Most recently I was at SPLASH in Tucson, Arizona last month, presenting “Patterns as Objects in Grace“, and also an author on “Grace: The Absence of (Inessential) Difficulty“. Major takeaways from the location were that Arizona is orange and that I really didn’t appreciate the scale of cactus (pictured). I think the presentation went well and there was some interesting discussion sparked from it.

Before that I was a last-minute fill-in at Strange Loop in St Louis in September, talking about Grace in general at the Emerging Languages Camp. There will be a video of my talk available, apparently on February 25. I don’t have any pictures from St Louis because basically the whole time I was there was occupied by the conference itself, but I did go past the Gateway Arch on the way from the airport — it is bigger than I expected. Strange Loop was a great conference full of interesting sessions, and really well organised. I highly recommend it to anyone who gets the opportunity. It’s a shame it’s so far away and I probably won’t get to go there again.

Even further back in June I was at ECOOP/PLDI in Beijing, presenting at STOP but mostly just attending. There were some interesting sessions there as well. I didn’t get to do much tourism while I was there, but I did get to the nearby Olympic stadium. It was an interesting location for the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, and one I probably wouldn’t have been to otherwise

Although there was value in all of these conferences I am glad to be back home for the foreseeable future. What I’ve been talking about at them is my work with Grace, a new object-oriented language aimed at education, and especially my work on implementing the language in my Minigrace compiler. The compiler is available both in tarball form and on Github, and should work on any POSIX-compatible system (including Cygwin and Mac OS X). It includes all the pattern-matching work I talked about as well as most of the rest of the language. It’s all at the experimental stage still, but it is complete enough to compile itself and a variety of other programs, though it doesn’t always do quite what you want. There’s also an online client-side frontend compiling to JavaScript, which actually runs the same source code as the native compiler. I’m still working on developing, extending, and writing about the compiler as part of my PhD research at Victoria University of Wellington.

Update: I’ve extended it to the top five, rather than three, parties, and it gets a little more interesting then. The fifth-place party varies quite a bit.

Update 2: More electorates:

• Auckland Central
• Christchurch Central
• Epsom
• Mana
• Mangere
• Manukau East
• Mt Albert
• Ōhariu
• Rongotai

The driving use case of this for me is log files – I want to get all of the file after the current occurrence of some event. After establishing that I couldn’t do that with sed, and that although I probably could with awk it would be a bad idea, I set about writing this in C. It does exactly what I want, and I’ve also been over the POSIX tail spec to add everything from that as well, so it is a usable tail command.

The code is on GitHub (for the moment at least), accessible with `git clone git://github.com/mwh/retail.git`, or in an automatic tarball https://github.com/mwh/retail/tarball/master . Although it satisfies my original use-case there are a couple of additions I’d still like to make along with efficiency improvements, and, of course – patches welcome.

Some usage examples:

retail -r Beginning logfile.log

Output everything after the last occurrence of “Beginning” in the file.

retail -r Beginning -u 'succeeded|error' -f logfile.log

Same as the last one, and continue reading as any lines are appended until one matches /succeeded|error/ (i.e., it contains either of those words), and then terminate.

retail -n +10

Start printing at line 10, until the end of the file. Just like in regular tail. Negative numbers, bare [-+]N, and -c work too.

Once more, retail.

The /System/Aliens talk from the Distro Summit is still missing in action. I’m not sure whether it’s coming or not, but it’s looking unlikely at this point.

Scripts has a fix for the man directory path in PrepareProgram (actually used by Compile), and handles dependency conversion better. It also includes updates to the database used by the CommandNotFound system as usual.

The only notable behaviour change is a special case in the useflag code: having -INSTALLED in the environment variable will now disable automatic flags from occurring at all, rather than applying the change at the end of the process. This helps debugging of recipes and is useful for targeted compilation, and the previous more consistent behaviour doesn’t seem to have a use case.

Compile has a single direct bugfix, affecting a case where a failed direct dependency would not cause the build process to terminate. It also benefits from the changes made within Scripts.

The packages are on the master now and will propagate to the mirrors shortly. You can use `InstallPackage Scripts 2.10.2` and `InstallPackage Compile 1.13.3` to install them. Please report any bugs you encounter in the bug tracker and request help either on the mailing lists or the forums.

Thanks to all those who contributed to this release, particularly “Baffo32″ who sent patches to Scripts.

The package is out and making its way to the mirrors now; InstallPackage Compile 1.13.2 should pick it up. There is no corresponding release of Scripts this time around because all fixes are within Compile itself. The latest Scripts release remains 2.10.1.

Following this release the 015 branches for Scripts and Compile will be merged into trunk to allow them to bed in, get more testing, and pick up the new developments in the trunk. That may cause some disruption to users who are tracking trunk tools; it may be best to hold off updating your snapshots for a few days after the merge, or be prepared to revert.

