inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 17 - fixup inferno samterm DESCRIPTION There's an inferno version of samterm intended for connection to remote sam running on unix/nt/plan9. It looks like it hasn't been updated for the latest tkclient interface. Get it working. Simple edits to add samtk.b:/^tkcmds/ and samtk.b:/^cmd/ One of the bigger changes I made is to spawn a new proc samtk.b:/^tkproc/ for each file to handle events from the toplevel chan. This was the quickest way I could think of doing it. It might be more correct to create arrays of channels like those already in samterm.m:/Context:/ but that seemed like a lot more work. I use the idiom of returning the pid samtk.b:711 so I can kill the proc when the file is removed, otherwise the windows would be left hanging around. I added the pid to samterm.m:/pid/ Menus were placed wrongly when middle or right clicking in an edit window. Menu...

NAME lab 16 - set up a styx service for active essays DESCRIPTION I created a readonly unauthenticated styx service for readers of IPN, who have inferno installed, and want to read the lab notes in acme and execute the embedded scripts. From here on I'll use the term canto for active essays authored and "read" (rather to execute or chant) in the Inferno environment. This entry in my notebook is my first attempt of the new style. It describes the files and formats of the service. Mount the service and open acme on the file for this lab. mkdir /n/canto mount -A tcp!canto.hopto.org!6700 /n/canto acme -c1 /n/canto/16/index.txt Each canto is in a numbered directory containing the following files: text the raw contents of the notes in man (6) format post.html the text file converted to html using man2html for sending to the blog. guide the...

in the second post to this blog i talked about wanting this lab notebook to be more interactive, with something like mathematica notebook or squeak project in mind. after reading more about squeak, and thinking again of what i want, i'll try and describe how i'll proceed with this notebook. Alan Kay and Mitchel Resnick have used the term "active essay" to describe a publication that includes computational objects. Resnick describes them as "new forms of narrative expression, in which manipulable computational objects are integrated with text, graphics, and video." Kay in particular stresses the point that the objects in the essay can be deconstructed to learn how to put them together again. The squeak environment uses many visual elements targetted at children for building simulations of ideas they are learning in school--a constructionist view of education for math and sciences. Kay believes the most important use for modern inexpensive personal compute...

been very busy of late (new baby!) and had no time for inferno programming after work. I hope to get back into some kind of routine within the next month. TODO list clean up dsp module and write more instruments try out the alphabet typesets with dsp, tickfs, grids write a general btree module for indexes port plan9 sort to inferno ... Aside from inferno I've been playing with the squeak smalltalk environment. I've been very impressed with this. The morphic interface and etoys scripting is very cool. It got me thinking about how these and other ideas could be transferred to inferno, and then I got into a kind of thought paralysis--I got too confused. another interesting paper I read yesterday was protium an infrastructure for partitioning applications. i wonder if some ideas for session persistence could be explored within inferno. i downloaded panda3d a 3d game and simulation engine with python scripting. wouldn't it be cool to link this to inferno as a new in...