eighty-twenty

I started this afternoon wanting to get some hacking done on our Jukebox code, which is written using MzScheme’s web-server, but I’ve been pretty thoroughly distracted: first by the notion of using postgresql instead of flat-files for the Jukebox database, leading to my earlier scheme-pg post, and then by the desire to move the 8020 site over to darcs from tla, which led to exploring a chain of recursive dependencies. The arch2darcs program requires the missingh library, which in turn needs Cabal; so I decided the path of least resistance was upgrading to ghc 6.4.1, which seems to involve building from source when working on MacOS X. The build somehow caused make to spin endlessly (or at least it was giving no visible signs of progress), and I’ve given up on the whole line of investigation and am going back to the relative safety of working on the Jukebox itself.

So back to the Jukebox: over the last three weeks I’ve had an opportunity to teach myself basic JavaScript and AJAX techniques. Paul’s new Jukebox code uses nevow’s “livepage.py” features, which make a great substrate for a good Jukebox user-interface, with queue- and volume-updates broadcast to connected clients, and I’m thinking of adapting the existing Jukebox to do something similar using my new JavaScript skills.