The Hobbit Hole

I’ve long wanted remote access to a Subversion repository on the internet where I could store my personal projects. I thought this meant either using an open source provider, such as SourceForge, or a hosting plan, such as Dreamhost. Being cheap, I really didn’t like the idea of a hosting plan, and I really didn’t feel like opening up my software when it’s not ready for public consumption. I just wanted some place to store backups in case of a hard drive failure, but with the niceties of source control.

Having cable internet, using my own server would have been an option, except for the dynamic IP address. Static IP address isn’t an option for residential customers where I live. I thought it would be trivial to write a service/daemon that would monitor the IP address and could e-mail to me any changes. As I was researching this idea, I found some utilties to do exactly that. “Aha!” I thought, “This would be perfect if I could just have something like this that updated a DNS server, maybe one of those free DNS servers.” Cha-ching! It turns out there is something exactly like that.

Enter DynDNS. It’s a free DNS service that has utilities (an official one and several 3rd party) that can monitor an IP address and update their DNS server when it changes. The service is free if you use one of their domains (choosing your own subdomain). For a nominal fee they will manage your own domain name. I chose the free option, but might go with my own domain if the service proves reliable. So far, this weekend, it’s been great. I installed their software and XAMPP on a local machine. I can remotely access a web server, ftp, and subversion server running on my home machine. There are a couple of caveats:

• I don’t know how reliable the service is yet. It’s worked for 2 days, but I haven’t tested it other than setting it up.
• There are security risks by opening up even a little bit on your home machine. You had better make sure you know what you’re doing before allowing any sort of access to a machine containing personal data.

I’ll keep this post updated with changes as I use the service. So far it’s everything I’ve wanted! If you’ve had good experiences with a similar service, drop a note here to let me know.

I don’t know why I have such a fascination with these little internet surveys. I saw this one at the Digital Hobbit.

So, I guess I’m Elrond. That’s cool. I like him alot. And Gandalf. I wonder how I have to rig it so I get him.

It’s been a good three weeks here at Microsoft. Things are happening. I’ve managed to fix a couple of bugs and get things checked in. The automation here is awesome. Our group could easily pass the Joel Test.

I’ve been somewhat distracted from the game development front, but what I’ve learned will translate back into improved game code, so I feel it was justified.

For stock analysis purposes, I’ve been wanting to port CLSQL to Corman Lisp. This meant porting UFFI (Universal Foreign Function Interface) since it’s used by CLSQL. I have completed the port of UFFI to Corman Lisp and the unit tests that come with UFFI now run completely, excepting union support, as Corman Lisp doesn’t (yet) support unions.

I’ve written a document and it should appear shortly in the pages section on the right. I’ve got to first bundle up the patches and verify everything. I also need to migrate the port to uffi-1.5.14, as I used 1.5.13 as a baseline. None of these should take too long, and I should hopefully have it online by the weekend.

Things are happening…

Edit: Well, the migration to 1.5.14 couldn’t have been easier. It was 2 lines of code and 2 CVS tag updates. Tests still run flawlessly. I love TDD.

Python in Common Lisp. Sounds great! I think it is. And this helps validate what I’ve always thought about Lisp. Lisp is a great language for this kind of thing. It’s VMs are usually state of the art, with native compiling and really fast garbage collection.

And the syntax of Lisp makes this ideal. Parsing a language to syntax trees is like parsing it to Lisp! The hardest part is translating the concepts from one language VM to the Lisp VM, but that can be the domain of language specific macros.