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+What I'm working on (Fall 2014)
+===============================
+---
+date: "2014-09-11"
+---
+
+I realized today that I haven't updated my log in a while, and I don't
+have any "finished" stuff to show off right now, but I should just
+talk about all the cool stuff I'm working on right now.
+
+Static parsing of subshells
+---------------------------
+
+Last year I wrote a shell (for my Systems Programming class); however,
+I went above-and-beyond and added some really novel features.  In my
+opinion, the most significant is that it parses arbitrarily deep
+subshells in one pass, instead of deferring them until execution.  No
+shell that I know of does this.
+
+At first this sounds like a really difficult, but minor feature.
+Until you think about scripting, and maintenance of those scripts.
+Being able to do a full syntax check of a script is *crucial* for
+long-term maintenance, yet it's something that is missing from every
+major shell.  I'd love to get this code merged into bash.  It would be
+incredibly useful for [some software I maintain](/git/mirror/parabola/packages/libretools.git).
+
+Anyway, I'm trying to publish this code, but because of a recent
+kerfuffle with a student publishing all of his projects on the web
+(and other students trying to pass it off as their own), I'm being
+cautious with this and making sure Purdue is alright with what I'm
+putting online.
+
+[Stateless user configuration for PAM/NSS](https://lukeshu.com/git/mirror/parabola/hackers.git/log/?h=lukeshu/restructure)
+------------------------------------------
+
+Parabola GNU/Linux-libre users know that over this summer, we had a
+*mess* with server outages.  One of the servers is still out (due to
+things out of our control), and we don't have some of the data on it
+(because volunteer developers are terrible about back-ups,
+apparently).
+
+This has caused us to look at how we manage our servers, back-ups, and
+several other things.
+
+One thing that I've taken on as my pet project is making sure that if
+a server goes down, or we need to migrate (for example, Jon is telling
+us that he wants us to hurry up and switch to the new 64 bit hardware
+so he can turn off the 32 bit box), we can spin up a new server
+from scratch pretty easily.  Part of that is making configurations
+stateless, and dynamic based on external data; having data be located
+in one place instead of duplicated across 12 config files and 3
+databases... on the same box.
+
+Right now, that's looking like some custom software interfacing with
+OpenLDAP and OpenSSH via sockets (OpenLDAP being a middle-man between
+us and PAM (Linux) and NSS (libc)).  However, the OpenLDAP
+documentation is... inconsistent and frustrating.  I might end up
+hacking up the LDAP modules for NSS and PAM to talk to our system
+directly, and cut OpenLDAP out of the picture.  We'll see!
+
+PS: Pablo says that tomorrow we should be getting out-of-band access
+to the drive of the server that is down, so that we can finally
+restore those services on a different server.
+
+[Project Leaguer](https://lukeshu.com/git/mirror/leaguer.git/)
+-----------------
+
+Last year, some friends and I began writing some "eSports tournament
+management software", primarily targeting League of Legends (though it
+has a module system that will allow it to support tons of different
+data sources).  We mostly got it done last semester, but it had some
+rough spots and sharp edges we need to work out.  Because we were all
+out of communication for the summer, we didn't work on it very much
+(but we did a little!).  It's weird that I care about this, because
+I'm not a gamer.  Huh, I guess coding with friends is just fun.
+
+Anyway, this year, [Andrew](https://github.com/AndrewMurrell),
+[Davis](https://github.com/DavisLWebb), and I are planning to get it
+to a polished state by the end of the semester.  We could probably do
+it faster, but we'd all also like to focus on classes and other
+projects a little more.
+
+C+=1
+----
+
+People tend to lump C and C++ together, which upsets me, because I
+love C, but have a dislike for C++.  That's not to say that C++ is
+entirely bad; it has some good features.  My "favorite" code is
+actually code that is basically C, but takes advantage of a couple C++
+features, while still being idiomatic C, not C++.
+
+Anyway, with the perspective of history (what worked and what didn't),
+and a slightly opinionated view on language design (I'm pretty much a
+Rob Pike fan-boy), I thought I'd try to tackle "object-oriented C"
+with roughly the same design criteria as Stroustrup had when designing
+C++.  I'm calling mine C+=1, for obvious reasons.
+
+I haven't published anything yet, because calling it "working" would
+be stretching the truth.  But I am using it for my assignments in CS
+334 (Intro to Graphics), so it should move along fairly quickly, as my
+grade depends on it.
+
+I'm not taking it too seriously; I don't expect it to be much more
+than a toy language, but it is an excuse to dive into the GCC
+internals.
+
+Projects that I've put on the back-burner
+-----------------------------------------
+
+I've got several other projects that I'm putting on hold for a while.
+
+ - `maven-dist` (was hosted with Parabola, apparently I haven't pushed
+   it anywhere except the server that is down): A tool to build Apache
+   Maven from source.  That sounds easy, it's open source, right?
+   Well, except that Maven is the build system from hell.  It doesn't
+   support cyclic dependencies, yet uses them internally to build
+   itself.  It *loves* to just get binaries from Maven Central to
+   "optimize" the build process.  It depends on code that depends on
+   compiler bugs that no longer exist (which I guess means that *no
+   one* has tried to build it from source after it was originally
+   published).  I've been working on-and-off on this for more than a
+   year.  My favorite part of it was writing a 
+   [sed script](/dump/jflex2jlex.sed.txt) that
+   translates a JFlex grammar specification into a JLex grammar, which
+   is used to bootstrap JFlex; its both gross and delightful at the
+   same time.
+ - Integration between `dbscripts` and `abslibre`.  If you search IRC
+   logs, mailing lists, and ParabolaWiki, you can find numerous rants
+   by me against
+   [`dbscripts:db-sync`](/git/mirror/parabola/dbscripts.git/tree/db-sync).
+   I just hate the data-flow, it is almost designed to make things get
+   out of sync, and broken.  I mean, does
+   [this](/dump/parabola-data-flow.svg) look like a simple diagram?
+   For contrast, [here's](/dump/parabola-data-flow-xbs.svg) a rough
+   (slightly incomplete) diagram of what I want to replace it with.
+ - Git backend for MediaWiki (or, pulling out the rendering module of
+   MediaWiki).  I've made decent progress on that front, but there is
+   *crazy* de-normalization going on in the MediaWiki schema that
+   makes this very difficult.  I'm sure some of it is for historical
+   reasons, and some of it for performance, but either way it is a
+   mess for someone trying to neatly gut that part of the codebase.
+
+Other
+-----
+
+I should consider doing a write-up of deterministic-`tar` behavior
+(something that I've been implementing in Parabola for a while,
+meanwhile the Debian people have also been working on it).
+
+I should also consider doing a "post-mortem" of
+[PBS](https://lukeshu.com/git/mirror/parabola/packages/pbs-tools.git/),
+which never actually got used, but launched XBS (part of the
+`dbscripts`/`abslibre` integration mentioned above), as well as
+serving as a good test-bed for features that did get implemented.
+
+I over-use the word "anyway."