Done last month (20160228Su - 0229Mo)

[mdlbear]

It's only been two days since my last "done" post, but I wanted to finish off the month, and in any case it's been a fairly eventful couple of days.

Lots of Linux configuration stuff (and more today), much of it triggered by the hard drive to SSD upgrade I did on my laptop. Tweaking is still ongoing, but mostly it's done (for example, I'm posting from it). And Sunday I nailed a configuration problem (having to do with locales, but showing up only as inability to start gnome-terminal over ssh). Fun!

Yesterday had been set aside at work for doing or learning something new. I spent the day learning the Go programming language. It has a lot to recommend it: fast as a bat, first class functions, real closures, duck-typed interfaces, coroutines and channels, documentation done right (i.e. simple, ordinary comments). A few things to dislike, but I'm likely to try some small projects in it.

I could still have gotten more done. Notes & links:

0228Su
  * up 05:55; W=197.6
  % ... and the first thing I really miss about Emmy is the way she would unload the
    dishwasher for me.  For some reason I prefer loading to unloading.
  @ Configuring html-helper-mode
  : We're going to be hosting a few Sanders staffers.
  * Finally fixed the problem with gnome-terminal, which turned out to be both .bashrc and
    .profile setting LC_ALL=C.  :P  It's been plaguing me for *months* on and off.  Unlike
    *everything else in the known universe* it fails if *the process that starts dbus*
    isn't set up with a UTF-8 locale.  Actually, some other DBus problems are probably
    still there.  But that was the big one, since it kept gnome-terminal from working AT
    ALL on the newly-upgraded Cygnus.
    There were still some problems on Nova.  And Nova doesn't boot when there's an
    unformatted drive in the USB cradle.  Which makes sense, it just threw me for a bit.
  * Up in E's room to disassemble the "box spring".  All put together with metric
    hex-headed machine screws; stood up way too long and wore myself out.  Not helped by
    cleaning up spilled tea immediately thereafter.
  * The campaign staffers are here.  They have dragged mattresses up to E's room (which I
    guess we're going to have to rename soon); that means there's room to move around in
    the garage.
  * Install everything that was installed on old Cygnus -- taking forever, but...
    apt-cache pkgnames | sort > known
    sort explicitly-installed-pkgs | grep -v ^linux > wanted
    sudo apt-get install `join known wanted`
    9:30 finally finished downloading.
    9:40 done.  Wow.  That _was_ fast!

0229Mo
  * Up 5:15ish; W=197.6; laundry, dishes
  * Bills (Sound and Seattle) and transfers
  * Day set aside at work for "Learn and be curious" -- I spent it going through 
    A Tour of Go (the programming
    language).  I'm also going to be learning Scala soon.
    Go is pretty cool -- it has strong typing, first-class functions, closures, duck-typed
    interfaces, and coroutines.  OTOH the syntax is a bit weird, and I don't think it has
    nearly as large a package library as Perl, Java or Python.
    See What's the Go language really good for? | JavaWorld
  @ The Rust Programming Language (online book)
  % in other news, my right eye has been itching/hurting all day
  @ Today’s
    Smalltalk: A Second Look At The First OO Language
  @ Lilypad Planet tiny house; awesome decor

Comments

[montemplar]

Have bookmarked the links on Go, Rust and Smalltalk for future perusal. Not sure I'll ever have any use for them, but hey, learning new stuff is fun. :) Just finished the front-end section of the Web Developer Bootcamp that I'm currently working through, and now have a much better understanding of Javascript and jQuery. The last project introduced me to a couple of nice Javascript frameworks - Paper.js for drawing and animating on the HTML5 Canvas, and Howler.js for playing audio. Fun stuff.

Speaking of bookmarking, I'm having another go at getting Evernote to actually work for me, rather than just be another pile of stuff I never get round to viewing. So today I will be mostly sorting through the detritus, putting the stuff that's useful in the Cabinet, and throwing the rest in the Trash. I did a big clean-up over Christmas, so it's a lot smaller than it used to be, but still a lot of stuff that Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, most likely. I've looked at some alternatives, as there are some questions about Evernote's long-term future, but none of them are as versatile at capturing information and then being able to organise, format and (most importantly) retrieve. Oh well.

[mdlbear]

Javascript and CSS frameworks are definitely on my list of stuff to learn. Along with Scala.

Never got into Evernote -- probably a good thing.