It’s been quite a while since I posted anything, so I thought I’d give you an update on what I’m working on. School is still a major time sink, so I don’t know when any of these things will be finished.

This Website

Wait, WordPress 3.3.1 is out already? My ancient custom theme only works on an ancient version of WordPress, so it’s about time for a new one. I have a design in mind, but I haven’t started building it yet.

Opera Extensions

The latest Opera 12.00 snapshots have a vastly improved Tabs and Windows API. Tab Vault was made when said API sucked (as of Opera 11.62, it still does). I’ve rewritten much of the backend code to be able to take advantage of the new features. Now I’m waiting for the bugs in the new API to get fixed.

Transcriptions

I’m currently about 2/3 done transcribing βίος-δ (Bios-delta) from Guilty Crown. I may attempt to transcribe the piano version of Light My Fire from Shakugan no Shana Final next, though the only available audio clips I have are from the show with people talking over the song. (If anyone can help me find all the episodes and times where the song is played, that would be most helpful!)

GlassCalc 2

So, it turns out writing a parser is hard. Who knew?  My new plan is to use ANTLR to generate a parser. I now have a mostly-working grammar based on a grammar for Python. It doesn’t yet understand that 2 x y should be evaluated as 2*x*y, but I may insert the multiplication operators before sending the expression to the parser (as I’m already doing in GlassCalc 1.x) because making the parser recognize this seems to require backtracking, which is slow. Given the computing power of modern computers and that the average expression isn’t very long, (compared to say a C++ source code file) this slowdown might not make much a difference.

I am also trying to balance power with ease of use in the new syntax. For example, can the value of a variable be a function? If not, (x + 1)(x + 2) would evaluate to x2 + 3x + 2 as it has in GlassCalc 1.x. If so, it would mean “try to call the result of (x+1) as a function and pass x+2 as the only argument”. At the moment, I’m leaning towards functions not being able to be stored as variable values, as I think the alternative is very powerful, yet very confusing.