Sub Ubi

Along with sketching out an explicit group development process, we discussed several other aspects of our project’s organization. As these were relatively straight-forward things, I’ve grouped them all here.

Wrappers

A ‘wrapper’ is what makes it possible to run the Transterpreter on a new platform. That is, cross-compiling the interpreter for a new architecture is boring and easy. Connecting up the language to the hardware (or underlying operating system) is the interesting bit, and the wrapper is where we do that work.

Up until now, we have typically done wrapper development in branches. However, this is difficult, as it means each wrapper developer must constantly be merging the trunk back into their branch. This is silly, as most of our wrappers we want to remain current, and take advantage of any improvements in the trunk.

So, moving forward, we’re going to try and keep wrapper development in the trunk. Because wrappers are mutually exclusive, we don’t have to worry about one adversely influencing the other, and it will make it easier for us to make sure that changes that help one branch doesn’t hurt another (eg. using buildbot and cross compilers).

This requires us to be a bit more vigilant about…

Tagging

Up until now, we’ve been rather lazy about tagging. As a group, we need to start tagging more often. This might be by deciding on features that should go into milestones, or perhaps through an ad-hoc democratic process, where someone suggests that we tag, and the group agrees (or disagrees) that it is a good time to do so.

This is an area that requires more discussion, but it is clear that the project could do with more versioning and tagging, providing snapshots of known good/stable points.

Libraries

Adam has been doing a lot of work at making libraries for occam-pi cross-runtime buildable. By this, I mean that we have a situation where we have two runtimes (CCSP and the Transterpreter), each which are capable of different things. For example, the interpreter will always be smaller, and therefore more portable to more (embedded) platforms. Unfortunately, if I had developed a C library with occam-pi bindings, it was virtually impossible to use it from both the Transterpreter and the CCSP (KRoC) runtime.

Adam’s work has brought us into a world where we can easily build such libraries for either runtime from the same source with minimal effort. This is excellent, and we’ll be converting all of our libraries to use this new build system over time. Which, brings me to the last bit…

Build systems

Some time ago, I explored the use of Scons as a build system. It represents a spike, and can build the Transterpreter for Linux, Mac (PPC and Intel), the MSP430, and Windows.

However, it’s a bit ugly. It represents my first time working with Scons, and it could be better. Also, we discovered that mingw provides an environment that lets us easily build everything using our Autotools-based environment. So, whereas we thought the Scons build would improve things across the board, it’s not clear that it’s a 100% necessary improvement.

Either way, we’re going to bring Scons into the trunk, and play with it. Because it is completely orthogonal to the Autoconf/Automake build system, it can’t hurt. However, we’re going to be looking at this closely over the next few months, as one of them has to go, and we definitely want our build system to be cleaner/better organized/simplified greatly. If that means using Scons, great. If it means revamping our existing system, great.

Up next…

Those are reasonably straight-forward changes coming down the pipe; as a side effect of these things, we’ll likely do some branch cleanup and repos reorganization. As the time comes for these things, they’ll be discussed on the development list.

The last thing I’ll talk about is a project mission statement and project goals. That’ll come later this week.

So, the first of our diaspora updates involves making our development process more explicit. While our group has, largely, worked this way already, it hasn’t been explicit. This had a lot to do with the fact that the entire team was housed in the same suite of offices at the University of Kent. Now, things have changed.

The first document I want to introduce you to is our development process. We’ve attempted to keep this as short and simple as possible. We want just enough process to keep us moving forward harmoniously, but not so much that developing on the Transterpreter is notfun. Given that we hope that students interested in concurrency, embedded systems, and other cool stuff like that will want to get involved, we also wanted the process to be heavy enough to provide some structure and be pedagogically valuable, but light enough so as not to get in the way of (say) an enjoyable final-year project.

So take a look, and join the development mailing list if you want to discuss it.

Arguably, with respect to England, I’m now the Western Front. That is, last week, I moved from the UK back to my native land of the USA. Kinda sad, really; it’s hard to find cask-conditioned, top-fermented ales in the USA.

On Friday, July 20th, we went ahead and had a group meeting discussing many aspects of the project. Over the next few days, I’ll describe the various parts of that discussion to inform the development list as well as provide a partial record of what we came up with.

