A Geekly Miscellany
Headache, bad; also lack-of-sleep issues; so I'm not at Balticon today. I'll probably be there tomorrow evening, but don't know yet what time I'll be showing up (playing a gig elsewhere in the afternoon and don't know how late the event will go). Today my plan was to conserve my strength for tomorrow, but a few urgent things had to be done first, and I got sucked into one or two less-urgent tasks as well. So I probably won't get the wheel anniemal found for me modified to attach to the endpin of the double bass by tomorrow ... though there's a small chance of that still.
I've been meaning to install a software development kit for PalmOS -- y'know: cross-compiler, emulator, etc. -- but hadn't gotten around to it. Now my getting around to it has been pushed back a bit farther ... because I stumbled across native development tools that I'll be playing with for a while. I haven't installed OnboardC yet because some glitchy misconfiguration somewhere makes inconvenient things happen every time I hotsync (so I'll do it when I feel like coping with undoing the side effects -- if a local Palm expert wants to help me fix the underlying problem sometime, that'd be great), but before I found that, I'd installed a copy of SmallBASIC. BASIC probably isn't the right tool to try to write an improved ABC viewer in, but I've been tinkering in that direction anyhow. So far I've been playing with the graphics commands and putting together routines for drawing the staves and the symbols. I should be able to do that much more tidily when I get around to switching to C, but hey, I'm still having fun so far. (That'll stop about the time I hit the maximum program size and discove I only have two thirds of a parser coded, or something, I'm sure.)
Having a native language means I don't have to keep uploading the compiled code to the PDA, and it means that I can tinker at the kitchen table or on the toilet or away from home. It means dealing with a single environment.
A native development environment on a PDA also means that much more temptation to skip any semblance of proper, thought-out design and just start coding and see where I wind up. And it means not having a proper editor, having to stroke all the code in using Graffiti instead of typing it, risking God-knows-what side effects of a stray pointer, looking at my code a tiny screenful at time, and discharging the battery in a hurry, so I've still got plenty of reason to install a cross-compiler and develop code under Linux or Windows when I finally decide to take the trouble to hunt down and install all those pieces.
One thing about starting this in BASIC with an expectation of changing to C later is that I can use what I'm doing now as a rough draft and not be upset about ripping up huge chunks of it when I realize there's a better approach. I won't be tempted to salvage anything that should really be thrown away, since I'd still have to re-code it.
Now if I had a native Java development environment on the Clie, I'd have a big incentive to finally get around to teaching myself Java like I'd planned for so long. I'd grab a PalmOS native C++ compiler if I stumbled across one as well. But somehow I cannot bring myself to daydream about having ForTran or COBOL on it ... (OTOH, I wonder how useful Lisp would be on a PDA.)
The other thing that having a BASIC interpreter on the Clie means is that it's convenient to type in that AI program I stole from madbodger *mumble* years ago. :-) That was the first thing I did with it, of course.
I've documented how-many-measures-of-what each track on Home, the second Homespun Ceilidh Band CD, is. This is for dancers who want to know, for example, that the "Saut du Lapin" set is 208 measures long. I'm not sure yet where this info will eventually wind up, but it'll be made available (on our web site, at least). I need to do this for Spinning Reels, our first album, as well.
And now I'm going to read some email and then either close my eyes for a spell or tinker with note-beaming algorithms in BASIC, depending on how much effect this dose of ibuprofen has on my headache.
anniemal talks about guarding my sleep and trying to take care of me when we're together (I can be frustrating to take care of, not because I don't want help, but because I so very much don't want to need taking-care-of ... and because I feel guilty about not being more fun); my feeling better after she'd been here a day or so is quite unlikely to have been mere coincidence. Alas, it only took a couple of days of pushing myself to deal with Things With Looming Deadlines to mess me up again. A couple more things to deal with (after some rest) and tomorrow's gig(s), and then I can try to get back on track in terms of sleep, energy, and pain-management. I did at least have the sense yesterday to not try to squeeze in one more thing I'd really wanted (but not absolutely needed) to get done.
And speaking of looming deadlines, the Pennsic pre-registration deadline is mere days away. If you're going and haven't registered yet, go make sure your group's land allotment includes you.