NPCT

While I’m complaining about Erlang: why doesn’t Google ever return any hits on the documentation? If I google “perl sprintf” the first hit is the documentation page http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sprintf.html. The same thing happens if I Google “python array” or “lisp map” or “php echo.” If I type “erlang supervisor” I don’t get anything [...]

Like just about everything to do with Erlang, database driver support appears to be in total disarray. I’d like to be able to store data in a PostgreSQL database and access it reasonably well. Options appear to be

Erlang psql driver that is a fork or something of the code by Erlang Consulting. [...]

In my previous post, I complained a lot about trying to get XML stream parsing working. Ultimately, I just decided to rip the guts out of ejabberd, rather than reinvent the wheel. The relevant files are xml_stream.erl, xml.erl, and expat_erl.c. You can see how to use it in ejabberd_receiver.erl. Frankly, these [...]

There’s a lively debate out there about how one should communicate with clients in a game, in particular UDP vs TCP. I won’t go into details about it, but you can read a lively debate here. The choice for my ridiculous game is TCP+UDP. I want to use TCP for various communications [...]

I’ve posted twice now about starting an Erlang project (one and two). I now have a directory structure and a Makefile that I’m happy with, plus some odds-and-ends from my first attempt at stubbing out an OTP application. I’m now going to begin again, with a healthy dose of Chapter 18 from Joe [...]

Continuing on with the previous Erlang post, there have been a couple of developments: 1) Programming Erlang arrived from Amazon, 2) trapexit.org came back online, and 3) I found this awesome blog.
To remind you of my immediate goal: I want to figure out how to organize a large-scale Erlang project. I want to learn [...]

Per my previous post, I’m going to start a little Erlang project. I’ll call it “North Zulch,” or “NZ” in reference to the tiny little place where the family ranch is located.
There are three things that I’ve had to solve over and over (or at least cut and paste over and over), in [...]

I have decided for some reason that it would be fun to play with massively scalable systems. In particular, I thought it would be a hilarious waste of time to work on an MMO engine. I’m not sure why this seems like a good idea, given that I have more than enough on [...]