Author: grant

Calling Java Under Cygwin

While trying to set up Clojure under Cygwin I found that doing mixed-mode between Cygwin and Java isn’t very happy due to the ‘;’ vs ‘:’ in the classpath.
This post (via this post) provided an obfuscated Ruby program to take care of that for you… thanks!

#!/bin/ruby
# Slightly obfuscated cygwin + windows java wrapper, automate cygpath
cpi = ARGV.index("-cp") + 1
cp = ARGV[cpi] if cpi
XBCP = "-Xbootclasspath/a:"
xbcpi = ARGV.index{|i|i=~/^#{XBCP}.*/}
xbcp = ARGV[xbcpi] if xbcpi
if cp or xbcpi
  def convert_paths(paths)
    paths = paths.gsub(':', ';').split(';')
    paths.map{|p|`cygpath -aw #{p}`.strip}.join ';'
  end
  ARGV[cpi] = convert_paths(cp) if cp
  ARGV[xbcpi] = XBCP + convert_paths(xbcp.sub(XBCP, '')) if xbcp
end
java = '/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/java'
cmd = .concat ARGV
def e(s); "\"#{s.strip.gsub('"','\"')}\""; end
exec(cmd.map{|a|e a}.join(' '))

ImgBurn for Windows is Excellent

Here is a great disc-burning application for MS Windows called ImgBurn. Works great “out of the box” and is free, which doesn’t reflect its utility or value at all.
I will only share additionally that I’ve tried two free and two commercial application, which I won’t name for fear of any publicity that it would generate for them, that ultimately would fail due to pretty simple scenarios like a disc not being loaded in the disc-drive.

Chris's advice on how to read The Books of History Chronicles

  1. The Circle Series (takes place in our world and in Other Earth)
    1. Green (Book Zero, sequel to Book 3 and prequel to Book 1. Best to read this last as it closes a lot of story loops.)
    2. Black (Book One) probably the best place to start with the BoHC world.
    3. Red (Book Two)
    4. White (Book Three)
  2. The Lost Books (written for young adults, but still worth the read. Occurs mostly in Other Earth.)

    1. Chosen (takes place between Black and Red)
    2. Infidel
    3. Renegade (things make more sense if you read Showdown first)
    4. Chaos
    5. Lunatic (between White and Green)
    6. Elyon
  3. Paradise Novels (completely in our world)

    1. Showdown (other point to enter the BoHC world if you do not start with Black. But Black is a better place to start.)
    2. Saint
    3. Sinner
  4. Here are spin-off novels that occur due to events in the other series.

    1. Skin (spins off of Showdown, but is an independent book. Does have one “hook” for the Lost Books.)
    2. House (spins off of Showdown, but is an independent book)
    3. Immanuel’s Veins (takes place in our world in the 11th or 12th century, but with ties to other books in the series)
  1. My recommendation is to read Black, Red, White from the Circle first (this was the original Circle Trilogy that started it all)
    1. Then read the Paradise Novels
    2. Then read the Lost Books
    3. Then read Green and the other independent spin-offs.
      2. Based on the plot points that intertwine, I think things will mean the most if you read them that way.

Intel presentation about their new functional programming language

Via CUFP via Caml-list:

For five years Intel’s Programming Systems Lab (PSL) has been collaborating with an external partner on a new functional programming language designed for productivity on many-core processors. While the language is not yet public, this talk outlines motivations behind the language and describes our experiences in implementing it using a variety of functional languages. The reference interpreter is written in Haskell and compiled with GHC while PSL’s performance implementation is written in SML and compiled with Mlton. We have also generated Scheme code compiled with PLT Scheme as part of a prototyping effort.