Euler

Allan pointed me to a kickass website the other day. Project Euler is an interesting confluence of number theory, geometry, and programming problems. I have done about half a dozen of them so far. I think what I like best about them is that they serve as good warm-up problems. Often it's hard for me to start on something because I'm not entirely sure what to do first. Doing a euler problem puts me into programming mode. Of course, I'll eventually run out of them, but I do have all my computer science textbooks laying around. Maybe I'll finally have a use for those.

In the interest of having something to attach myself to for Startup School, Tyler and I have been working on getting some basic functionality together. I've spent a lot of time the last couple days working with the new merb and jQuery. My javascript skills are coming along, but I'm currently fighting with creating a custom rich text editor. I have somewhat of a reference implementation in jWYSIWYG, but the editing feels buggy at best. There seem to be lots of focus issues and general UI quirks that don't make it feel quite natural yet.

My initial implementation with textareas was quite normal feeling, but that would require users to learn some form of markup, which just isn't acceptable in the age of Word and OpenOffice. On the other hand, do I really want to be reinventing word processing software in the browser?

*couple hours pass*

Op, better finish this post. Just had minor success in getting my own iframe-based editor to work. That will give me a good starting point this evening to make it do useful things.

Currently Listening: Piggy (Bassland Club Mix)