the arc of software bends towards understanding
Here is to celebrate a year of blogging. Thank you all for reading. It was only a year ago that I first opened up shop under the wings of Iron Blogger. Iron Blogger has mostly disintegrated at this point, but I’m proud to say that this blog has not, publishing thrice a week, every week (excepting that one time I missed a post and made it up with a bonus post later that month), a bet that I made with myself and am happy to have won.
Some things come round full circle.
As a high schooler, I was a real Windows enthusiast. A budding programmer, I accumulated a complete development environment out of necessity, a mix of Cygwin, handwritten batch scripts, PuTTY, LogMeIn, a homegrown set of PHP build scripts and Notepad++. I was so devoted to the cause I even got a single patch into Git, for the purpose of making Git play nicely with plink on Windows. The setup worked, but it always felt like a patchwork of different components, all not quite seeing eye-to-eye with each other. When I discovered that Linux was able to offer me an unbelievably coherent development environment, I jumped ship and said goodbye to Windows.
Taking a page from Raymond Chen’s blog, please post suggestions for future blog posts by me. What would you like to see me explain? What do you think would be amusing if I attempted to write a post about it? Topics I am inclined to cover:
Since Raymond is famous and I’m not, I will be much less choosy about which suggestions I will post about.
Here at the eve of Spring 2010 term, I decided to run this little experiment on my laptop: what files had I modified within the last six months?
find . \( -path '*/.*' \) -prune -o -mtime -180 -print
The result was north of one-hundred-fifty thousand modified files. Here’s the (slightly) abridged version:
valk.txt, which contained notes for my Valkyrie Nethack character. I made my first ascension on March {24,25}th.htmlpurifier-web and htmlpurifier, courtesy of the HTML Purifier 4.1 release I pushed within the last month. (I suspect there will be another release coming soon too.) This also meant new builds of PHP 5.2.11, 5.2.12, 5.2.13, 5.3.1 and 5.3.2 for my super-amazing PHP multi-version farm. Note to self, next time, exclude the build directories from your automated backups, kthxbai.qemu checkout, in which I attempted to fix their broken DHCP code when the same MAC address requests two different IP addresses, gave up, and assigned static addresses to the virtual machines we were using to demo live process migration. Mmm… 6.828 final project.hackage-server and holumbus checkout, sprung from aborted dreams of making Holombus and Hackage cooperate to have up-to-the-minute index of all Haskell functions. I hear the Holumbus team has been making changes to make Hayoo be able to incrementally update its index.extort, a membership dues tracking application written in Haskell, due to the recent change of leadership in the Assassins’ Guild. During the replacement election, one of the suggested candidate questions was “Do you know Haskell.” We’ll see how long the program lasts…abc source directory, in which I flexed my C source-diving skills and searched for information on how to use the library. I may be working closely with it in my internship at Galois. Curiously enough, this roughly coincided with the SAT solver that was to be written for 6.005, as well as the study of SAT in my computation complexity class 6.045.mit-scheme checkout, in order to analyze their red-black tree implementation to figure out how easily it could be persisted (the answer was no, and I had to write my own implementation off of Okasaki’s notes), and to figure out why --batch-mode didn’t do what it said on the tin.log4j source tree, which I used for two of my Software Engineering 6.005 projects. It was mostly painless to use, and I highly recommend it if you’re building software in Java.wizard (note to self, backing those up is also a bad idea!) Some day, I’ll unleash this software on the world, but for now, it’s usage is growing within the MIT sphere.The really abridged version:
In today’s world of social news aggregation websites, ala Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, it is rare for the sole dialog between an author and a reader to take place on a private channel or on one’s website. I discovered this rather bluntly when I found that a document I had written had amassed a number of comments, one of which pointed out an error in what I had written, and then failed to notify me.
I did one of these for 2008, and it was highly amusing to see some of the goals I had put down that, in fact, I do not care at all about in the middle of my sophomore year in college. (For a more technically oriented one, see “Get PHP to compile with VS2008”… ick.) They are not quite resolutions, because I know enough that to actually get things done I should set schedules. These are tendencies; guiding principles for the New Year. Things to make habits. Things that are hard.
This social experiment has already hit number four Google spot for “Iron Blogger,” and there’s no reason it shouldn’t rise any higher. Iron Blogger is an experiment in beer (well, not quite for me), blogging, and peer pressure.
Since we’re on the topic of blogging, and why people (including myself) can’t seem to do it, we might as well look over the aborted attempts at blogging that I’ve had over the years.