Status
============================================================
Never mind that three month gap in my phlog entries. Don't
look directly at it.
Anyway, I wasn't taking a break on purpose. I was just
hyper-focused on making my way through a personal tech tree
(like a video game), trying to upgrade some specific skills
in order to accomplish specific tasks. I made good use of
my small daily allotment of time. I kept away from
side-tracks and out of the ditches and the weeds. From a
command-level view of my life, this is surely visible as a
straight arrow pointing towards sweet success and rewards
beyond measure.
The weird thing is that it felt a little bit like failure.
The long, slow grind towards a goal is the right answer,
but it doesn't always have the payoffs I crave.
4974 2773 2066 756e 2074 6f20 6163 7420 It's fun to act
6c69 6b65 2061 2031 3333 3720 6861 636b like a 1337 hack
6572 206e 6f77 2061 6e64 2074 6865 6e2e er now and then.
I just haven't had time to fool around *and* make inroads
on the things I want to learn in order to build what I want
to build. Something had to give and I'm afraid Gopher
didn't fit in.
Actually, I would definitely have posted at least a *few*
status updates to this phlog. (I *wanted* to and I had
ideas for posts.) But using `scp` to upload my gopher
content to sdf.org went from 50% failure to 100% failure
with a "permission denied". Apparently only ARPA members
get scp privileges. Which is fine, but I needed to convert
my 'ken' script to use 'sftp' instead of scp...and that was
just enough of a barrier to keep me from doing it.
Work gave us today (Friday) off and I found myself with
some actual free time with our eldest kiddo in school!
First I took care of some geeky system stuff on my
Slackware laptop. Then I got my Gopher phlogging apparatus
going again.
I even listened to some new music today. I haven't done
that in a while.
Looking Back and Forward
------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the road-map and what I've managed to complete in
the last three months:
1. DONE: Re-learned Perl and have now written a number of
useful utilities with it. I've also learned to live with
its limitations. Once it's beyond 200 lines or so, it's
time for a different language (my personal opinion)
2. DONE: Got back up to speed with Nim.
3. DONE: Wrote 'lf' (stands for "Log Friend") command line
utility which manages my daily log text files. These are
my log/diary/notes which are transcribed from the pocket
notebooks I've been filling daily since 2012 (now on
notebook number 70).
4. STARTED: Learning Mithril 2.x. Earlier versions of
Mithril are my favorite way to build JavaScript
applications. Many changes have been cosmetic, but some
run deeper - see the next item:
5. STARTED: Learning Mithril streams. At their simplest,
these can be used as simple getter-setters. But the real
intention is to enable functional reactive programming
(FRP), so to help me get a grasp on the true potential, I
added another task:
6. IN PROGRESS: Learn FRP-style JavaScript and
streams/observables via a book I purchased a while back:
"RxJS In Action". My paper copy's in storage at the moment
with 99.9% of the rest of my programming books, but
manning.com has a pretty awesome LiveBook feature which
lets you read your purchases online, so that's how I've
been making my way through this one. I have criticisms of
the book, but I am learning this stuff, so it's doing its
job.
7. IN PROGRESS: Learn Flux-style immutability and
uni-directional data flow by learning Redux. This is
actually going really well and I love how easily I can
write my own implementation of Redux in a half page of
code!
> "What i cannot create i do not understand" - Richard
> Feynman
8. FUTURE: Build a JavaScript game. I've started and
stopped dozens of projects like this, but this time I want
to actually get something that can be played and that I can
add onto over time. I want it because I want: 1) A
creative outlet for writing, 2) Something to tinker on, 3)
Something that non-programmers can see and appreciate when
I show them.
9. IN PROGRESS: And as of today, I've added back into the
mix my seemingly never-ending quest for the One True Text
Formatter for notes, phlog posts, documentation, etc. I'm
write more on that in the near future, I'm sure, but in
short it comes down to this: 1) I want to write my content
in an unobtrusive Markdown-like format but I don't feel
like maintaining a complicated text formatting engine. 2)
I already have a very powerful text formatter on my Linux
machine in the form of Groff. 3) The syntax of Troff is
not unobtrusive (enough). 4) But *aha!* if I write a
simple pre-processor to generate Troff output and pipe that
through Groff...
