Functional programming and Minix

Looking at two things right now -

Functional programming and Minix

For FP, I'm trying to do the Huffman encoding in Haskell

For Minix, I am working on getting fuse based Minix FS to work...Fuse seems interesting.

Fetching contents from the web

Curl is good ... Check this out for details http://sourceforge.net/projects/gotmail

Also, found a Ruby REST implementation - http://wiki.github.com/adamwiggins/rest-client

New web browser

Are we trying to work around unnecessary limitations of the browser when it comes to on-line applications?

The web browser was good for HTML rendering ... then they brought in java script for ineraction and now you have systems that are entirely java script. And, then there are these new type of plugins that try to overcome browser limitations.

Can the wide spreading x86 emulators become the next app execution systems?

Found a graphics rendering library

After spending some time trying to look for ways to draw lines and ellipses,  I realized that this is a deep subject - even without the anti-aliasing complexity. So I decided to use an existing library.

Very quickly, I hit upon libgd - http://www.libgd.org

Now, I think I have all that is needed to build my drawing utility...then do the documentation of Minix and then proceed with Minix....

Font rendering

Font rendering had been at the back of my mind for a long time ... I had managed a couple of automations using the font bitmap found in the Linux sources...

However, it was during the creation of the drawing utility that I found the real need for a more sophisticated fonts...

Thanks to Buzz .. I got the solution -  http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/step1.html

Programatic drawing

I spent most of yesterday doing a tool for programmatic drawing. I chose Ruby for this.

After getting to some point and discussing with a few folks about it - I was not able to articulate the need for such a tool ...

After thinking a little more I realized a usecase - 

A tool like this would help in drawing a diagramatic representation of a structure definition from a C source!!!

Doing it non-programmatically would not be so easy.

Anyway, I also realized that font rendering is a little more complicated that picking up the bitmap from the Linux source.

I am going ahead with the bitmap approach for now ... but I came across a nice ruby library ruby-ttf that can read tty information.

Minix is going fine ... found out yesterday that the tty driver works without the need of any other servers..

This is good ... now I can test the thing out.

Back to documentation ... looking for a good tool for it .... graphviz looks like a good tool for graph.

However need something more for diagrams ... checked with Sita ... he redirected to LWN