adrift on a cosmic ocean

Yet another installment in my journey through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. At this stage it is so far off seven weeks, it's definitely going to be more than seven months, and I'm just hoping it won't take seven years! But it is enjoyable nonetheless - if a little painful. This time, I've just completed the chapter on Prolog. The previous chapter, which I found reasonably painful as well (but…

It has been a while since my last blog post; certainly not because I wanted to write less but I've just been trying to learn so damn much recently it hasn't left much time for anything else. Whether or not I've actually learned anything is yet to be seen. This leads me to a subject which I am still struggling with - Pair Programming. Not that I don't "get it", "understand it", or "enjoy it" - I…

Today I actually have the energy for a blog post. Probably because I went for a bike ride when it was -1  outside, and am WIDE awake as a result! That aside - I realised that the last time I went bike riding-  Kai was barely walking - meaning it has been a long time since I have ridden. However I distinctively recall having significantly lower energy then,  than this time around. As I was riding…

I've been playing around with a basic implementation of HLS the last few days, and despite it being a proprietary streaming transport there is a public specification available for it which seems reasonably complete. That being said, it is still proprietary, hasn't made it through the standardization process and the public spec is suspected of being at least partially incomplete. THAT being said, I…

I've been doing a lot more programming in Go recently, mostly because it has awesome concurrency primitives but also because it is generally a pretty amazing language. Unlike other languages which have threads, fibres or event-driven frameworks to achieve good concurrency, Go manages to avoid all of these but still remain readable. You can also reason about its behaviour very effectively due to…

Well, despite my best intentions, here I am again writing Ruby. I decided to automate a small part of some data analysis I've had to do a few times, starting with the database queries themselves. Unfortunately the data is spread over several hosts and databases and the first implementation simply queried them serially. The next iteration used the mysql2 gem's asynchronous query functionality but…

As I wrote previously, I found that the mismatch between the goals of large cloud services like Amazon Web Services and the languages they support slightly conflict with the notion of making highly concurrent and parallelised workflows. Of course the obvious followup to that post (even embarrassingly obvious since I've been copiously mentioning Go so much recently) is to point out that Google's…

I've mentioned a couple of times that I started reading through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, and even though I've recently been heavily sidetracked by Learning Go I just finished chapter two which dealt with Io. The book gushes over the language, and I've read a lot of other people's blogs where they seem quite excited about it. In the end I couldn't finish the last exercise, even having a…

Almost two years ago now, I wrote a post about how I was fed up with resorting to shell scripting as my knee-jerk reaction to computer problems. At the time, I had been attacking any problem that required more than a couple of commands at the prompt by writing a shell (usually BASH) script and hit major limitations that I really should have been solving with a legitimate programming language. I…

Unlike many, I'm actually a good boy and do backups of my personal data (for which I can mostly thank my obsessive-compulsive side). However, up until now I've been remiss in my duties to also take these backups off-site in case of fire, theft, acts of god or gods etc. Without a tape system or rotation of hard drives (not to mention an actual "off-site" site to store them), this ends up being a…