When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also totally sweet and all thanks to our armadillo friends down south and partially thanks to their publishers, Apogee. I suckered my brothers into giving me their allowance from Dad one time so that we could all go in on a Sound Blaster Pro 16 sound card for the family’s 386. I played a lot of Team Fortress and Q2CTF on that rig. I even attended the Quake 3 Arena launch party that happened at Zoid‘s place. I recall that he ported the original quake to Linux. I also recall there being naughty remarks included in the README.txt.

When my older brother, Aaron turned 16, he was gifted a fancy car. When asked what type of car I would like when I turned 16, I said that I’d prefer a computer instead. So I got a high-end 80486 with math co-processor. It could compile the kernel in 15 minutes flat. With all the bits turned on on in /usr/src/linux/.config. But this was later. I hadn’t even heard of linux when I got my system. I wanted to be entertained by the thing. I made sure to get a CD-Rom and a sound card. I got on the beta for Ultima Online and spent a summer as a virtual collier. Digging stuff out of mines north of Britannia and hauling them to town to make weapons and armor out of them. And then setting out in said armor only to be PK’d because I forgot healing potions and I was no good at fighting.

While I was in the middle of all this gaming, my friend Lucas told me that I should try out this lynx thing that they run at the University of Washington. He heard that it was reported to run doom faster than it ran on MS-DOS. It turns out that it did, but that it was not, in fact, called lynx. Or pine. The Doom engine ran so fast that the video couldn’t keep up. This was probably because they didn’t use double buffering for frame display, since they didn’t want to waste the time maintaining and switching context. I think I downloaded the boot/root 3.5″ disk pair and was able to get the system to a shell with an on-phone assist from the Rev. I then promptly got lost in bash and the virtual terminals (OMG! I GET SIX CONSOLES!?) and bought a book on the subject. It shipped with slackware. Which I ran. Until Debian came along. Lucas also recommended that I try out this IRC thing, so I did. And I’m still doing it on #linpeople just like I did back then.

I learned to write Pascal on dos. Then I learned c while they were trying to teach me c++. I learned emacs and vi when I was attending North Kitsap High School. I learned sed and only a little awk when I took Running Start classes in Lynnwood at Edmonds Community College and perl & x.509 while attending Olympic Community College and simultaneously jr-administering Sinclair Communications. I studied TCP/IP, UNP, APUE, C and algorithms & data structures while preparing for an interview with a company whose CEO claimed to have invented SCSI. I learned PGP and PHP while writing web-based adware for this company. I didn’t want to write ads and instead wanted to work in security, so took a job with Security Portal. While there, I wrote what one might call a blogging platform. It worked and made it possible for authors to write prose and poetry. Editors didn’t have to manage a database in order to review and publish the posts that were “ready.” Everyone but me was able to avoid html and cgi.

Then I sold pizza. Then I helped bring the bombay company onto the interwebs using the Amazon ECS (now AWS) platform. Then I helped support MaxDB. Then I helped develop and maintain the Amazon blogging platform. And then attempted to reduce the load on the Amazon pager system by doing and enforcing code reviews. It turns out that they prefer to run their support team at full bore and a load average of 16.

I am now, still, fully employed in an effort to make hard things possible. The hard thing we’re working on now is the implementation and ongoing operations of distributed x.500 infrastructure. This includes request handling, processing and delivery of response (à la HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, SIP, RTP, RTSP, OCSP) including authentication, authorization and auditing (AAA) of all transactions. It’s a hard thing to get right, but our product development team gets it right. Consistently and reliably. We make mistakes sometimes (sorry Bago), but we correct them and make the product better.

I’m the newest member of an R and d team (note: big R, little d) called NTR, which sits behind the firewall that is Product Development, out of production space. In a manner that reminds me of Debian Testing. We try new things. Our current project is to allow users to compare their current (cloud-based or iron-based) IT system with what their system would be like with a BIG-IP in front of it. I can probably come up with a demo if anyone’s interested in checking it out. I’ll go work on that now.

