What’s with the widgets?

Ok, I’m a sort of almost a blogger, and I write things that sometimes roughly resemble blog postings. I admit it takes a certain level of vanity to do that. I like to think I’m not being too ridiculous, and I admit that I only have a very narrow crowd of people who even care what I have to say… Most of them are people I collaborate on projects with, or people who look at it to be nice to me… but certain websites in the endless pursuit of, I’m not sure what, are getting ridiculous today. It’s vain enough to put a ‘Slashdot this!’ or ‘Digg It!’ widget on your page, but if you’re ’sort of a big deal’ then I guess that makes sense. HOWEVER, things can quickly get out of hand, and I kid you not, I actually saw this on a real live site…

Great Idea! That’s right, for your convenience, you can digg it, facebook it, del.icio.us it, newsvine it, stumbleupon it, reddit, yahoo it, fark it, technorati it, furl it, ma.gnolia it, embed it in your site, or just spam the hell out of your closest friends. All with the click of a button. Brilliant! But still a little too much work for me.

I’m going to invent my own button. I’ll put it at the bottom of my posts and sign up for adsense… I’ll call it ‘Give Me Ad Revenue!’, and it will do all of those things with one click. It’s honest, straight to the point, and best of all, it saves you the trouble of clicking on all of the buttons individually. How Convenient!

C# Template for GoldParser Builder and the Morozov Engine

I decided to give a shot to creating a template for Gold Parser Builder that implements a C# instance of a parser making use of the Morozov Engine, which is known in the Gold Parser world as the fastest of the C# engines.

Thanks to Devin Cook for making this all possible by creating Gold Parser Builder, and also to Vladimir Morozov for his contribution of the great Gold engine for us C# geeks. (a few of the structure-like features of this template were.. uh.. borrowed from the Calitha template, but nothing really ‘codey’, just ’structurey’)

You can get the template here, in case you’re interested: http://davedolan.com/downloads/C-SharpMorozovNet2.pgt

Updated I forgot to add the definition of SymbolException and RuleException to the original download (it was correct in the version that went to the list, I just got a little happy cleaning up the script and … chopped two things too many. It is FIXED now.

I’ve also added a .Net 1.x compatible version of this template: http://davedolan.com/downloads/C-SharpMorozovNet1.pgt

Don’t even ask about .Net 3, and if you were thinking ‘what? why not?’ then perhaps you should not be making parsers, even with templates

Lock Free Coding Addendum

Ok so something strikes me… the only thing that makes sense in multi client lock free coding is to have a shared, un-orderd data structure between all process elements. This strikes me as a little odd because you have to ensure the thread safety of this shared structure… I’m going to have to read more on this, because I’m now throughly confused… Maybe lock free isn’t the best methodology for client-server paradigms (that don’t broadcast data to each client simultaneously, and must maintain open ‘indexed’ tcp connections) Sure you can safeguard a collection, like the hash structure of tcp handles… but… don’t you have to put them in critical regions first? This is what i get for learning this stuff in my “spare time”… you can see how often I get that.

Comment added After the Fact: I apologize for sounding like such an idiot on this subject, I’m just trying to get my head into the multi-core ready ideas, and I’m having a bit of a time at it… All of your emails and comments are very helpful. So Thanks, and I’m trying, I’m really not as dumb as my (lack of) conceptualization of Lock-Freeness would suggest.