Award-winning virtual classroom

PopTech vs. Rodgab: FIGHT

Confusing event of the week: Rodrigo y Gabriela playing at PopTech. I would have loved to have been there for the talks but then to have seen them play (outside of an Irish pub, which is where I’ve seen them play three times previously) would have hurt my head with the unlikeliness of it all.

They’re completely worth seeing if you get the chance.

Not the reason why I slowed on the blogging front

“no one — including adults — should have a blog or personal website”

It’s true, I am constantly OMG-ing my way through life. Mental note: put off filthy communication!

Minor victories

I’m now sufficiently proficient in Haskell to be able to manipulate large databases precisely how I want to. It makes my job that bit easier.

I managed to make GHCi crash too. I smell my first bug report!

Things to read when you've nothing to read

These are the webcomics I read while waiting for the kettle to boil, or my boss to get off the phone, or for a response to some idle text message… I’ve set up the links to start at the first page of the webcomic.

Starslip Crisis - A sci-fi comedy about museums, quantum physics and longing for that girl you’ve not got the guts to make a move on. Updated daily.
Gunnerkrigg Court - This one is hard to describe, but handily, Neil Gaiman’s already had a shot: “it’s a semi-gothic funny-sweet school story with mysteries and robots and so forth — but I kept finding myself reminded of the early days of reading Bone.” Well worth reading.
Concerned - One thing to do when you can’t draw comics, but have always wanted to write one. This comic is built from posed screenshots from the Half-Life 2 engine. The storyline wraps itself around the storyline of the game quite cleverly, though this does mean many of the jokes are only funny if you’ve played the game.

That’ll do for now.

Using Mac OS X's Cocoa without Objective C

I’m having real problems trying to work out how to interface with the Cocoa runtime on Mac OS X. F-Script, a “lightweight open-source scripting layer” for Cocoa, looks very good and also has a super-useful list of language bridges to the Cocoa runtime. The one I’m looking for, a Haskell-Objective C bridge, is there too. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the examples to work, and the project maintainers seem to have found more interesting things to be doing… which is a shame, as the bridge no longer compiles on Tiger.

Update: Spoke too soon here about HOC - I managed to compile it on 10.3. The trick is to update XCode to 1.5, and then apply a GCC update. Both updates are available from Apple’s Developer website but that requires registration and agreeing to their T & Cs. I’m sure there’s a way to update GCC without going the XCode updating route but I’m not clued in enough to puzzle it out…

This guy used Quartz Compositor to simulate electronic circuits. Compositor’s GUI is what I find most interesting.

Headdress transforms Mac OS X’s built-in Apache setup into a full-blown virtual server suitable for website development, including PHP support. And all trivially easy to use.

A rival

So close, and yet so far! Proxi looks great, and free to boot.

Visual Complexity is a catalogue of graphs designed to show complex (and often domain-specific) networks. Some gorgeous stuff here, though the page itself can take a while to load given the number of thumbnails.

PShell is a minimal implementation of a UNIX shell (in the traditional sense). The barest implementation has no sophisticated features at all, being little more than a wrapper around fork(), excluding the minimal parsing and other stuff.

Hugs, the Haskell interpreter, has been updated. Now it actually works on MS Windows platforms (unlike the previous update, and like the update before that). Huzzah!

A simultaneous change of direction and speed

For whatever reason, my urge to blog randomly seems to have withered. I’m sure it’ll spark up again, but in the interim I may as well use AWVC to post these links I keep hoarding. I wasn’t sure about doing this as they’re mostly technical links of no interest to my friends, who’ve been my readership to date. On the other hand, at least I’ll be putting something up!

Random links are under the ‘Linkage’ category. Technical links feeding my never-ending desire to create my own software are under the ‘Projekt’ sub-category.

Unstructured thoughts on the eternal quandary

On foot of my last but one post, no, I wasn’t promoted - but no surprise there, I’ve only been in my current position six months. What was surprising was the feedback received on my performance after the interview; I was weak in the areas I thought I’d be weak in, but far stronger than I thought I’d ever be in others. Encouraging stuff overall.

On the other hand, I’m turning 30 soon. It’s been five years (yes Oliver, five years) since I last made a serious go of being self-employed, and while that’s still the ultimate ambition I know now there’s far more to consider than the desire to be creatively & financially independent.

As I write, Graham and Myra are touring the world on a two-year journey. At one stage I made a half-conscious decision not to do something similar. I know travel broadens the mind but in a funny way I want to narrow mine - I want to become very good at one thing in particular, which is what I’ve spent a fair amount of my spare time over the last few years doing. Haskell is the latest piece of that puzzle but a large part of me is thinking that if I had a little more discipline and a little less inclination to find some magical means of making programming easier, then I’d have some actual software to show for the past half-decade.

Three thoughts arising:

Graham and Myra seem to be having the time of their lives
Working for myself would be creatively rewarding, and maybe even financially rewarding, but the job I do now is one of those jobs that it feels great to do right - there’s a dull but morally satisfying core to it that being self-employed definitely wouldn’t provide
The past five years have been the best of my life, but that’s all my fiancée’s fault!

Before I forget

Once upon a time I could be reached by email via the quite wonderful oddpost email client - using oliverm@oddpost.com. Then yahoo bought them. While the oddpost goodness seems to have been adopted wholesale by yahoo, I’m still not happy, so the gmail address available via my email link on the top right there is now my permanent one.

Thanks for emailing, oddposters.

30 days in 30 seconds

Since my last post I have:

Lain in bed ill for a few days
Gone deaf in my right ear from said illness, resulting in a very grumpy Oliver for a week
Had my ear ‘fixed’
Applied for a promotion despite only being promoted five months ago
Paid real money for a book on interview techniques, a move which my younger self would have sneered at
Made a fool of myself at an interview (though I think the panel got a nice chuckle out of my performance)

That last one was this morning, actually. Apparently I’ll know in two days. Buddies of mine also applying said it was their worst interview ever too, so I guess it’s not just me. Still, the mental fantasies about getting promoted again were fun while they lasted.