I’m also hosting it on my own not-as-l33t git repo:

http://git.colliertech.org/?p=mcs.git;a=summary

Does this mean that I get a “cooler than Miguel” tee shirt?

Last Tuesday, Miguel contacted me and asked that I chat with Michael Hutchinson about possibly taking up a different project. It seems that the group did not have any mentors who felt comfortable mentoring the Perl6 project. After a bit of consideration, I agreed to modify my application and take up a project to revive the regular expression compiler from 2.2.

Today, the project was officially accepted, and I met with my mentor for the first time (hi Rodrigo!).

I will also be working with Matthew Wilson (aka @diakopter), since he has purportedly implemented a number of regex-to-IL compilers ;) He also offered to mentor me if The Perl Foundation had accepted my application, and since he has already implemented a perl6 compiler in javascript, I have been looking forward to poking some code with him.

Although the GSoC doesn’t officially get started until 5/24, I’m making a git-svn checkout now. I’ve always committed the code directly to svn, but I’ve enjoyed working with git, and it seems about time to start contributing via git-svn. It will be easier to have local branches this way, too.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to it ;)

Install MonoDevelop

$ sudo apt-get install monodevelop libgtk2.0-cil-dev

Start MonoDevelop

It’ll be in your GNOME application menu under Applications->Programming->MonoDevelop

Create a new Gtk# Project

Create New Project

Select Gtk# 2.0 Project

Select Project Features

Hello World

Run project

You can run this boilerplate by pressing Ctrl-F5

Using the Designer

Double-click on the file named MainWindow.cs in the Solution section. When the file opens, click the Designer button below the code view.

The Designer

The Toolbox

To add the Toolbox, press Alt-Shift-B or click View->Toolbox.

Drag a VBox widget from the Toolbox to the main window.

Add VBox

Drop a Menu Bar widget into the top cell of the VBox, and a Statusbar into the bottom.

Insert Menu and Status Bar

Properties grid

Drop a Button widget into the middle cell of the VBox.
Add the Properties grid from the View menu (Alt+Shift+P or View->Properties).
Select the new button by clicking on it.
In the Properties grid, expand the Button Properties section and click the value of the Label field. Delete the default content and replace it with a different string.

Button with new Label

Adding a Click handler

Select the button in the Designer view
In the Property grid, select the Signals tab
Click twice on the text in the column to the right of the Clicked and replace Click here to add a new handler with MyButtonClickHandler

Add a click handler

Click on the Source Code button below the viewer window to switch to the C♯ code. You can use the find tool to search for the new handler you created, called MyButtonClickHandler. Ctrl-F will bring up the find dialogue.

Browse to click handler

Add some code to update the status bar.

	protected virtual void MyButtonClickHandler (object sender, System.EventArgs e)
	{
		var contextId = this.statusbar1.GetContextId("clicked");
		this.statusbar1.Push(contextId, "Clicky-Clicky" );
	}

Click handler code

Modify button layout

The size of the running window is a little weird. I fixed mine by un-setting the Auto Size boolean and setting the Expand and Fill in the Box Child Layout section of the Properties grid.

Button layout changes

Exercise button click handler

Run your application with Ctrl-F5 and click on the button. You should see the new string show up in the status bar at the bottom left of the window.

Not yet clicked

Clicked + Status update

Add Menu items

Create File Menu Entry

Create File->Quit Menu Item

Add Quit event handler

Add Clear Statusbar Activate Handler

I’m not just sitting on my hands while this happens. I’ve been working with Ivan, Ankit, Dino and Michael to get the next version of the package put together. I’m currently merging Ivan’s latest branch into the changes I’ve made for DFSG compliance. Dino recommended that the next release include IronRuby 1.0 and IronPython 2.6.1, which should be released by upstream around the middle of April.

