bohemian paradise

We had quite a feast at the co-op last night. Jon and Heather whipped up some delicious hummous and we bought a bunch of other stuff (tabouli, marinated tomotoes, ... various other items of a mediterranian flare) from a neighbor who is an organic catererer and had leftovers. Brette donated a neat wheely cart thing and giant cutting board that really improve the kitchen. Then Amol 'remodelled,' moving things around and making a lot more room. We had as a guest Chris Maj, would-be Rochester mayoral candidate on the Demo ticket, and also Jon and Heather and Chris (out-of-house co-opers) and Amanda (prospective member) and a few other guests.

The dinner thing is in full swing now, with organised chores that seem to be working very well. If you remember, I announced a couple weeks ago that I'd be cooking dinner every Thursday in an effort to jump start things, to show that group cooking was worthwhile, something we'd want to do. Well, I only had to do it once before it caught on, with Jon and Heather and JP filling in on other nights. So over the last two or three weeks we've scaled up from ad hoc cooking to organised dinner two nights a week, to now having organised group cooking five nights a week, organised shopping trips, and organised cleanup everyday.

The co-op is slowly moving from 'headache' to the bohemian paradise it's intended to be... (-:

I talked to the landlord about what it would take to get Third Floor Occupancy (i.e. to be able to have people sleep on the third floor/attic legally) and it's much more tractable than I thought. We have to install a fire escape, which is basically a metal ladder we bolt to the side of the building--doesn't have to be nearly as grandious as some of the fire escapes you've seen. We have to install a wired smoke detector system. And then we can apply to the zoning board or whatever. Then we can install the bunk room and operate our hostel. (-: Of course a little insulation and remodelling would be involved too. I also saw a free hot tub advertised in the "pools, spas, and hot tubs" section of the classified, but I was apparently not the quickest to respond. Next time...

(no subject)

We lock our basement door at night, principally to prevent the zombies from wandering up into the house.

Ant Hill "Technical Projects Group"

For anyone who is interested in conspiring on various technical projects, such as: creating a public transporation routing program for ROC, geodesic domes, building a 'SpokePOV', micropower radio, and other small collaborative programming/electronics/engineering projects, please consider joining the Ant Hill 'Technical Projects Group' mailing list: http://splorg.org:8080/mailman/listinfo/projects (archive) There is also an associated CVS archive for real time collaboration on real code.

annoying software

When I was very little and learning Pascal, I had only the foggiest notion of machine code and no idea about linkers and loaders whatsoever. I could, however, write a program in Pascal and then the compiler would magically turn it into an executable (EXE!) file. The only way I could conceive to write a compiler myself was this: To write a program that was really an interpreter, and then, to "compile" some source, I would concatenate the executable of my interpreter and the source to be "compiled." The interpreter would know, when run, to examine itself, seek to the point where its own executable code ended, and find the program it was suppose to interpret. Presto! A program to generate self-running exectables from source code! But it was not, of course, in any sense a compiler.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty much how the Matlab compiler works.