inferno programmer's notebook

i have setup a demo inferno wiki for wikifs on inferno.

NAME lab 30 - wikifs for inferno DESCRIPTION I ported plan 9's wikifs to inferno. There were various aspects of the application I wanted to learn about--such as, the cache, the transforms from wiki syntax to html, the method for using html templates, and the details of creating the namespace--that it seemed worthwhile to write it in limbo to absorb it all. I also had a hunch I'd be borrowing a lot of the code for my next file system. The differences between the original and the port are small. The one significant difference is the approach to locking data structures. The original uses locks for the Map and the Cache memory as well as file locks for accessing disk. For the port I attempted to avoid the memory locks altogether. One reason being that when the Flush message is received I attempt to kill the proc processing the request, but that might leave stray locks. The f...

NAME lab 29 - embedded graphs DESCRIPTION Taking inspiration from Mathematica 's notebook user interface, I tried implementing graphs embedded within the shell window, wm/sh . The idea being that a scrolling page of graphs, text and images is easier to manage than many overlapping windows. I feel this especially while I'm iteratively running commands, generating data and viewing graphs. The shell window provides a history of activity. By including other windows in that history I can look back at the graphs I generated, what data generated them, what command was used to generate the data, and so on. With overlapping windows this context can be lost. Wm/sh used in this way now behaves as a rudimentary window manager. It is easy to imagine ways in which it becomes inconvient to use. Such as interacting with two windows separated by a large block of text. But it still might ad...

I took a break from this blog and inferno coding for March and April. During that time I've been reading about web services, deconstructing Google's offerings and AJAX , and most importantly reading about the REST architectural style for the web. I like the approach taken by the Plan9 wikifs to offer web pages by first writing a filesystem, then just mount that into the httpd namespace. I'd like to experiment with that approach further to implement RESTful services like del.icio.us . I've been porting wikifs to Inferno to learn more how it's done. I'll post that soon. I'd like to update the Inferno httpd to support HTTP 1.1 and basic authentication. That shouldn't be hard considering Plan9's supports this and the code is very similar.