All Over Everywhere

Tagged as Hardware, Linkpost, Personal, Programming

Written on 2009-04-02 20:31:30

This week has ended up being pretty nice, if off the wall. Teresa and I were getting locked into an apartment over at the Aventine at Ashford. I'm also beginning to dig into Financial Aid applications for 2009-2010 and preparing for all the schoolwork I've got to do in April. Oh, and before I beat you with them I might as well warn you that this is another linkpost.

I'm planning on doing some hacking with a friend this weekend and was looking at data structures on Wikipedia, primarily Radix Trees and Tries(Prefix Trees).

Looking at which languages had libraries already, I found that Haskell's ByteString-Trie was written by a fellow named wren ng thorton. I chased a few links and stumbled on wren's livejournal where I read my favorite thing since the Minimal Social Compact. I may not be smart enough to follow every thread in there but I'm smart enough to know that his thoughts resonate and I wish wren the best of success. I really enjoyed Objects are a Big Pile of Fail too but for different reasons.

Speaking of Haskell, Conal Elliott's blog hosted a really good discussion on what portability means in terms of semantics, GHC 6.10.2 was released and the Haskell-Platform Mailing List put out a call for volunteers to help Duncan and Dons et al help get it out the door. You can say a lot of things about that language but you can't say it doesn't have momentum. Mmmm.

That other language I'm fond of has had some fun developments recently. It's not a huge deal necessarily but there's an interesting article by Slava Pestov on implementing a SmallTalk front end to Factor's VM. That's good fun.

Yesterday was eventful. I fixed some drywall and got a book in the mail. I'm rather excited about it. Its called The Elements of Computing Systems and between the book and companion web site (see: study plan), you'll build a computer from top to bottom out of NAND gates. A minimal Operating System implemented in a High Level Language, implemented on a VM, implemented on an Assembler, implemented on Machine Code, implemented on a specific Computer Architecture, implemented from Chips and Gates on whatever substrate proves suitable. Beneath that, of course, is Physics.

Also, it's been a long time since I was regularly checking Anandtech but when Anand keeps kicking out awesome articles about SSDs and the development of breakthrough graphics products I've gotta keep checking in for more. Keep it up, Anand! He's also managed to turn me into an OCZ Vertex fanboy.

Last but not least, it's important that somebody tell the Music Industry (and the Content Industry as a whole, actually) to bug off but I'm not sure that Charlie Nesson would be my first choice for the job. That said, it's important that somebody is trying to do it and I at least appreciate his goal of turning Copyright into a matter which people actually think about. We'll see what happens.

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