What I've been up to the past few days, other than nervously refreshing polling and sites over and over..
Like Anna I skulked around an abandoned farmhouse yesterday, and found a pear windfall. (Better than expected pears too.) Actually, the farm turns out to not be abandoned, the fireplace had hot coals in it. Been too long since I was out there, and in touch with what's going on.
Found the At Play column by John Harris, full of enthusiastic writing about rogue-like games.
Inspired by that I dusted off my nethack fingers. I basically suck at
nethack, but still dream of ascending one decade. But playing it on a laptop
is such a pain. I tossed together
this script to
let me use the arrow keys with nethack, rather than hjkl, because vim has
ruined me.
Oh, and I've been making salsa with the last of the summer tomatoes, as they ripen.
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By way of Tomoko and Mom.
Effective immediatly --
If you're annoyed by the spelling of something I've written,
I will accept a patch -- preferably generated by git-format-patch,
but diff -u is also acceptable.
Any other communication about spelling mistakes will be ignored, unless the mistake has ramifications that will cause undue pain and suffering to people who are not English majors.
Furthermore, if the spelling "mistake" is that I spelled "-ize" as "-ise", it's not a mistake -- I prefer to use the latter form for obscure reasons, with a few exceptions.
PS, I realise that these are entirely arbitrary rules forced upon you willy-nilly. Teh irony..
Guess it's really been longer than a year that haskell has been on my mind, though not much lately. Things are aligning again. I'll shortly be visiting the Bay Area again -- last time I piled up haskell documentation for the plane trip. This time I'm looking forward to the Real World Haskell book waiting in the mailbox when I get back.
I read and commented on the first several draft chapters, hoping my ignorance would be useful, and I know one of the authors (though if I'm not mistaken I've never met him). So I'm looking forward to reading it, but also feeling guilty that I haven't managed to do anything serious with haskell yet. No new project that I dared, or had the patience, to attempt in it. But that's what the book's supposed to solve. Getting over the gap from a basic understanding to being able to add the language as another tool in the kit.
And hey, it's better than seriously learning javascript would be, right?
Right now I can't think about haskell without thinking about Buddhism. I won't bore you with why they're connected in my head.
I've been looking at netbooks, since indications are that my laptop's hard drive will die again soon, and that its LCD may follow.
I can't seem to find any netbook with a resolution better than 1024x600. I'm used to 1280x768; dropping down will be a real shame, but seems unavoidable.
I'm very interested in a machine with no moving parts. So far the only one I've found is the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which has passive cooling, so no fan, and of course uses a SSD. I'm not completly sold on it though -- its battery is only a 4 cell; its wifi may not be well supported.
The Eee 901 is attractive due to its battery, but has a fan. I'm very noise sensative these days, and the fan would have to be whisper quiet to be acceptable. And even then I think it would annoy me. (Even quiet laptop hard drives annoy me.)
All in all, I wish I could wait another 6 months to a year and see if the next generation improves any. OTOH, I could buy both of these for less than the price of my current laptop.
Spent yesterday at Anna's doing a computer clinic. Camped out in the yurt with a zero degree sleeping bag and a down comforter, nice overkill.
I'm writing a piece of autobiography/alternate world fiction, using git. Whether it will get finished or be any good, or be too personal to share I don't know. The idea though is sorta interesting -- a series of descriptions of inflection points in a life, each committed into git at the time it describes. As the life paths diverge, branches form, but never quite merge.
Reading this would not be quite like reading one of those choose your own
adventure books. Rather you'd start at the end of a path and read back
through the choices and events that led there. Or browse around for
interesting nuggets in gitk. Or perhaps the point isn't that it be read
at all, but is instead in the writing, and the committing.
Up at 4:30 am to fly to the Bay Area, then visited the beach, a posh thanksgiving at Mill Valley (stuffing with oysters in is the best ever). By the time I got to bed in Oakland, I'd been up for 21 hours, aside from catnaps on the plane.