Are you a government sponsored secret agent? Because if you are you have to tell me.
November 2006 Archives
Ok, it's ten o'clock. Time to go and get toliet paper so that me and the woman I love can live in the quality household that we deserve.
Now what happens when you run the BSOD screensaver and your box BSODs?
I was going to start a post saying "Man, it has been a long time since I've posted, here's what I've been up to...", then I realized that I rarely post anything anyway. I guess I'm feeling even more off the net (read "out of touch") because besides not posting entries I haven't been on IRC much, read any of my personal email, or read anything else online. Really none of it is Shannon's fault. I think I'm just getting too lazy or bored with stuff. Who knows.
But anyway here's what I've been entertaining myself with recently besides getting married and spending time with my wife (which is still a weird word for me to use.)
Working.
I'm working in the bottom-most dungeon of $EMPLOYER just above the Customer Service and Janitorial staff. As this is my first real "Silicon Valley" job I have an observation to make, this industry is insane. I am getting paid $nn000 a year. People that I work with are getting paid similarly. Some of the people that I work with don't know what tcpdump and ICMP are. I'm doing four times less work than I did in Reno and am making two times as much money.
In meetings and on customer tours I hear how pro-opensource the company is and then on other occasions I hear the age old anti-opensource arguments. The reason we use Commercial SSH over OpenSSH: "OpenSSH is insecure." The reason for using Solaris over Linux: "Solaris is more reliable." (hidden message: "we paid a lot for a Solaris contract.")
Another thing I see is that many people (at least where I work) are completely unaware of what goes on on the Internet. The concept of having a Wiki was a fresh new idea.
And there are probably a ton of other things that I could go on about except that I'm sure someday one of my coworkers might read this. Once they find out about these "blog" things.
On a more interesting note I've been looking into various text/data mining methods for going through a lot of data. Which is a bit more stimulating.
Programming
I still really like the Scheme. The R6RS Draft is out, I've been peeking at it every once in a while. I've picked up copies of The Reasoned Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and Essentials of Computer Languages.
I've been playing with a lot of dialects of Scheme mostly Gambit, Chicken, Bigloo, MzScheme, and Scheme48. Scheme48 and MzScheme are currently my more favorite implementations. Most of my Gambit hacking is due to Termite, the Erlang like distributed computing package for it.
Speaking of Erlang I spent a few days picking it up and coding a few prototypes for some fanciful ideas in it. It's ok. Kinda like what if Scheme, Prolog, and ML had a big orgy and the result was Erlang.
And I've actually started to sit down and work on a couple projects I've been meaning to work on for a while now. A Scheme compiler and Megatropolis, which are going to be intertwined eventually.
My Scheme compiler is nothing new or earth shattering. I've put together a couple of prototype versions and have been compiling to Python code. I'm using Python right now because it is close enough to Scheme so that some things aren't really hard (Garbage Collection, Typing), but far enough that some things have to be coded specially for (Tail Recursion.) I hope to link to some reasonable code soonish.
Megatropolis is a project that I've taken fleeting stabs at many times over the past years. And I will probably write about more in the future.
much more
I've been reading comics and playing some vidiot games. But now I'm too lazy to write so I'll have to blab about it all later.
This story is great because:
- It's funny.
- It involves Penn and Teller.
- It involves two of the most influential (IMO) contributors to Unix (Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike).
