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 - 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)

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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.

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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

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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.

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Wombat IDE - Git

2011-10-06

Long story short, I switched from SVN to Git. I could go probably go into a long list of reasons why, but really it comes down to two:

  • I want a lightweight branching model (to keep things like the screen sharing out of the deployed builds)
  • I want to learn a new version control system (I’ve used Git a bit, but this is the largest project I’m working on so will force me to learn more quickly)

It took a bit to get everything moved over, but I think everything is working correctly now. I’m still on Google Code, just using their Git back-end.

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Wombat IDE - Bug fixes, memory issues, and screen sharing

2011-09-28
A bit of a bigger update today, bringing the version number up to r213. First, bug fixes: Removed visible references to Java, replacing class names in errors Fixed an issue related to hanging on non-procedure errors Fix for even? and odd? to correctly deal with both Java and Kawa numbers Added trace-define Increased stack size to delay infinite loop errors (so that larger code that isn’t actually an infinite loop can run) Do not format after #!

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Wombat IDE - Bug fixes

2011-09-15

A small list of bug fixes:

  • Fixed printing for empty strings and Kawa specific strings (derived from gnu.lists.FString)
  • Fixed a problem with the Ant script when the build directory didn’t previously exist
  • Fixed random to correctly deal with large numbers (larger than the range of a Java int)

The new build is r194.