Still fishing around for a solid topic at the moment; waiting on mail back from supervisor and a response on the barrelfish mailing list about one of their topic’s availability. So it should be Haskell and Barrelfish or one or the other, but remains to be seen exactly what. Yesterday’s talk with my examiner about structure, procedure etc went well. I’m confident that whatever happens with this stuff I will come away with something to show for it, and that I’m not going to be left in the lurch if the topic doesn’t work out. That said, time is a bald miser.

I had a first look through the OS source code today: it’s C alright. It’s nice to see literate Haskell used in some of the tools files, but it’s only a few bits here and there, not the body of work. In case you’re not familiar with it, literate programming is the notion of reversing the purpose of comment markers: instead of commenting out your comments, you comment out your program. Wrapping code in LaTeX section tags gives new life to the report-driven-development idea.

The best place to start looking through the Barrelfish code is usr/examples, where there’s a few small applications including a very ordinary looking hello-world and accompanying build files. Once you have an application to run the main way to run it is hard-wire it into the bootloader instructions, e.g. the menu.lst given to grub. I believe there’s an interactive shell (fish) to investigate, but it’s not being touted as the regular way to launch things so I’m not rushing to look at it.

All this is a little moot at the moment, as I can’t yet build and run the OS. My Mac’s gcc version is too old, and it seems the supported build platform is Debian/Ubuntu. Fortunately that’s what I’ll be adding to my new laptop next week.

I won’t be sad to see the back of build issues on Mac OS. I will be sad to lose some of the applications though. Today I tried out handwritten notes in Curio, wondering about looking at yet another of the Omni suite of applications. It didn’t really work out; my tablet is too small to be comfortable to write with, and though the quality was ok and would have improved with practice, it’s just too slow. I’m trying out org mode for emacs for a while. It seems promising, though moving to something so spartan from mac/android guis will be a puzzle for a while.

Distractions are a fun part of any big project. My current ones are attempting to finish the Stanford Machine Learning class, before my trip to the UK, and the occasional bout of fragging in QuakeLive. I’m surprised by how well that resurrection is doing. It’s essentially the same 10 year old game, and people are still hooked on it. Nothing has or will replace it, sadly; that style of gameplay has been replaced by the spawn of counterstrike, the slower paced and more “realistic” fare. Which I’ll be able to run on my new laptop. Ho hum.

Then there’s the PhD applications due in a few days. Busy busy.