The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security. That’s about where I am today!

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Wombat IDE - C211 Matrix Library

2011-12-13

For the final exam, I’ve added a matrix API. The students are supposed to have implemented this, but we know that haven’t, so this way they can either use their version or mine.

Matrix API (Edit: The most up to date Matrix API can be found here):

Wombat IDE - A problem with characters

2011-12-07

Previously character literals (of the form #\a, #\space, etc) were messing with automatic indentation and bracket matching (mostly, if you tried to do #\( or #\) ), but now it’s fixed.

Update to version 1.340.13 if this has been a problem.

Wombat IDE - Images are annoying sometimes

2011-11-26

There have been two image bugs that have been bothering me for a while. Occasionally error messages will crop up showing an IndexOutOfBoundsException. I’ve fixed most of those, but I finally found a new one dealing with strange negative array indices. Some images don’t work correctly with read-image. I haven’t been able to determine why (I should be able to deal with any image that Java’s JAI can read), but I finally tracked it down to some kinds of grayscale images.

Wombat IDE - A pile of minor changes

2011-11-24

I’ve been putting off a new release for a while while I collect a number of minor bug fixes and enhancements, but I think it’s about time to actually release them. 1.327.1 is the new build.

Wombat IDE - A bug fix and a timing function

2011-11-03

First, a bug fix in leaf?. It now does what it’s actually supposed to and return #t if and only if the objust is a tree with both subtrees satisfying empty-tree?. Second, cpu-time has been redefined to only count time spent on actual processing (and not on output / Java wrapper code) while the old functionality has been renamed to the function real-time. Small and simple, but it’s still worth a new version.

Wombat IDE - Big fixes and confusion removal

2011-11-02

A small list of bug fixes first:

Updated draw-tree to use ovals instead of rectangles to match the old version
Fix error messages with functions whose names end with ?
Added better error messages for division by 0, particularly for the function /
Removed whitespace at the ends of files and lines on save
Fixed automatic indentation on the first line of a file
Removed formatting from the undo/redo stack (as it’s automatic anyways)

Wombat IDE - Automatic updating

2011-10-29

For a while now, we’ve been using Java Webstart to keep local copies of Wombat updated but I’ve been having issues keeping everything up to date. It doesn’t seem that I’m the only one either. So I’ve started writing my own update system, using a simple version file on the servers on campus that will automatically be fetched to verify that all of the files are up to date.

Wombat IDE - A bunch of new procedures

2011-10-25

I’ve added a bunch of new procedures today, mostly to improve compatibility with Chez Scheme and the like. All together, I’ve added these functions:

cpu-time - get a timestamp to use in timing function runtime

Wombat IDE - Minor bug fixes

2011-10-17

Just a few bug fixes this time:

A few fixes for error message related to incorrect usage of car and cdr to better match what Chez gives
Tweaks to clean up the build system
Fixed the JAR signing system to automatically sign JARs only if they’re out of date (prevents Webstart from re-downloading them)

Wombat IDE - Bug fixes and new image code

2011-10-14

First, bug fixes: Fixed an issue that made the C211 libraries disappear on a reset list should be printed as a procedure (rather than a type) Fixed a problem where reload would fail Fixed a problem where the wrong procedure name would be printed in errors in make-image and image-map Added code to automatically add a git tag on deploy (based on the version number) Also, I’ve rewritten the image code (especially read-, write-, and draw-image) to make them significantly faster.