Ivan and I put a couple of Hudson instances up recently that you can reach via hudson-windows.colliertech.org and hudson-linux.colliertech.org. The linux instance is dropping new builds of IronRuby to http://dlrci.colliertech.org/ironruby/. I expect we can tweak the build script a bit and have it also produce IronPython builds. This would hypothetically drop the builds to http://dlrci.colliertech.org/ironpython/.

Ivan mentioned that we may get CNAME records which would activate the windows-builds.ironruby.net and linux-builds.ironruby.net hosts as well.

Note that these builds are being produced from the linux branch of git://github.com/casualjim/ironruby.git

Thanks for your work on this, Ivan!

So. Later ;)

P.S., can you believe that nobody registered a11y.com before now? Crazy talk.

P.P.S., does anyone out there in gnome land have a ruby app they want to test for compatibility with IronRuby?

Install Mono

You can grab the Mono .dmg from go-mono.com. This will install the framework and put the required programs (mono, xbuild) in your PATH.

Fetch the IronRuby source

Since Jim Deville likes macs, I’m sure more recent versions will work, but this is the one we’ve recently packaged up for Debian and tested on Ubuntu. If you want to be certain that the IronRuby code you write on Debian works on OS X, then you should probably build from the same version of the source. You should probably also install version 2.4.3 of Mono, but that may be more effort than it’s worth ;)

http://github.com/mletterle/ironruby/tarball/20090805+git.e6b28d27

Unpack the tarball

Open up a terminal and unpack the thing you just downloaded:

$ mkdir ~/src/
$ cd ~/src/
$ tar xfz ~/Desktop/mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2.tar.gz
$ cd mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2/

Build IronRuby

At this point, you should be able to build the IronRuby assemblies using xbuild. I don’t recommend using rake, as it has some dependencies, and I’m not a fan of dependencies.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false Merlin/Main/Languages/Ruby/Ruby.sln
<snip/>
Build succeeded.
	 2817 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:28.8378230

Run the IronRuby interactive interpreter

Our guest mentioned that he was using a terminal with a white background. Do note that the font color of the interactive interpreter (aka Read-Eval-Print Loop or REPL) is white, so if you’re using a white background, you might want to change it. IIRC, there is a way to change the font color using a configuration setting. Figuring it out is left as an exercise for the reader.

$ mono Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ir.exe
IronRuby 0.9.0.0 on 2.6.3 (tarball Wed Mar 10 18:18:12 MST 2010)
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

>>> 1+2
=> 3
>>> exit()

Extra credit: IronPython

The tarball you downloaded also included the source to IronPython. The procedure to build/run IronPython is pretty similar to IronRuby.

Build IronPython

Unlike IronRuby’s .sln, this version of IronPython’s .sln does not have a default configuration parameter, so we need to specify it with the /p:Configuration=Debug argument.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false /p:Configuration=Debug Merlin/Main/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.sln
<snip/>
	 69 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:38.8057450

Run the IronPython interactive interpreter

IronPython has a REPL interface like IronRuby’s. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, here’s an example.

$ mono .//Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ipy.exe    
IronPython 2.6 Beta 2 DEBUG (2.6.0.20) on .NET 2.0.50727.1433
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1+2
3
>>> ^D

Kudos for this release go to Jo Sheilds (package sponsorship & mentoring), Mirco Bauer (package sponsorship & mentoring), Matthias Klose (IronPython package review), Ivan Porto Carrero (IronRuby build/test support), Michael Letterle (IronRuby build/test support), Jim Deville (IronRuby build/test support), Jimmy Schementi (upstream point of contact @ Microsoft), Dino Viehland (IronPython build/test support), Michael Foord (IronPython build/test support), Marek Safar (mono c# compiler support), Ankit Jain (xbuild support), the folks on OFTC’s #debian-cli, Freenode’s #ironruby and GimpNet’s #mono, and the folks on the IronRuby and IronPython mailing lists.

This is my first package in Debian, too. I’m pretty ecstatic ;)