2010.06.11 19:00 - DSL

The Guardian for this meeting was Pema Pera. The comments are by Pema Pera.

For the first ten minutes I was alone, watching the ever rippling waters in the pond.  At some point Calvino arrived, and stayed put for a couple minutes.

Pema Pera: Hi Calvino!
Pema Pera: Calvino?
Calvino Rabeni: Hello
Pema Pera: slow rezzing?
Calvino Rabeni: Sometimes after a teleport, the viewer just shows the progress bar a very long time
Calvino Rabeni: I think it sends me there, but doesn't show it
Pema Pera: ah, okay, yes, I know the "feature" :)
Pema Pera: I thought you were lost in contemplation :-)
Calvino Rabeni: I was :)
Pema Pera: contemplating a bar . . . .
Calvino Rabeni: But I thought I could do it in the bardo state between requesting TP and arriving
Pema Pera: hahaha, yes
Pema Pera: the bar-do state
Calvino Rabeni: haha that one, while waiting for the "bar" to "do"
Pema Pera: yes, as opposed to bar-be
Pema Pera: another avatar
Calvino Rabeni: The gallery is filling up inside the dome - have you visited it?
Pema Pera: not yet, should do soon, has been a very busy week
Pema Pera: do we have an opening day already fixed?
--BELL--
Calvino Rabeni: I don't recall any opening day
Calvino Rabeni: My entry is kind of "just in time" creation
Pema Pera: :)

We turn to the new wiki, on http://wiki.playasbeing.org/

Pema Pera: I guess the new wiki is now behaving reasonably well?
Calvino Rabeni: I was just thinking of that, btw.
Calvino Rabeni: Yes, but today I discovered the RSS feeds are not active
Pema Pera: I'm really happy that the whole transition went so smoothly, without downtime.
Calvino Rabeni: therefore, the recent changes listed on the home page, appear to be frozen to July 4th
Pema Pera: ah, that can probably be adjusted relatively simply
Pema Pera: June 4th?
Calvino Rabeni: Sure, the adjustment will be easy ... once found
Calvino Rabeni: June that is :)
Pema Pera: hahaha, yes, "in the last place you looked" as they say . . . .
Pema Pera: my favorite expression in the English language
Calvino Rabeni: RIght, and the self-organizing nature of the self-representing mindtouch wiki documentation is not self-comprehending
Pema Pera: :-)
Calvino Rabeni: only the parts are documented, so it's hard to see all the pieces that work together to make the feed work
Pema Pera wonders who came up with the name "mindtouch" . . . .
Pema Pera: the wiki does often seem to have a mind of its own, when I try to edit it!
Calvino Rabeni: one guideline - don't use shift-enter any more
Pema Pera: (never used it :)
Calvino Rabeni: ok, I was advised to do so, and not sure who else does
Pema Pera: (now I'm getting curious to try!)
Pema Pera: (and control-enter and option-enter and command-enter and fn-enter)
Calvino Rabeni: you can figure out the difference, next time entering text
Pema Pera: will be soon! I'm posting the log for today

Alas, I had to leave early.

Pema Pera: but as I mentioned on the email list, unfortunately I'll have to scoot out in five minutes
Calvino Rabeni: Yes
Pema Pera: to get to an unexpected lunch meeting
Pema Pera: sorry about that
Pema Pera: but I've claimed the log, so I'll take care of posting.
Calvino Rabeni: what are your main activities these days?
Pema Pera: recently more astrophysics
Pema Pera: more than I've done in the last three years in fact, since I got into virtual worlds
Calvino Rabeni: ah, what's the topic area?
Pema Pera: astrophysics computer simulations, with also branches into special-domain language development and even category theory
Pema Pera: another branch is doing simulations with higher than double precision
Pema Pera: in fact hundreds of digits precision
Pema Pera: there is a good library for doing that, gnu mp
Calvino Rabeni: does special-domain language mean the same as "domain-specific language"?

This is the technical term that led to the title of this session :)

Pema Pera: when using a couple hundred digits word length, that library slows down by only a factor of a couple hundred, compared to using the hardwired double precision floating point operations
Pema Pera: (yes, domain-specific, that's what I should have said).
Calvino Rabeni: ah,ok
Pema Pera: so interestingly, although Ruby is 200 times slower than C in many operations,
Calvino Rabeni: is that using some kind of metamodeling middleware to do the DSL?
Pema Pera: using 200-digt precision it becomes just as fast to program in C or in Ruby :-)
--BELL--
Pema Pera: For our DSL project, spearheaded by a grad student here in Kyoto, see http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/hakubi/02-proposal-en.pdf
Pema Pera: off to lunch now
Pema Pera: cy!
Calvino Rabeni: bon apetit
Calvino Rabeni: :)