[psoc-2008] [report] Day-0 report - Andrew Whitworth

[Andrew Whitworth]

Today marks the last day of work I have before this year's Google
Summer of Code project starts on Monday the 26th. I'm away all
weekend, and so I need to get my prep work done now so I can hit the
ground running next week. I still need to talk to chromatic a little
bit and finalize details of the algorithm to make sure I'm running in
the right direction.

I've been in regular contact with chromatic about this project, and
he's been feeding me a list of papers to read about GC. I was hardly
an expert before all this, but I'm certainly moving in that direction
now! With school over, my access to free printing and free database
access has disappeared, so I can only hope I read enough.

This morning I created a branch in the Parrot svn repository to hold
my work. The benefit to having a branch is that I can make all the
mistakes I want without affecting the rest of the project. The link to
the branch is here:

https://svn.perl.org/parrot/branches/gsoc_pdd09/

A few weeks ago, I switched from Windows to Linux, and it's been
hectic for me to become familiar with all the necessary development
tools on this platform. I've been practicing my svn-foo, and I've been
refamiliarizing myself with the all-important shell. My editor of
choice, so far, is medit. It's lightweight, provides some basic syntax
highlighting, and doesn't get in my way. I may switch to a different
editor eventually. SciTE, for one, is very reminiscent of the
notepad++ editor I had been using on Windows, but has a few
disappointing feature omissions that make it significantly less
attractive then it's windows-based cousin. I tried Notepad++ through
wine, but the performance was poorer then I could deal with. For the
second time in my life I've tried to get acquainted with some of the
iconic GNU/Linux programming editors: Vim and Emacs. Try as I might, I
just can't wrap my mind around them.

As much as the command-line is the de facto programming environment on
Linux, I'm always more comfortable with a good GUI. My SVN client at
the moment is RapidSVN, although I've been looking at SVN Workbench as
well. I've been bumbling around with the command-line svn, patch, and
diff utilities as well, and will probably have to resort to them on
occasion. It's always good to have a backup.

I've done a little perl work so far, but I haven't developed any C
code on Linux yet. I'm interested to see how that will go. I'm not
unfamiliar with GCC, but I am unfamilar with GDB and valgrind and all
the other cool tools that i'm going to need to learn to use here. It's
going to be a trial by fire, but if school has taught me anything,
it's that I'm capable of learning cool new things like this.