I attended a farewell party today. It’s sad to see A leave but he and H appear happy. It’s probably better anyway. Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic….
Work has been busy for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been frustrated by the systems I’m working with. The question I constantly ask myself: "If given the chance to build the same system under similar time pressures, would I have done it any differently?" I worry that my criticisms are a case of hindsight and monday morning quarterbacking. I wonder if I’m also frustrated by how static my life has become. Things change around me but my life seems to stay static.
I’ve thought and talked briefly about designing a programming language. I have enough books on the subject to last a lifetime. I’m pretty sure the world does not need yet another half-assed crappy programming language (YAHCPL). If that’s true, what is the point of all my study? Why not be happy, stick with a language like Java and learn the inside out of it. Why do I constantly feel the desire to experiment? Why can’t I just settle down?
An old friend and mentor seems to be making waves with his blog writing. He claims that he isn’t a good writer but I think it might be a case of false modesty. People wouldn’t care as much if he didn’t write so well. I don’t agree with all his points but I have to agree with the kernel of his arguments.
Notes to self:
1) I’m really liking fastcgi. It’s nice not having to build mod_* for apache. Ooops yeah I don’t use apache anymore for personal use. lighttpd with fastcgi works really well for me on my notebook and desktop systems. Why lighttpd? Read the C10K Problem. A long time ago, I worked on a research project with very similar goals.
2) I’m not sure about newlisp. Being able to connect to a mysql instance in under 10 minutes was a nice change. The documentation looks complete. It’s lisp with some peculiarities but nothing particularly onerous. I want to like it….. Something about it bugs me… I cannot put my finger on it.
3) Try and understand fscript again.
4) Rails is nice. I should use it to prototype more of the ideas I have.
5) Play with Spring more. From my initial 30 minute review, it looked like a nice enough framework. Hibernate is okay but I think iBatis might be a better fit for me.