Status ============================================================ Never mind that three month gap in my phlog entries. Don't look directly at it. Anyway, I wasn't taking a break on purpose. I was just hyper-focused on making my way through a personal tech tree (like a video game), trying to upgrade some specific skills in order to accomplish specific tasks. I made good use of my small daily allotment of time. I kept away from side-tracks and out of the ditches and the weeds. From a command-level view of my life, this is surely visible as a straight arrow pointing towards sweet success and rewards beyond measure. The weird thing is that it felt a little bit like failure. The long, slow grind towards a goal is the right answer, but it doesn't always have the payoffs I crave. 4974 2773 2066 756e 2074 6f20 6163 7420 It's fun to act 6c69 6b65 2061 2031 3333 3720 6861 636b like a 1337 hack 6572 206e 6f77 2061 6e64 2074 6865 6e2e er now and then. I just haven't had time to fool around *and* make inroads on the things I want to learn in order to build what I want to build. Something had to give and I'm afraid Gopher didn't fit in. Actually, I would definitely have posted at least a *few* status updates to this phlog. (I *wanted* to and I had ideas for posts.) But using `scp` to upload my gopher content to sdf.org went from 50% failure to 100% failure with a "permission denied". Apparently only ARPA members get scp privileges. Which is fine, but I needed to convert my 'ken' script to use 'sftp' instead of scp...and that was just enough of a barrier to keep me from doing it. Work gave us today (Friday) off and I found myself with some actual free time with our eldest kiddo in school! First I took care of some geeky system stuff on my Slackware laptop. Then I got my Gopher phlogging apparatus going again. I even listened to some new music today. I haven't done that in a while. Looking Back and Forward ------------------------------------------------------------ Here's the road-map and what I've managed to complete in the last three months: 1. DONE: Re-learned Perl and have now written a number of useful utilities with it. I've also learned to live with its limitations. Once it's beyond 200 lines or so, it's time for a different language (my personal opinion) 2. DONE: Got back up to speed with Nim. 3. DONE: Wrote 'lf' (stands for "Log Friend") command line utility which manages my daily log text files. These are my log/diary/notes which are transcribed from the pocket notebooks I've been filling daily since 2012 (now on notebook number 70). 4. STARTED: Learning Mithril 2.x. Earlier versions of Mithril are my favorite way to build JavaScript applications. Many changes have been cosmetic, but some run deeper - see the next item: 5. STARTED: Learning Mithril streams. At their simplest, these can be used as simple getter-setters. But the real intention is to enable functional reactive programming (FRP), so to help me get a grasp on the true potential, I added another task: 6. IN PROGRESS: Learn FRP-style JavaScript and streams/observables via a book I purchased a while back: "RxJS In Action". My paper copy's in storage at the moment with 99.9% of the rest of my programming books, but manning.com has a pretty awesome LiveBook feature which lets you read your purchases online, so that's how I've been making my way through this one. I have criticisms of the book, but I am learning this stuff, so it's doing its job. 7. IN PROGRESS: Learn Flux-style immutability and uni-directional data flow by learning Redux. This is actually going really well and I love how easily I can write my own implementation of Redux in a half page of code! > "What i cannot create i do not understand" - Richard > Feynman 8. FUTURE: Build a JavaScript game. I've started and stopped dozens of projects like this, but this time I want to actually get something that can be played and that I can add onto over time. I want it because I want: 1) A creative outlet for writing, 2) Something to tinker on, 3) Something that non-programmers can see and appreciate when I show them. 9. IN PROGRESS: And as of today, I've added back into the mix my seemingly never-ending quest for the One True Text Formatter for notes, phlog posts, documentation, etc. I'm write more on that in the near future, I'm sure, but in short it comes down to this: 1) I want to write my content in an unobtrusive Markdown-like format but I don't feel like maintaining a complicated text formatting engine. 2) I already have a very powerful text formatter on my Linux machine in the form of Groff. 3) The syntax of Troff is not unobtrusive (enough). 4) But *aha!* if I write a simple pre-processor to generate Troff output and pipe that through Groff... Good-night Gophers and happy hacking!