inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 73 - MIDI NOTES I've written a module to read MIDI format files. I needed this because I wanted more input for my software synthesizer. I was getting bored listening to the same old track, and I haven't yet come up with any computer generated music. This seemed like a quick and easy option to get a large amount of music to listen to. The code reads in the whole MIDI file and stores it in memory, using an ADT for the Header that contains an array of Tracks and each Track has an array of Events. I also wrote a midi2skini command that interleaves the multiple MIDI tracks into a single stream of skini messages for the synthesizer (see earlier labs). It sorts and orders the events converting tick delta to realtime. I've been trying this out on some bach midi files . It's been working quite nicely with the organ like sounds produced by the inferno synth. % echo 1 > /dev/jit % midi2skini bwv988-aria.mid | sequencer ... You need JIT enabled when using the sequence...

NAME lab 72 - wikipedia NOTES I've been working on modifying dict to use the Wikipedia database. I mentioned this in lab 70. So here's what I've got so far. It's not beautiful; the wiki syntax parser needs a lot of work The general idea is I want to use acme-sac as a Wikipedia browser. But there are other reasons too, such as gaining experience of using inferno to work on some large text databases. Acme brings some nice things to a database like Wikipedia. Because of the nature of acme you don't have to rely on people making wiki links to find other articles. You can right-select almost any text to search the index. Right-selecting single words often opens a Wikipedia disambiguation page. If you want to get this working try following the steps below. You need to use the latest acme-sac copy from svn. It has some fixes to support big files, including Acme.exe, otherwise none of this will work. Download the Wikipedia database . This site will explain about ...

NAME lab 71 - pruning NOTES I've tried to reduce acme-sac source tree to what I consider the core. I'm cutting out dead wood to encourage new growth. Except that what counts as dead wood is highly debatable. I removed files I tended not to use, but my well traveled paths through inferno are not necessarily going to match yours. So while acme-sac still stands alone, it depends on the larger world of inferno-os for diversity and range of applications. The smaller mass of code is intended to have less inertia. Not only can a programmer more easily understand it all, but he can also make changes system wide and so turn it to new directions. For example, if a new system library were to be imagined that could be applied to the whole limbo code set, the size of the code should not present so much resistance that an individual would not attempt it. This reduction effort started in lab 58. The source from that became acme-sac. The recent "right-sizing" removed a lot of...

NAME software temples NOTES I've been listening to the seminars about long term thinking from the Long Now Foundation. I highly recommend them. The purpose of these seminars is to encourage long term thinking. They succeed at that. For the last few weeks as I've been listening to them I've been contemplating the future of software and the history of civilization. I can't say that I've ever been interested in history. But after attempting to look forward more than 100 years it only now occurs to me what a good idea it is to look backwards far enough to see the patterns and cycles in human history. Some of the seminars are inspiring. Danny Hillis talks about his progress in constructing a clock that will run for 10,000 years. At first it sounds insane, but after listening to him I can't help but admire him and what he's doing. The real purpose of such a scheme is to trick yourself into a different kind of thinking. Similar to the idea of forcing change ...