworks professional are simply more then I’m ready to spend at this point so they are out.

Scheme?  This is probably the most appealing right now, since PLT has UI stuff, it runs on just about every platform known to man, and compiles down to sanely sized exe’s last I checked.  However I’ve heard the level of control of the UI isn’t that great, but I may have to explore this for myself, and see if it’s true, and if so see if there’s any sane way around it with macros or the like.

Clojure?  This one was really starting to appeal to me at first, in spite of my dislike for the JVM (which I am willing to admit is probably silly and based on old issues that have since been corrected).  Then I discovered that as of right now you can’t compile it to bytecode and release that.  It’s only JIT compiled during execution.  Big downer if I decide I want to sell my idea for money and not open source it, which I have not decided yet.

Haskell?  No background in it at ALL, and after taking a look at the tutorial for writing a scheme compiler in haskell, I’m just not sure what to think, as while decent, without hunting on the ‘net for more info, the tutorial hasn’t left me feeling comfortable with the syntax yet.  So unless I want to buy a book for a language I only MIGHT use (something I’ve done far too often in the past) then this idea doesn’t thrill me yet.  I’m also not clear on the GUI capabilities.

 C#?  Now that I’ve used it some during my day job, I find some of my dislikes for Java syntactically carry through.  The biggest being the whole concept of everything must be in a class.  While I know there are reasons they designed it that way, I still have a deep dislike for that level of object orientation.

 So right now the front runners seem to be PLT Scheme or go with Clojure in spite of the lack of compilation to bytecode (though even if it did this I’d still have to look into obfuscation).

Oh, and just so all the zealots don’t think I’m ignoring it.

Ruby?  What I’ve seen of the syntax never appealed to me, and it’s at best as fast as Python if you run the non-final 1.9 (last I saw 1.8. … 6? was the official version on the language website) and can still be worse.  Why would I go away from a language I’m comfortable with (Python?) for another that is at best as fast and quite easily can be worse, and the syntax doesn’t appeal to me.  Pass 

Downsides of working with Open Source Lisps in windows

Figured out a project I wanted to work on in Lisp, so I thought I would set up asdf-install to allow me to grab various packages like cl-ppcre and s-xml (since cl-xml doesn’t work in sbcl I guess) and kept running into various errors, and now I’m going to settle in for the night and get away from coding for the rest of the night I think.

 Bleh not as productive as I wanted, but this goes to show why I’ve been debating using the linux vm image instead of fighting the lack of windows support.

Runevault redirect.

Since I haven’t gotten around to putting runevault.com to proper use yet, going to point it here until I get around to using it for something more, aka when I have some more interesting site to put up.

 Be interesting to see how much traffic is driven here by it, considering there are several google hits referencing the domain, and someone offered to buy it off me at one point (assumably the people at runevault.net).

 Guess it’s a good thing I grabbed it when I did back in 2006.

Programming blog

I figure I can use this as an experiment in tracking what I do learning new programming stuff in my free time.

For anyone who finds this and cares, I’m currently working on Common Lisp, using primarily SBCL in Vista (yes I’m a masochist, but once SBCL support improves a bit with stuff like threads, it really seems the best of the CL implementations so it appeals to me more then going with, say, CLISP).

It’s actually tempted me to set up vmware on my laptop and drop Ubuntu image on there so I can just lisp program that way, in an environment much better supported by the open source choices.  Perhaps once 8.04 comes out I’ll consider it.