"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Thursday 28 July 2011

Random blog post title generator with Polygen

After so many “Test drive:” blog post I sometimes feel that my writing has become too much repetitive. I so decided to have some relax and, with a little of self-irony, I'll try writing a random blog post generator using Polygen. Writing a full post generator is a huge task: as you start decomposing a phrase structure the number of options literally explode. So let's start just with generating the post title.

A top down approach

The top-down approach is the one I find more natural while dealing with a Polygen grammar, so let's start with defining the very basic structure of a blog post
S ::= Title "\n"^
Body "\n"^
Tags;
the “\n” string is a new line escape character while the “^” operator tells Polygen to concatenate without adding spaces (To avoid a new line starting with a space).
We'll set the “Body” symbol to an empty preposition and forget about if (at least for the moment).
Body ::= _;
Titles for “review style” posts are usually something like “installed some-program on some-system”; this can be written, in Polygen grammar language, like following:
Title ::= Action (Program ("on the" Computer | "on" Os | "on the" Computer "and" Os) | Os "on the" Computer);

Wednesday 6 July 2011

What would you do with a HP Omnibook XE2?

Sometimes I bring home old computers like other people bring home stranded pets. I've been given from a friend an old HP Omnibook Xe2 laptop. It's a 333 MHz Celeron based computer with 64MB RAM and a 12'' screen. It was a decent hardware configuration … twelve years ago. Of course the first question that came up has been: “Can I run Linux on it?”.

Wary or Lupu?

Speaking of old computers Puppy Linux is probably the most famous solution. Two version are actually available at Puppy's download page: the Ubuntu-Lucid based “Lupu” (V.5.2.5) and the more traditional “Wary” (5.1.2). I downloaded both but, unfortunately, while testing the distributions in live mode from CD Lupu showed some problem locking the system every now and then. I so went for installing Puppy Linux “Wary”.