Zac Bowling’s Blog

One thing I find myself doing recently is choosing languages when it comes to different projects on the CLI. For stuff I distribute or might be seen by other developers, I lean towards C#, but for my own projects the decision can vary.

There a lot of chooses that all compile to the CLI. All of them doing something a bit different then the rest but really not all that different in overall abilities and structure and everything integrates so well because its all the same class libraries and runtime. I really doesn’t matter if its be Boo, VB.NET, C#, Nemerle, Delphi.NET, JScript, J#, IVKM converted Java, (dare I say) Managed C++, IronPython, IronPHP, PHP4Mono, IL (yes even plain IL is nice), and so many more (see http://dotnetpowered.com/).

A lot of this is elementary to most of us on how you can intermix langauges on the CLI but its hard to find a practical reason for mixing of languages in a single project. I’ve been doing just that.

I love using boo for all my testing, its takes less typing and isn’t so strict. Its also so easy to change quickly to test everything in just a little different way. It can get a bit confusing on some stuff but its entire design is premo for getting it done quickly and making it work (as the slug on the site says: “a wrist friendly language for the CLI”). It’s so nice having a language that compiles and runs in a single command because I can script that into my test scripts.

I still believe in writing all my backends in C# of course for all my interfacing and business logic, however for my data layers, lately I’ve been using Nemerle because of the great runtime macro abilities. and its cut and dry abilities for handling collections and arrays.

For the GUI side, depending on the project, I’ve been working on using PHP4Mono and interoping into other languages with SOAP like ColdFusion and Java using JSP and just plain C# or VB (depending on who is going to work on it after me).

I’ve only gone over a few of the languages I use but really before I do anything, I always evaluate the options and the best languages. Sometimes I choose to use something like Python, Perl, Java, PHP (traditional) and even C or C++, but the CLI offers a new level of integration options that really rocks when you are like me and have more then one favorite language.

Resources:

• http://boo.codehaus.org/ - Boo
• http://www.nemerle.org/ - Nemerle
• http://php4mono.sourceforge.net/ - PHP4Mono

As always, I give the general disclaimer, that I believe everyone needs to do a bit of research before making any decisions. This is one thing though that I’m giving you a heads up to check out and not ignore.

I’m talking about the President’s new nomonation of Alito to the Supreme Court. I didn’t have a very big background on him so I did some research. I checked as many nuetral sources as I could find and it honestly has me scared. I suggest you do some research and get involved if you feel for or against. I can see this as getting pretty big in the news and its time now to get involved if you want to have any influence.

EDIT: Got a little flack for this so i decided to clarify. The sources I was speaking about are not the sources qouted below however I do respect these people’s opioins. I used an encylopedia and found some biographies and written statements by him as my sources to come to this desision.

Here is what some people have to say:

“If confirmed, Alito could very well fundamentally alter the balance of the court and push it dangerously to the right, placing at risk decades of American progress in safeguarding our fundamental rights and freedoms.”
–Sen. Ted Kennedy

“Has the right wing now forced a weakened President to nominate a divisive justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia?”
–Sen. John Kerry

I can’t believe I’m going here but here a few patitions if you feel the sameway.
http://www.moveonpac.org/stopalito/
http://www.savethecourt.org/
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/31/samuel-alitos-america

Anyone that doesn’t already know, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft’s MS SQL Server 2005 are downloadable via MSDN subscription downloads. Uninstalling VS2005 beta (so far at 3 hours waiting for it to finish) so I can install the new version in its place.

Yahoo… (Sorta)…

Still waiting on my laptop to come back from Alienware. Going crazy. Got desperate and ordered all the parts to build a fairly cheap PVR using MythTV (~$600 from Newegg.com).

Specs:

• CPU: Intel p4 3.0Ghz
• Ram: GEIL DDR 400 (PC 3200) - 1GB (2 x 512M)
• HD: Maxtor 200GB 7200 RPM SATA (Recieved a Seagate but same spec oddly, oh well )
• Barebone System (Case/Motherboard/Powersupply): JetWay MiniQ 868AV
• DVD: ASUS IDE DVD-Rom
• Video Out/TV Out ATI Radeon/A.I.W. 9600 (AGP)
• TV In: LifeView FlyVideo 2000FM (NTSC /w Philips Tunner installed)

After installing Ubuntu (had a live CD from Hoary and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ to Breezy), I installed all the relevant drivers. ATI Radeon was an AIW and I wanted to use GATOS for the driver but unfortunately, GATOS can’t do video capture in my version of X. Not to mention GATOS tv out seemed to be out of sync with my TV. Installed the ATI binary drivers and they worked (no tv in though in AIW ).

Thankfully I planned ahead and got the FlyVideo out. It was a $40 TV card (not great but it seems that all the super low end and the super high ends cards seem to be supported but very few mid range TV cards will even work in V4L, but I’m guessing that’s because of the time and effort it takes to work on these cards and the limited number of real vendors of the chipsets).

Took some work to get the little saa7130/4’s chipset to work under Linux. Tuners are a big issue in configuring on since the vendor changes tuners all the time with the FlyVideo’s. Had to write a shell script to rmmod the kernel module, modprobe it in with a different set of parameters, run a test to see if I had a signal, and then loop if it failed to detect. After an hour I figured out I had the 39th or 42nd tuner (can’t figure out which but both seem to work) in the list of tuners know in the kernel module.

Tvtime works no problem from the apt in Ubuntu. I tried the packages for MythTV but they seemed not to work for me. I tried to use the last stable of MythTV but it was broken as well. I then tried the latest SVN version of MythTV. Success!

Just for kicks I tried Freevo but it was a pain to setup. I’ll stick with MythTV for now. I’m also looking into ways I can make a basic PVR in Mono using remoting for a backend/frontend communication system. I just wish I had a bunch more time to tinker on this. Works for now but I hope to get back to it.