Part of the things I’ve been thinking about is prioritizing the focuses in my life.
This will help me figure out the things I need to do better in my daily life.
Stuff I do:
- Read
- Watch TV
- Veg Out
- Playing Electric Bass
- Working
- Programming
- Going out with friends
- Sleep, Breath, Bath
Stuff I wish I did more of:
- Exercise
- Date
Some how I need to figure out how to get rid of the non productive activities.
So the things I was supposed to get done, didn’t get done. Got distracted by work and other personal stuff.
I really need to get my 2003 tax returns done this week. Cannot keep putting it off.
Also, need to start training again.
Bistro is a smalltalk dialect that runs on a JVM. Overall, it’s not too bad if you need a smalltalk like environment to work in. Alternatives are Squeak, GNU Smalltalk or Cincom Smalltalk. All are available free of charge except Cincom Smalltalk (free only for personal use). I would have liked to use GNU Smalltalk but I could not get it to compile on my Mac. If I really wanted too, I could probably get it compiled but I didn’t feel like it.
There are some issues I have with Bistro but other than that it’s not too bad.
It does have the advantage of letting me use the extensive set of Java libraries out there. The biggest issue is that Bistro doesn’t compile code straight to bytecode, it transforms the bistro source code to java source code. It’s kind of like how the early C++ compilers where implemented by transforming the source text into C first.
There are also some quirks with integrating a strongly typed language like Java with a weakly typed language like Smalltalk. Frustration with writing aSwing GUI was exacerbated by various compilation errors caused by incompatible types. Further aggravation was caused by having to read the java source code text output from the bistro compiler to figure out what was wrong (I had to think doubly indirectly).
Learning Smalltalk has been a great experience for me. It is just one of those languages that I get. Very unlike my experiences with trying to learn ML. In many ways Smalltalk has the same sort of feel as Lisp/Scheme. There is this elegance, compactness and consistency to the language. It’s also interesting to see it’s influence on languages like Objective-C (hmm Objective-C may be as old as Smalltalk though), Ruby and F-Script.
Wish I had more time to play with it. So many things to do, so little time.
Forbes.com: CORRECTED - Former WorldCom CFO pleads guilty to fraud
Hmm I wonder whether they will send him to a minimum security prison a la OfficeSpace. Not quite sure if he would survive federal ‘pound you in the ass’ prison. He would deserve it if you asked me.
If your time format is DDMMYY, then today is 020304. Cool eh!
Obviously I’m too geeky.
Got mucho stuff done today. Lots of cleaning. The apartment is looking better than it has in recent months. I see my coffee table again. Most of the papers on the floor have been filed away. Still have a bunch of work to do though.
Anyway these are the things I want to do this upcoming week.
- 2003 Tax Returns
- Get in a run or two and at least 1 trip to the gym
- Get shoe rack, laundry hamper, swifer wet jet
- Get rid of old books, software and printer
Pretty busy at the office this week too. I’m a day behind on one of my tasks. Hopefully I can finish it on Monday.
Gave my old 5GB iPod a new lease of life. I’ve set it up so that all the songs I’m working on are on the iPod. At a much better quality than normal too. Ripped the tracks as 320Kbps MP4. Sounded great on my amp (Didn’t notice any difference). My music studio (the small area where my bass is located) is noticeably less cluttered now.
Anyway it turns out if your library size is bigger than the capacity of your iPod, it will create a new playlist to hold a selection of your library for the iPod. That’s all fine and good but what about the songs already on my iPod?
So I removed all the songs from the playlist that I didn’t want and was prepared to just reformat the iPod hard drive.
But it turns out that the iPod _only_ keeps the songs that are on that playlist. Everything else got deleted away. In this case, my only source of irritation surrounding the iPod has been appeased.
Beware the Ides of March
Got myself a book off Amazon. Been meaning to pick up some Haskell but was never able to find any good tutorials on the web. Hopefully it is a lot more fun to read than “ML for the Working Programmer”.