Niall’s virtual diary archives – April 2004

Sunday 18th April 2004: 2.26am. I've had a persistent headache these last two days, on the left side at the front. It could be that I need new glasses - I've been doing that thing everyone who has ever worn eyesight corrective lenses has, you know, trying to look at something and then alternate the closing of one of the eyes to see if it refocuses. Problem is that my eyes one being long and the other being short sighted mean that the magnification factor of each lens is quite different, so it's hard to match them up anyway. I don't like to cross traffic wearing them anyway.

I got the guts of the capability system done in Tn. You can now define capability implementations at compile-time and the run-time support code I've written assembles the proper configuration based on type info at process initialisation or DLL load. This is a remarkably extensible and very flexible mechanism - I'm proud of it. I was just finishing the security stuff when these headaches started, I'll take some painkillers and continue tomorrow anyway. After the code implementing the ability to open capabilities and operate them, it's a very short step to data streams. I already have the guts of user accounts and authentication done, so in theory I should be getting onto the Tn menu system very soon indeed. I'll write TTaskBar and TFiler to test all this new code which takes me tantalisingly close to what I want to achieve before the end of this summer. I'm very sure it'll take longer than I think it will, it always does.

I must get around to booking some flights to London for next month - I'll be looking tonight. Need to pick up gowns and stuff never mind seeing many people I haven't seen in ages. And maybe, if I can afford it, a quick trip to Spain to refresh my Spanish. I have barely any money so that limits things somewhat but we can hope! Be happy!