inferno programmer's notebook

I've been occupied recently with archiving my digital media. I've been copying home videos on DV tapes to hard-disk, ripping audio CD's to WAV files, gathering photo collections, and trying to copy documents from Iomega disks, floppies, and my dusty old Acorn RiscPC. The plan is to have a copy of this data to give to each of my children. My Dad recently scanned and sent me all his photographs of me and my siblings growing up; he also included pictures of himself and my Mother when they met in Africa. With technology today each generation can build a digital library of family history to hand on to the next generation. In the past a family album may have been passed on to only one person. The accumulation of digital data still presents problems. It requires discipline to store files that are open and not locked into devices or proprietary formats. With digital preservation in mind I've tried to use file formats recommended for long term archiving. WAV files for audio, D...

There has been a three and a half year gap in my posts to this blog. In that time I hadn't done any Limbo programming. I've used Acme as my editor everyday, but I was drifting towards using Notepad++ more often. In the past couple of months I've had the time to contemplate doing some hacking projects. I wanted to explore what I could do with Inferno for multimedia file types. This lab was the first thing I tackled in using Inferno again. I had to open up the Limbo paper to remember even some basic syntax. It bothered me that wm/view only displayed images using the Inferno 256 color map. Charon didn't have this limitation and I thought it had something to do with their respective image libraries. They don't use the same code. I extracted Charon's img.b code out into another view tool only to realize once I'd finished that the difference was not in the handling of JPEGs or PNGs but in the remap of the raw image to an Inferno image after the image was load...

NAME lab 52 - text files NOTES Some limbo programs can be replaced with shell one liners, and others can be replaced with more general programs that reduce the limbo line count but increase functionality. I'll look at the few I've discovered. The /prog filesystem exposes a textual interface that allows existing software tools to work with it. This implies I do not need a custom set of limbo tools to read and write to this filesystem. For example, ps is a 61 line limbo program, but I can do the same thing in one line of shell, fn ps {sed '' /prog/*/status |sort -n} This is the great power of Inferno. Simple textual interfaces exposed as files and a small set of software tools working together. Therefore, I can also try rewriting kill and broke . In this case I make the functionality more like Plan 9. Each command writes to output the commands that can be sent back to the shell to actually perform the kill action. fn kill { sed -n '/' ^ 1ドル ^ '/s/^ +...