Jay McGavren's Journal

My boss just called me into his office to meet someone - I guess his interviewee is currently working at my old company, and has worked with a bunch of my old Perl libraries. He had been looking forward to meeting me, because a lot of his Perl knowledge had been gleaned from working with my code.

I’m probably one of the Valley’s foremost remaining experts on Perl 5. Not that this is something to be particularly proud of; it’s basically a dead language. Still, it’s nice to know your code is being studied and used.

This might account for that fighter jet purchase...

Google Tutor points out that Google has added a clause to their robots.txt:

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

But it seems to me that there’s not much to worry about, because when I access google.com/brains, I get:

www.google.com/brains - does not exist.

DOD: $514 billion. DOE: $59 billion.

Death and Taxes chart: 2009 federal discretionary budget

Passed some folks holding up Obama signs on Camelback, and without thinking, I threw up the devil horns sign. To me, that means “You rock!”. Not sure what it means to forty- and fifty-somethings, though, and I hope they weren’t offended.

Unix “make” as a model for media conversion...

OK, this is a lot less complicated than I thought. From An Introduction to the UNIX Make Utility:

Make has a set of default rules called suffix or implicit rules. These are generalized rules that make can use to build a program. For example in building a C++ program these rules tell make that .o object files are made from .cc source files. The suffix rule that make uses for a C++ program is

     .cc.o:
        $(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -c $<

where $< is a special macro which in this case stands for a .cc file that is used to produce a particular target .o file.

So in the media server, if I mark my compiler object as requiring type binary/o, and link a text/cc to it, the compiler object should look at the environment for rules that output binary/o. Among them, it will (hopefully) see one linked to a compiler object that takes text/cc. (I know in the real world these compilers are the same, but this is my contrived example and I’m sticking to it.) It feeds the text/cc into the compiler linked from the rule, then feeds the binary/o output to the initial target compiler.

OK, let’s try a better example: we have a Screen which expects a binary/image, and we link a text/html to it. We go find a rule that links to ImageMagic “convert”, which outputs a binary/image, but only accepts text/plain input. Looking for rules that output text/plain, we find one linked to “lynx” that accepts text/html. So the path goes:

text/html -> text/plain -> binary/image

This could probably be drawn out to several more steps, though I worry about speed in finding the correct path. If I recall right, looking up “graph traversal” in Programming Game AI By Example will help me there.