Arc

(I tried to post this a few days ago, but blogger was being crabby.)

So Paul Graham released Arc yesterday... or at least a first draft. From reading the tutorial it sounds like a fun little language so far. It definitely addresses a lot of my annoyances with CL (although I'm so rough with CL I'm barely qualified to make a genuine critique). It just seems a lot more Scheme-ish... and I love Scheme, so of course I will like it.

I haven't gotten to sit down and actually hack away at it, but from what little I have played with, I must say that I absolutely adore the [... _ ...] and composition syntax. It just makes lines so much easier to read once you get used to them. To give a trivial example, (keep [odd _] '(1 2 3 4 5)) is so much easier to grok than (keep (fn (x) (odd x)) '(1 2 3 4 5)) or the CL variant which would be something like (filter (lambda (x) (oddp x)) '(1 2 3 4 5)). (All those examples should return a list of only the odd numbers.)

I got very sick last Thursday with a stomach flu and spent most of the day purging via all available means. Friday I was still feverish and weak, but mostly recovered by the next morning. Missing work will be a punch in the wallet, but oh well, not much I could do. I spent most of the time sleeping when I could, so not much got done on anything.

You know, I really enjoy writing code in Lisp-y languages. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it's the succinctness of it. The initial release comes with a blog implementation of only 107 lines. Yes, an entire blog written in 107 lines of code. That is short.

Today was mostly spent tracking down these two very annoying Java bugs. It would be nice if the stack trace was at all useful in tracking stuff down. Sadly, I have to resort to sticking in println statements pretty much every time to figure out where the errors are. Tonight I think it will be time to play with Arc.

Sleepy

So last night I got home and napped from 5:45-7:30ish, then was up until roughly 1:30-1:45. At 5:30 this morning, my alarm went off, and I was in the Rec Center working out by 6:25. I feel quite victorious actually waking up early to go be healthy. The only downside is that the showers in the Rec Center are beyond cold.

Actually, the other downside is that I'm not quite adjusted to this waking up early thing either. The sleepy feeling is already hitting me.

Dawn

Last night I went to bed at a slightly early, but mostly normal, 11pm. I had incredibly vivid dreams about being in Spain again, only this time I had to go to high school there. They were very strange. The weirdest thing came at 5:15am, when I woke up and just couldn't fall back asleep.

I got up and had a full breakfast and trolled some news sites. Then I got ready and came to work. I actually got here before the building was unlocked, so I drove around on campus a bit to kill time. At 6:55am I was at my desk, already going.

I am not a morning person, so it was very strange to watch the sun come up.

In completely unrelated news, I read one of the best articles about computer science degrees I have ever seen. I remember being a CS undergrad, wishing that there was more 'real world' and 'applicable' courses. You know, more things like our software engineering class. But now, looking back with good ole 20/20, I can see that the coolest things I learned were Scheme (EECS 662), Operating Systems (EECS 678), and my Kinnersley triplet (EECS 510, 560, and 660). None of these things has direct real world resume value per se, but all of them make me a far better programmer and are far more interesting long-term.

A Break

So I took last week off and Kathy and I headed down to Austin for a little vacation. It was nice and relaxing. The weather was great, sunny every day and in the 70s. I finished both Xenocide and Children of the Mind while down in this little cabin on Lake Travis. We ate scrumptious barbeque, saw a great movie, and generally toured all things Austin.

Coming back to the cold was sad, but it had to be done. Unfortunately my Grandpa had a surprise heart attack and general near-death weekend. We went to the hospital in Olathe on Sunday morning expecting to have to pull the plug and watch him go... but after we did that, he actually started getting better. Now he is alert and they are talking about a quadruple bypass surgery and six months of rehabilitation. I hope everything turns out in the end. He has had two heart attacks before this one (in 1979 and 1987), but this really caught us all by surprise.

I have been pretty worthless otherwise. I pretty much didn't touch the internet while in Austin, except to find stuff to do there. Since being back, I've mostly just played dota or watched movies. I've done some general chores/bills/rebates and spent two hours Saturday on the phone with AT&T getting our download speed fixed, but nothing in the area of Lorebroker or the project with Tyler. At least I have been getting things done at work.

Hopefully I'll get back on the ball soon. Only 129 days until my self-imposed summer vacation. It'd be nice to have momentum going into that.

AT&T Dry Loop Finally

So someone was kind enough to reply to my last post about dry loop DSL to inform me that AT&T started offering their Elite service (6.0 mbps down/768kbps up) as a dry loop package on 12/13/07. So I called the number today (1-800-264-0002 for the midwest region) and put in an order to switch my service over. Since dry loop means no taxes or fees on the bill (absolutely none, due to the lack of a land line), that means we'll be saving about $25/mo. Yay!

Feliz Año Nuevo

So the new year is here, like every year (don't think too hard about that). Woohoo... I guess.

I never make New Year's resolutions, and I don't intend to start that now. I have been very productive so far. Granted, a lot of that productive energy has been devoted to making decks, sorting stuff, paying bills, and just general ilk... but a good chunk of it has also been spent on making my silly code generator at work even better. It pretty much will set up an entire table (in basic form) with a single command. That probably shaves a couple hours of work off each table. Not bad.

Today also happens to be Jys' birthday... que lo cumplas feliz! I look forward to sushi tonight.