It appears that Microsoft is giving away its Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 compiler for free — probably as a move to get deeper penetration of its .NET amongst the free and open source community, sniping at Java as well as projects out to displace Microsoft such as DotGNU. All Microsoft would have to do at this point is port the VC++ Toolkit 2003 to Linux and release a free CLR for Linux, and DotGNU is as good as dead, and Java could be in deep trouble.

Today on /. someone announced that MySQL Gets Functions in Java, or that you can write UDFs (User Defined Functions) in Java that can be used from within MySQL.

Apparently, David Sklar has implemented what he calls myphp, which lets you use PHP as a UDF from MySQL.

Now, what would be a dream to me is to bring two of my favorite things (you know, Tcl and MySQL) together to let you call Tcl procs as UDFs from MySQL. Unfortunately, Jeremy Cole has already used the name MyTCL which is the successor to tcl-sql. So … I guess if I implement mytcl.so, I’ll have to name it something different.

(also titled “Dossy’s Tcl implementation of the Bowling Score exercise”)

In November 2003, on the Extreme Programming mailing list, several folks have been implementing solutions to solve the “calculate the score of a bowling game” problem, to demonstrate techniques like refactoring, test-first programming, etc. As usual, my contribution is a Tcl-based solution to the problem, to show everyone how simple and powerful Tcl can be. *chuckle*

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I recently changed jobs back in June 2003, and my new gig has provided me with an excellent project to work on that I pretty much chose. One of the interesting things is that I was able to put together a team that was interested in doing some Extreme Programming, which I’ve been practicing since 1999 or so. After roughly 6 weeks of this new team working together, I decided to write a little something and post it to the Extreme Programming Yahoo! Group (which is a mailing list).

Thanks to the Church Sign Generator it’s now trivially easy to create sacriligious humor. Seems to be a fairly popular meme with bloggers lately, so I figured I’d get in on the fun.

A neat aerial photo of 40.9994 latitude, -74.3334 longitude, courtesy of TerraServer USA:

(Click the image to view a larger version.)

The photo is quite old now, supposedly from April 16, 1995, but it’s still interesting to look at. What exactly are you looking at? Lovely Butler, New Jersey. More specifically, it’s where I currently live.

Please, I don’t need any of you freaky Geocaching weirdos trying to find me and my home now that you have coordinates. Just send me email if you want to chat.

A co-worker IM’ed me nothing more than an URL, and like every impulsive fool out on the ‘net, I blindly clicked on it out of sheer curiousity. Maybe you’ll do the same:

http://my.so-net.net.tw/carl0726/sand.wmv

I’m pretty speechless. Okay, that’s a lie, I can say lots of things about how cool this performance art is. But, rather than babble on and spoil the surprise, I’ll just hope you were tempted enough to click on the link so you can see exactly what I’m talking about.

Update, 11/20/2003: Seems like the original link is dead now (poor guy’s bandwidth must have been suffering). Here’s another link:

http://www.theposse.org/downloads/sand.wmv

I’ve got a copy myself but I don’t have a nice high-bandwidth place to post it (it’s 30.5MB in size), but if someone wants to host it, I’ll link to it.

Update, 11/26/2003: The folks at theposse.org have taken the video down and replaced it with a happy message. I’m not going to keep fishing for links to this video — if you haven’t seen it by now, then man, get with the program!

Update, 03/11/2005: It appears that over a year later, folks are still finding this entry when searching for “sand.wmv”, so I figured I’d better update it. In the comments below, RE provides a link to the sand animation artist, Ferenc Cako‘s website. His site features a page on his sand painting performance which has some links to the video but it’s broken up into separate small, low-quality files: sand_1.mpg, sand_2.mpg, erzekeny_toredekek.mpg, toredek.mpg, toredek_2.mpg. Enjoy!

Okay, every year or two, I build brand new machines for Sam and myself. Last time around, we ended up with generic ATX cases, Intel 815EEAL motherboards with Intel PIII-800 CPUs and 256 MB of RAM, each system costing around $600 a piece, if I recall. This was back in 2001, I believe.

Coming to the end of 2003, it’s amazing how fast technology has improved, and how far prices have dropped. It’s coming close to Christmas time and thus, time for me to start assembilng the list of parts that I’ll be using to build out our new machines. Read on to see what I’m planning and what factors were involved in the decision-making process.

So, what is Tcllian? Well, it’s a Tcl plugin for Trillian Pro. What’s Trillian Pro? It’s a multi-medium Instant Messaging (IM) client — it lets you connect to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and IRC all from one single application.

So, what’s the big deal about Tcllian? Well, instead of having to code plugin functionality in C/C++ or Delphi or some other compiled language, Tcllian exposes the functionality of the plugin API via Tcl, an interpreted scripting language which is incredibly fast and simple to develop in.

So, once the core of Tcllian is complete, the ability to develop plugins for Trillian Pro will become a piece of cake. I’m hoping to get it to a 0.9 release by the end of August for a 1.0 release by the end of 2003.