There is also a new 015 prerelease available for testing, snapshotting the state of work right now. It is available from http://karlsson.sytes.net/gobo/015/iso/GoboLinux-20100214.iso and should be functional. Testing, especially on different hardware, would be appreciated. It should boot and be able to start X correctly; where it doesn’t please make a report with as much detail as possible to the mailing list or on #gobolinux.

My slot was right before the closing ceremony and not too badly populated given that it was against at least two others I wanted to see. I don’t think it went too badly, though I did fixate on minor topics at a couple of points, and there were some good questions at the end. Since we were before the ceremony the cutoff was rigorously enforced and we actually ran out of time for them all, but I did have a chat with a couple of interested people at the stage while I was packing up.

Interestingly, and unexpectedly, an article turned up on TechWorld the next day about my talk and about GoboLinux. Some of the quoting is interesting, but the gist of it is there. The slides are also available (I think they’ll be on the conference site too at some point; at least they were collected on a USB stick afterwards), as is a more formally written-up version of the presentation. It doesn’t have all the content the talk did, since I added a few parts, including the whole Rootless section, in the aftermath of Monday’s Distro Summit discussion. Video should be available in a couple of weeks.

The closing ceremony was good enough, but ran long (and started late, so we didn’t really need to have rushed the questions so much…). Mostly that was to fit in thanks to the organisers and helpers, who really did do a fantastic job, so no complaints. Next year’s conference is in Brisbane. I’m not sure whether I’ll go or not yet, but it was definitely valuable this time so I will consider it. No speaking maybe ever again though. The Penguin Dinner that night was all right but also lagged a bit. The entertaining part of it was the Life Flight Trust donations race, which had a fivefold increase in the donation volume in just a couple of hours. I left early to get some actual sleep, so I’m not sure how high it got by the end, but it was approaching $20,000 last I saw.

I was hoping to find out the total at the open day today, but it didn’t appear to be up anywhere. I did get a lot of brochures and blurbs instead, and there was free stuff everywhere too. I didn’t end up with much of that; it was probably more appreciated by my later companion, who got all klepto (but not as klepto as she wanted to be, which seemed like a wasted opportunity). Most appreciated was the koala pen from the LCA2011 booth, so good marketing on their part. It was cute.

That’s a wrap. Later I’ll write up something on the various community engagement presentations I attended, which I think we can get some value out of. There were some others I didn’t make it into that I’ll watch when the videos become available. Right now I’m appreciating the opportunity to do something non-conference-related for a while.

I spent the whole day at the Open in the Public Sector miniconf, where I have plenty of interest but no experience. There were a few great talks there. Pia Waugh’s especially was brilliant and had a good point about the need for transparency in how public enagement is run. She’s the ICT advisor to an Australian Senator and it seems like both she and her boss get it. I liked her advice to other politicians: “get yourself an open-source geek”. The panel discussion with Clare Curran and Pia again was interesting, though Clare went on a bit sometimes. Trevor Mallard was there but not speaking, but he was pretty impressive in informal chat in the breaks. After that was the Speakers Dinner at Te Papa, which was nice enough. I did get to sit at a table with Ted Ts’o and Keith Packard. I left a little early and was still pretty shattered afterwards and the next day.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference proper. The highlight for me was Matthew Garrett’s talk on social conduct in the community, and Sage Weil from Dreamhost talking about their Ceph distributed filesystem (and mentioning that if you want to try it, and don’t have a huge cluster, you can sign up to Dreamhost with code “ceph”). Nothing on that night, so I was able to get some sleep.

Thursday brought two talks from Leslie Hawthorn on community management, mentoring, and bringing in new contributors. The mentoring talk was the most valuable and had a lot of content I think we need to take note of. I have good notes on both of those that I’ll bring to the mailing list later. The Professional Delegates’ Networking Session was that night, which I was technically eligible for, but I went home to work on my slides and talk instead. Also to catch up on sleep.

Friday to come later on.

I appreciated the copious power points around to keep the battery charged, and the wireless network I managed to get working today (except in the Civic Suite where the miniconf was, annoyingly [edit: and they've fixed it! Amazing.]). Kudos to the organisers. The tech people from the conference were also fantastic helping me get the projection up and running, even though it was completely my fault it wasn’t working. He was, in fact, a genius full of information, like he said, so people got to see my fairly information-free slides. Thankfully I’d turned up early to make sure it was going to work.

Those slides are available now, as is a written-up version of it that has more content than I was able to fit into the talk. I had to go through it with a hatchet last night and today to make it fit in the twenty-minute slot and some good parts had to go. Honesty dictated that I couldn’t leave out any of the limitations and drawbacks so it was mostly the rest that got the chop. The main talk is on Friday, and there were a few points that came out of the discussion today that I’ll work into it as well. It turns out everything is being webcast live, which I didn’t find out until after I spoke today, but you can watch Friday’s if you like (Renouf 1 feed, 1545L/0245Z). There’ll be recordings up too, apparently later in the week, which’d be an impressive feat, but at some point over the next few weeks or months anyway.

Now I have to try to plan out what I’m going to go to tomorrow. It’s not going to be easy.