Logan Buesching

Earlier this week I finally got around and filed papers to incorporate myself, thus forming Eleguin LLC. What does Eleguin stand for, what does this company do, and why did I form it?

Well, the name is a combination of elephant and penguin, No, it is not a reference to Family Guy, but rather signifying open source solutions for my clients.

My company provides open source solutions for its clients, currently specializing in web development.

Right now I have two projects in the pipeline, more in the near future, and I felt that it would be best to incorperate myself now and build my company’s name and portfolio, so possibly when I graduate I can make this my full time job.

Facebook better get its act together, soon. This type of MySpace BS better not become the norm or else I will cancel my account… these apps should be banned.

I recently bought Linux Format which featured an article on the E programming language. It is written in java and is an interpreted language. If you don’t like java, there is also one based on common lisp. Just make sure that you don’t use gcj to try and get it up and running, I experienced quite a few problems when attempting to use this JRE.

E is a programming language that removes deadlocks for multi-threaded applications by using promises. I have coffee and am waiting on sugar, you have sugar and are waiting on coffee. Deadlock. Normally, this is overcome by stating you must get coffee before trying to get sugar, and thus you remove the deadlock. What E does, is it says I promise to give you the coffee if you give me the sugar. Not only is this pretty powerful, but here is the kicker: the computation for each thread doesn’t have to be on the same machine. Imagine that the coffee thread is on machine A, and that sugar is on machine B connected over a network. Once machine A promises to give the coffee to machine B, machine B acts as though it has a value until it needs the value. So machine B can go and … buy snacks from the vending machine while machine A makes his coffee. When A is done making coffee, it hands over the coffee and the sugar to B for him to make his coffee: automagically. If machine B got his snacks from the vending machine and now wants to drink his coffee, but doesn’t have it yet, it will patiently wait until machine A is done making coffee before continuing.

I imagine that the types of applications that would get the most use out of this would be SETI @ home and Folding@Home. Although these probably have a robust and flexible model for doing this, I’d imagine that it was pretty difficult to create and could have been done more quickly when E matures.

Last night, I went to the theater to go and watch the new Transformers movie. I was a little disappointed with the results. Sure, the ultimate bad guy may be Megatron, but it’s a little cheesy when they are trying to be serious and there is yelling about Megatron, Bumble Bee, The All Spark, and whatever weird kiddish names are in the movie. It may have worked on us when we were 5 years old, but now that we are 25, it’s really, really kiddish.

Although Steven Spielburg was an executive producer on the set, the movie has as many plot holes in it as a movie about swiss cheese would have. If you went into the movie expecting to only see some sweet action scenes and robots blowing shit up, then you will leave the movie feeling satisified. Or maybe you went to go see the new chevy camaro… then you will be pretty damn happy. It’s a sweet car.

So I felt like I would be productive this evening. After a few hours trying to have Eclipse PDT installed and running, I just about cried. It was dependency error after dependency error after dependency error. Eclipse’s update manager should resolve these w/o me having to hassle with it. End of story.

So after messing around for about 2 hours, I finally stumbled upon Zend PDT, which kindly suited my exact needs: php development tools with a PHP debugger. Wow, that was so much quicker to install and use, I had it up and running in 20 minutes.

The reason why I installed these was for a PHP debugging tool, as I have started to find a need for one. I have recently been attempting to combine PHPFreeChat with Net_SmartIRC to make a really, really nice IRC AJAX client. This has not been going well at all so far, but hopefully things will turn around. It doesn’t help that I get IRC codes that are unrecognized and not stated in RFC 1459, namely 265, 266 and 250. Maybe somebody can help me out with this issue?

While I was testing, I also found out that Pidgin has a querky bug… for which I submitted Bug #2052. That took a couple of hours to nail down. Turns out that for certain values of your idleaway status in your prefs file, Pidgin crashes. I didn’t look too heavily into the issue, maybe someone on their end can easily fix it without me having to learn too much of their code base.

Now onto bed as I have work tomorrow.

**Edit**
After looking around in the ircd-hybrid (my IRC daemon), I found the following:
#define RPL_STATSCONN 250
/* RPL_STATSDLINE 250 Numerics List: IRCnet */
#define RPL_LOCALUSERS 265
#define RPL_GLOBALUSERS 266

For which I then didn’t feel like researching any further. Maybe someone knows where these are defined…