To me, the most important part of the discussion was our agreeing some working patterns that we can document and adhere to as a distributed group. As a result, this should make it much easier for new developers to get involved and feel “at home” in the project. This has been missing so far, largely because we were all in adjacent offices for the first few years of the project. That, now, has changed.

I’ll try and do one of these every morning. Admittedly, I’m on vacation right now, but I’m also jetlagged. Or, something… I’m still going to bed around 10PM and waking up around 6AM, which means that I have a few quiet hours in the morning to think and write things like this. We’ll see. Either way, keep an eye on this space, or watch the mailing lists, as I’ll announce the posts in this series to the list, as we (as a group) think they matter.

Hi Ron,

Now that we’re going to see you in a day or two, I thought I’d post a link to a few more graduation pictures so that you might enjoy them. As usual, if you’d like to pass on the link to Carrie’s Mom and Dad, that would be great. I think Mary gets a kick out of finding out about what we’re doing through you.

Cheers,
Matt

PS. This isn’t actually an email, as you know, it is a weblog post. I guess it’s a weblog post in the form of a personal email, but other people will, perhaps, enjoy the graduation photos just the same.

As part of moving away, I need to nuke the machines in my office. That is, I need to wipe their hard drives completely. (Well, I don’t have to, but I might as well. I have no idea what will happen to them next, after all.)

DBAN (Derik’s Boot and Nuke) is the tool I decided to use today, and it does the job nicely. You burn a CD, drop it in the machine, restart it, and then tell the software to destroy the contents of the hard drive. Very handy.

On Monday, I dropped off everything for shipping to the US. £679, and it might arrive sometime around November.

And then I discover this site.

Urm.

As I’m apt to say, “it’s just stuff.”

I’ll be in Wales through Tuesday. Pictures from my graduation (this past week) and Carrie’s (this coming Monday) will follow that trip.

In the meantime, you can reach me via my US SkypeIn number, or you can call/SMS my UK mobile number direct.

There are many people who take off in hot-air balloons… but how many people do it in a lawn chair? One in a billion?

Would I do it? In truth, I don’t know. I want to fly a paraplane or similar someday, because I think that the idea of piloting a low-power, low-altitude, sport craft is just great. I’ll probably have to settle for an R/C glider in the meantime, assuming I genuinely want to set aside time (and budget) for the hobby. But regardless, getting into the air is something I think I’ve always wanted to do… but I’ve never really done anything about.

Perhaps I’ll start collecting balloons.

There’s this odd thing about how PhDs work in the UK.

I wrote my dissertation, which like in the US involves a process of pain, self-loathing, loathing for everyone around you, and a general malaise that permeates everything you do. (Actually, I kinda liked my writeup, but there were some really grim moments near the end.) Once the dissertation is done, a lot of paperwork happens, and then a copy is sent to your internal examiner and your external examiner.

After about three months (in a properly handled process), you have your viva. This is your oral defense. Mine lasted two hours; for some people, it can last far, far longer. (Some friends here at Kent had defenses that lasted 4, 5, even 6 hours.) This is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the work—it could be the personality/nature of the examiners, and so on.

At the end of the defense, a decree is made: no corrections, minor corrections, or major corrections. At that point, you’re (apparently) done… sorta. I mean, I had minor corrections (which took six hours to do), but after the viva they said “Congratulations, Doctor!” However, I wasn’t really done.

After you submit your corrections for approval, you have to get two copies of the dissertation bound for the University (£50 each), and do a bit more paperwork. And even after doing that, I wasn’t (apparently) Dr. Jadud. You see, I had not yet graduated.

This involves walking across a stage and receiving a piece of paper.

But paper, in Britain, is very important. Entire nations, I believe, were conquered by this tiny island nation through the strategic use of paperwork. So, this Wednesday, I officially graduate, put on the funny gown and hat (we’ve got a great hat), and graduate. This is convenient, because I’m tired of having to request letters from the department officially explaining all of this to people who want to offer me jobs.

A home-made cake topper that now lives on my office wall.

In the meantime, though, we’ll be having a bit of a gathering this weekend, and it will involve the fine brews of the Hopdaemon Brewery. If you are ever in the southeast of England, and have the opportunity to sample something brewed by Tony, the Master Brewer at Hopdaemon… you should.