Martin Geisler Online

The summer has gone and autumn has arrived — it’s terrible cold outside these days. And this has made me sick: I’ve got myself a bad throat.

I went to the University today at 8:00 in the morning as usual, but got back already at 10:00 because my head started to ache. So Thoooms and Termos had to handle our group assignment in dArkOS themselves — which they did without a problem, of course. I went home to lie down on my couch.

Some hours later, I started working on the [LaTeX][] code that will become our report for our project in dPaSS. I’ve made a pretty cool document already by teaching the listings package to highlight BETA code. I’ll post the code here at GimpsterDotCom when we’ve tested it some more.

We’re working on your mandatory project for a week now. The task is to program a calendar system using the rather strange programming language BETA. To give your a taste of how BETA looks like, take a look at this Hello World example:

Origin '~beta/basiclib/betaenv';
--- Program: Descriptor ---
(# do 'Hello World!' -> putLine; #)

That was an easy example: It declares a fragment that will be inserted into the Program slot in betaenv which is the top level in all BETA programs. BETA programs consist of a lot of fragments which are inserted into slots in other fragments.

We can complicate things a bit this way:

Origin '~beta/basiclib/betaenv';
Include '~beta/containers/list';
--- Program: Descriptor ---
(# a, b: ^Text;
   l: @List(# element:: Text #);
do 'Hello ' -> a[];
   ‘World!’ -> b[];
   a[] -> l.Append;
   b[] -> l.Append;
   l.Scan(# do current[] -> putText; #);
   newLine;
#)

This will also output Hello World! to the terminal, but this time it’s done by storing each word in a variable, putting the variables into a list, and then running through the list — of course this is only to demonstrate the way you can further-bind Scan in the List pattern. The code in (# do ... #) is executed once for each element in the list, and the current element is available in the current variable. The brackets [] indicate that we’re working with references instead of the actual objects, just like & is used in C.

Programming in BETA is a mixed blessing: there’s a lot of nice things in the language like the way you specify take a general List pattern above and makes a subtype that can only contain Text patterns, but there’s also a lot of stupid things that you have to deal with using various hacks.

It’s raining a little right now and it’s getting dark outside. I’ve just been for a walk in the rain — I’ve found out that a little walk helps me clear my mind. It’s refreshing to go for just a little walk around the neighbourhood of [Skejbygård][]. So instead of just sitting in front of my computer without anything particularly interesting to do, I go for a walk. I’ve even heard that it should be healthy to walk around like that…

Tonight the rain also did its part to cool my brain, and it was particularly nice to get away from the smell of French fries which filled my little appartment after my dinner… That’s the downside of having a kitchen and a living-room without any seperation: It’s hard to go somewhere else :-) But then on the other hand: if I didn’t have my own kitchen, then I would have to do the dishes every night instead of just doing them once every few days.

I had an appointment at the dentist today — it was just a routine check to see if everything was OK. I had my last dental checkup just before I moved to Århus which is a year ago now, so I thought that it would be a good idea to have a check.

It turned out that I had caries in two of my teeth :-( The dentist said that it wasn’t that bad because they were small cavities, so I agreed to have it fixed while I was there. Also, when he said that they were small, I hoped it wouldn’t cost as much as if they had been big and difficult, but that didn’t hold true…

So he had to drill… it wasn’t too bad, and I didn’t even get anaesthesia. I’m generally OK with going to the dentist: it’s a matter of concentrating on something else while we does his magic on your mouth. He was finished after 45 minutes.

I then had to pay for the pain: the bill was $100(!) and that’s for less that one hours work… And then he also gets some money (about $50) from the Danish health insurance. I’m sure that his equiptment is expensive, and that he has to pay a lot to rent his place, but it’s still quite expensive for a student to go get his teeth fixed. When I made a remark about how expensive it was, he discovered that he had forgotten to charge me for the two X-ray photos he took of my teeth. But he didn’t change the bill — that saved me $20.

But now it’s done, and I wont be back for at least a year.

It’s weekend so we’re having a party here at [Skejbygård][], just as we did the week before, and the week before etc… :-)

I’m currently trying to get SørenMarkert to write something here at the WikiWikiWeb — let’s see how it goes.

!!!AERO concert

I’m a fairly big fan of JeanMichelJarre so I was very excited when I head about his plans about having a concert right here in Denmark. The concert (called AERO) was held last Saturday. It was held in the middle of a windmill park and was a tribute to the wind. I wasn’t present at the concert (the 40,000 tickets were sold out when I discovered it…) but the highligths were broadcast on TV2 tonigth so at least I can get an idea about how it must have been to be there.

It looked spetacular on the tv: over five tons of fireworks was lunched during the concert. The songs were remixes of his old hits, he had added some elements of wind to some of them, but you could easily recognize the themes from Equinoxe and Magnetic Fields and others.

But although the concert was meant to be about the wind, it turned out to be about rain also. The Danish weather really showed it’s worst side that day and poured 22 mm of rain down over the concert area. So everything turned into a muddy hell. There was really a lot of rain — I could see how the keyboards were sprinckled with small drops of water, even though Jean Michel Jarre was under a roof. It’s amazing that the equitment could handle all the moisture.

So now that I know about the rain and mud, perhaps it was lucky that I didn’t get a ticket.

I wrote a week ago, that I was at University of Aarhus. But university wasn’t the only thing that started, so did ÅrhusFestuge. We went downtown two times to hear live music: we heard Super Heroes and Loveshop — I didn’t really know the bands, but the music was fairly good. The city was absolutely filled with people, young and old, who enjoyed all the activity.

But there was also lots of activity here at [Skejbygård][], we usually had a party either before or after we had been downtown to hear music. And some evenings we just stayed here at [Skejbygård][], so we had a party almost every night for the last week or so. Night is the proper term here, for the parties lasted until the early morning and sometimes even longer. I usually stopped at around 4:00 in the morning, but others stayed awake even longer…

The parties were fuelled by friends of Christina Strøhl and Jesper Klintø — including Olle Hansen who made a tiny page for himself when I showed him this WikiWikiWeb. Martin Justesen also stopped by a couple of times when he and the others from the party commitee here at [Skejbygård][] came home from the city.

But now were done with partying and getting back to our studies.