Strange Loops

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

Chapter 4 Is Slow Going

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Coding and communication theory is going slow. I’m about half way through the chapter (it’s a long chapter though) after having spent 2 – 3 hours on it (including rereading a section here and there). The first 3 chapters I just breezed by but chapter 4 is a challenging read. I need a notepad to read chapter 4 so that I can work out Feynman’s proofs for myself. Trying to read it on my couch is not going to work for this chapter.
See more progress on: finish feynman lectures on computation

Installed It, Using It and Loving It

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Welcome to a revolution in version control!

Installation on my Mac was straightforward. I have a standard Panther installation with Fink and Xcode. To get darcs compiled, I used the ghc, ghc-dev fink packages. I got some error messages with gmp and readline which was promptly fixed by installing those fink packages. ./configure—prefix=~/root ; make ; make install ; and you’re done.


Why do I think it’s so great?


  • Straightforward to install

  • Distributed repositories rock for people whose primary machine is a notebook

  • Simple repository setup (just “darcs initialize” a directory baby!) makes it easy to version control anything

  • Free software GPL-ed

  • Written in Haskell and a Theory of Patches, just too geeky!


I’m not the only person with similar thoughts.

See more progress on: use darcs

Good Piece of Software

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I’ve tried it and it’s a good piece of software. For $17.95 I wouldn’t be out too much. The alternative solution is using Firefox. You can post rich text to TypePad with Firefox but not with OmniWeb/Safari. That is 80% of what I want to do.

I’m leaning towards not paying for it and saving money for a RAM upgrade to run both Firefox and OmniWeb at the same time.


It is a good piece of software. I definitely understand why people like it. It just doesn’t suit my needs.

See more progress on: try ecto

Once More With Flickr

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Panorama Point
Originally uploaded by signal11.

Alright if you view the photo again, you’ll see that I’ve added 2 notes to it. How do you add notes to a photo you might ask? The most obvious way: you highlight the region, type your note and click save. What does Flickr do? Exactly that.
When you view the photo and put your mouse over the photo, the regions I marked with notes will appear. When you mouse over the region, the note appears.

Update: I see how they did it. They used Flash to allow notes be added to photos. I thought they had used Javascript Ala Google Maps. Not nearly as cool but still useful nonetheless.

Experimenting With Flickr

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Panorama Point
Originally uploaded by signal11.

Flickr is cool. I like TypePad but for posting photos Flickr seems to be the much better tool. With the paid Pro package, Flickr is extremely generous with storage *ahem*unlimited*ahem*. The trick is that you have a 1GB monthly cap of photos you can upload. I’m experimenting to see if I should upgrade to the paid service.

I’m sure Picassa is a nice tool but I prefer tools that can run in my browser.

WAL

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German Courses

WAL has a 5 week german class that I could take. Looks like a fairly intensive class but sufficient for my needs. It is in Pioneer Square, around the corner from my workplace.


Ask shunpiker about his experiences with WAL.

See more progress on: learn german

Posting With Ecto

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The 1st issue of Make mentions Ecto favorably. Decided to give it a try. The interface seems fairly complex but not overly so.

It comes with a 2 week trial so that’s what I’ll do.

Boo Scala

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I spent the last couple of days looking at Scala. They are developing some nice ideas with that language of theirs. It reminds me slightly of Haskell and OCaml with it’s typing system. Strangly it feels less restrictive than I imagined it would be. The other nice thing: well written documentation is available on the site. I’ve enjoyed working through the tutorial they’ve supplied (plus it’s only 14 pages long). Super cool….

Boo is another JVM language that has been on my horizon. Python syntax with some interesting extensions (i.e. static typing, type inference).

See more progress on: improve my java-fu