So, this was rather an unproductive week, unfortunately. I'm completely busy with moving right now (and will be coming week). What did happen is that I poked a hole into parrot, and the community (nine) fixed it. The story: I started my 'loader' script by directly invoking a subroutine. That by-passed the starting of a green thread on the interpreter, which caused a crash when I tried to do something with that thread, such as sleeping. Nine fixed this issue by starting a green thread upon invocation using the api, which causes my tests to crash no more.

So my 'vacation' was a visit to the hospital for the birth of my son. Now that this has happened, my schedule is going to be even more fun. Was in the hospital for most of a week and am now adjusting to life back home. I've been slowly turning my disassembler program into a "library" of sorts so I can call it repeatedly from tests.

Now to write some tests that convert PIR to Packfiles and Packfiles to PACT.Packfiles...

Working on flags and permissions this past weekend in security api. Slow and steady progress. In terms of the timeline I am behind, but I am making every effort to get back on track. Monday should be an interesting day to show this past weekends progress.

Or, the internal Parrot C API. It is open, now. At least, parts of it anyway, and hopefully somewhat limited in scope.

When I set out to write mod_parrot it was my goal to use the 'new' embedding API - the one with all the Parrot_api_* calls. This is a limited API designed for loading and running the parrot interpreter and some scripts. It isn't perfect or even elegant but it works. Moreover, People have Promised it to be Stable. However, because it was designed to be used outside of the parrot runloop, these functions are not re-entrant in a rather subtle manner.

Till now was able to add the function to compute the eigenvalues. Also fixed the segmentation fault in the inverse function to do this has to edit the LU decomposition function to get results of couple of arrays. Now will be starting to work on the implementation of the function for eigenvectors and also try to develop the tests for inverse and eigenvalues functions.

How many days are in a week? Judging from my weekly blog posts, there are 14 days in a week. *sigh* Well, I knew my schedule was going to be a little erratic this summer but apparently underestimated slightly.

Now, to be fair, I'm actually not all that far behind schedule. It might have looked that way over the last couple of weeks, but that's because I tend to hold onto code and continue to revise commits until I have a large chunk of functionality working.

I have been working on the api.c file that handles the functions for the security. Revising and editing functions with the help of Whiteknight and Dukeleto. Right now I am allocating, initializing and freeing memory for the functions as well as integrating the api.c and utility.c files I am working on into root.in. I expect to get much done this week in terms of the api.

And by we, I mean myself, parrot, and mod_parrot. That is simple: cgi-style running LIVES AGAIN (almost, just need to fix headers ;-)). And with it, all the infrasturcture to implement more and nicer loaders, such as those for PSGI and / or WSGI, and the famous inline loader-in-the-sky I will be writing. Pretty nice, no?

For the technically interested, what has happened is that:

• Loaders now accept 3 arguments: the request (as a PtrBuf). This is an opaque handle, that can be used to bind to the apache input / output handles.

This week was spent on fixing the errors encountered basically by adding get_pointers() functions to some of the files in parrot and pla.Then later on started to write tests on the project to check the correctness of the result from lapack subroutines but have to change the implementation of the initial file so that it would be helpful for the testing part.Had also encountered and learned about an error from git regarding merge conflict.

Started the project off with a small problem. Parrot refused to build correctly on my windows machine. In the end I replaced it with Ubuntu to prevent falling behind further in my projected time line and have made little progress. It seems the biggest problem with developing the core for me is Parrots internals and fully understanding them. Whiteknight has been patient and giving guidance. I plan on submitting a small list of what exactly I am having problems with hopefully sometime today so I can prevent further snags. I welcome any and all advice.