Living Openly

I just wrote a long blog post talking about why it sucks playing Zerg in Starcraft 2. But friends, there has been too much whining on this blog of late! It's time to bring back two things we've missed for some time: computers and whimsy!



So a few things: I'm living the dream, and finally installed Linux on a personal box. It's a small step (this is my laptop, not my main) but Perfect is the Enemy of the Good, and after using Mac, Windows, and Linux at work, it's incredibly obvious which direction I'd like to move in for the future.

Currently I'm running Ubuntu. I wanted to run Debian like we did at Brown CS, but I'm too much of a weenie at the moment. Besides, Ubuntu's easy as a dream to set up, and I've done it for work twice already. Naturally, I'll be using XMonad as my window manager ^_^

I've written twice that I've "picked up" ScrabbleCheat again, but they were lies. This time I've actually picked it up again (see the commit history!) and it's finally going in the right direction. I had a substantial amount in the first tagged release, but that approach (the anagram solver) was ultimately doomed because it didn't take the board into account when generating words for moves. If I ever get productive again, I'll write about this process, this has been the most fun I've had coding in a while.

Part of the fun has been because of Erlang, which has just had another release. There are so many reasons to use Erlang, and this application contains almost none of them (not super parallelizable, no need for hot-swapping patches, binary syntax, or fault-tolerance). That being said, I really miss my functional programming, and refactoring calls to a series of folds and maps just feels nice. I can't imagine how powerful I'd feel if I'd properly learned macros, or had use of Haskell's type system. Those are for the next ones ^_^

Finally, Diaspora open sourced today. It's too early to really tell anything about its future, but I'm thinking of looking at it and seeing what they did. If we're lucky, the community will take well to this I can finally stop being a dumb fuck who trusts Zuckerberg.

(Note that while I don't love all aspects of the product, my family will always be eternally grateful to Facebook for helping us communicate to so many, so easily during the roughest parts of Annalisa's recovery. I also think their approach to engineering, like many of the coders I know there, is brilliant).

Finally, I'm turning in my iPhone in late October and getting me an Android (probably an Evo), since I'll be paying that bill pretty soon and will use the opportunity to go to a more open land, containing the closed platform I work on ^_^.

So that's it, kids! Open source OS, programming an open-source hippie language, slowly migrating out of Facebook while decking it out with a new, more open phone. All that will be left will be a bed that's also a Reprap.



I'll try to post more; I still sleep next to too much cardboard and styrofoam, and will probably be comfortably moved in and adjusted after Christmas ^_-.