» Thursday, 12 March A.D. 2009

status update

Wow, I haven't posted on here in over a month. Shame on me. A brief update on various activities and interesting sites, not necessarily in any sort of order, is in order. I'd prefer to split it up into nice, easily digestable, one-topic blog entries. Like one should have in a properly managed version control system. But you know those commits into version control that are just a torrent of unrelated stuff? This is the blogospheric equivalent.

I took a business trip to Texas to visit one of our partners. My flight through Chicago was delayed by several hours due to weather; I didn't get to the hotel until about 2:15AM. I had an 8AM meeting the next morning and an hour of travel time. The flight and lack of sleep notwithstanding, the trip went extremely well: the meetings were extremely productive and face-to-face time is always worth the investment.

I bought a T-Mobile G1 and SIM-unlocked it so I could use it with my current AT&T plan. I admit to being partially inspired to do this by a Twitter status talking about reading code at meals. I thought, “Why couldn't I take source code on my phone to read in various places?” In the same vein, I can read Project Gutenberg works on my phone. It's a little silly because I don't use any of the GPS, Bluetooth, or 3G/EDGE bits on the phone--it only gets used as a phone and a miniature computer with a Wi-Fi connection. One might think that I should have gotten a netbook instead, but a phone is more fun, easier to carry everywhere, and more socially acceptable for some value of acceptable. I'm waiting for the ARM netbooks to come out, personally.

I haven't really used the phone in its intended capacity yet because I haven't completed writing the viewer app for such files yet. (I thought about installing Debian on my phone and using vi/less/emacs, but I haven't worked up the courage to root my phone yet.) Writing the app means Java and GUI development, both of which make me feel like a complete newbie when programming. Eclipse is the preferred development environment for Android (the operating system on the phone) and is nice enough, I suppose. The code completion is somewhat weak, buffer management is horrible, and the navigation leaves something to be desired, though.

I went to a bachelor party in Chicago last weekend. We played Whirlyball and went to dinner at 437 Rush. Excellent establishments, both of them. I had the tastiest Alaskan King Crab, enhanced by Mojo's recommendation of brown butter. I also discovered a blend of alcohol that I am willing to drink: the B-52 shot. Yum. (I only had one, if you must know.) After dinner, instead of going out to a bar, I went back to the hotel with Mojo, Dave, and Jerry, and we played Dominion until the wee hours of the morning. A quality weekend.

I read Watchmen on the way home from Chicago. As a literary work, I think it's very well done: the “watch” theme is cleverly woven throughout, the multiple stories being told dovetail cleanly, and the basic storyline holds up well over 20 years later. That being said, I found it depressing: Good is going to get outflanked by Evil and that's just the way things are. After reading a bit about the 'net, though, I think you can argue thusly from the final page of the comic: either Good and the story Good has to tell about things is merely a crank story (still depressing), or Good really does Win, although you don't know for sure (potentially less depressing). And of course Good as represented by the final page and elsewhere is not exactly a shining moral example, which plays into the literary quality of the work. Anyway, I've thought about the book off-and-on after reading it, which I can't say for many books recently.

I checked out two books on the library recently: one about Peter Drucker, Inside Drucker's Brain, and a “best of” compilation, The Essential Drucker. Reading Drucker--at least in the edited compilation, the originals may not be quite as lucid--is exactly like reading your favorite business author of the current day. Christensen, Collins, Allen, Kotter, take your pick. Except that Drucker was writing it all decades ago. Fabulous stuff.

Akoha looks interesting, although it suggests that Charlie Stross was not too far off the mark when he wrote about SPOOKS in Halting State. Papers in Computer Science looks like a promising blog; I am tempted to flood him with suggestions from compilers, but will refrain for the time being. Cool Tools looks like a somewhat less pretentious and significantly more useful Gizmodo, of a sort. Das Netz looks like an interesting documentary, although I'm not sure if one needs to view the film after reading the extensive review. And if you want to figure out why Volkswagen's stock price looked so crazy in October 2008, you'll definitely want to read about Porsche hacking the financial system.

posted by Nate @ 8:24PM