Super Tuesday
Today’s Mercury News says that there hasn’t been a single presidential election from 1980 onward in which California’s primary had a chance to determine the result. I guess it’s easy to forget that people in the 49 other states still outnumber us. But it looks like this Tuesday’s primary will be a big one. I’ve been thinking about what to do with my part in it.
Nu on Linux
Lately I have been working on a version of Nu that I have modified to run on Linux. For now, it’s running on Ubuntu (Server 7.10), but other distributions can be easily supported. As you might imagine, there are several things that make this interesting.
Don't ask me Y you need this (the Y combinator in Nu)
Following John Franco, here is a definition of the Y combinator in Nu:
(function Y (X)
((do (procedure)
(X (do (arg) ((procedure procedure) arg))))
(do (procedure)
(X (do (arg) ((procedure procedure) arg))))))
MacFUSE and Nu
When Dave Dribin pointed out the new Objective-C wrapper for MacFUSE, I took a quick look at its interface. It’s super-nice and easy to use from Nu. As a quick demo, I ported one of the MacFUSE examples to Nu and then modified it to create a read-only filesystem based on nested dictionaries.
The code is in the NuFUSE.git repository at code.neontology.com. To run it, you’ll need to install the lastest MacFUSE and use a Nu that you’ve built from my git repository. Leopard-only.
UPDATE
After Bill Bumgarner released his nifty RuntimeFS for viewing classes in the Objective-C runtime, I decided to try the same thing with Nu. The result is objcfs, a single-file nush script that implements a file system as a daemon. As a bonus, objcfs also shows class and instance method descriptions.
Nuki: Live Nu Wiki!
Check out Nuki, Patrick Thomson’s new wiki project that’s entirely implemented with Nu.
Patrick reused lots of existing components to build Nuki: NuMarkdown, NuHTTP, CoreData, and Nu itself. He also recycled from the still-infantile Nudge, the issue tracker that I’ve been writing with Nu (which has recently gotten some helpful patches from Louis Gerbarg, watch for those to appear in the git repo soon).
See Patrick’s announcement for the source and more detail on Nuki.
Happy Nu Year: Friends and Events
Here’s a little script that dumps the contents of your address book and your iCal events for the past year. The iCal part uses the Leopard-only CalendarStore interface.
Nu Substance and Style
I was recently asked for an Objective-C to Nu conversion guide. That’s a good idea, and although it’s not yet written, I have a few example conversions online that may be helpful. One big one is NuPagePacker, my Nu port of Aaron Hillegass’ open-source PagePacker program. I’ve also posted the git repository for NuAnimatingViews, a port of the AnimatingViews example in the Leopard Developer Tools. That example uses CoreAnimation and required some improvements to Nu that aren’t in any existing release. To run it, you’ll need to either build your Nu from my git repository or wait for the next release of Nu.
After looking back over my code and the glimpses I’ve gotten of other people’s Nu code, here are some thoughts on the substance and style of programming in Nu:
Baking Nu
There’s a new tool in the Nu source distribution. It’s called nubake, and you can use it to “bake” Nu source files into compiled objects. I won’t call it an obfuscator because Nu has a way of making everything open, but nubake can be useful for simplifying Nu applications and giving them a bit of tamper-resistance.
