The 30 most recent posts on Jach's blog.
I was dusting off some old scripts the other day and thought let's check how ABCL is these days... unfortunately the last stable release is still from 2023, at 1.9.3. I see there is still quite some activity in the source repo though. And there's a plan to release 1.10 at the upcoming 2026 ELS.
This is just one of my silly "cocktail party" trains of thought (I've never been to a cocktail party). In short, more blog fodder I just felt like typing up without much careful thought or revision. It's simply amusing to me to try and divide up life, and indeed society at large, into small-ish eras focused around technological change, each suspiciously around 10 years long, with myself…
For some reason I occasionally think about programming pedagogy even though I don't teach anyone and I'm not in any hurry to write a book about it. I do occasionally give advice to beginners or even absolute beginners, though in the latter case it's usually "here are two book options that seem to be successful for that audience, even when or especially if you don't have a clear picture in mind of…
I don't usually do goals, since I think I won't succeed in them anyway. But what the heck, let's list some off this time. And we'll list a bunch of stuff which I know for sure I won't do all of, but maybe I'll complete some of.
It hit me just now that I've been programming for fun since 2004-2005, aka 20 years... So I thought I'd ramble a bit about some of those years, in brief. This isn't going to be an autobiography or anything, and isn't complete or well-edited, but just a bit of history for my own future reference I guess. Maybe I'll want to write something up that's more serious in the future.
I've had this thought for many years, but seeing yet another instance of someone randomly going crazy makes me think about it more frequently again. I'm not going to name names, but it just keeps happening...
Every programming language community seems to have a subset of itself that is just overly concerned with envy for another language, whether it's the features or parts of the ecosystem. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's actually good when a good idea gets support in multiple languages. It's just interesting how narrow and repetitive the envy can be. (In some cases even incestuous -- JS…
I had a dumb argument recently with my dad's wife, it was around various aspects of illegal alien workers. One of the retorts against me was something like "You have no idea how hard they work", to which my knee-jerk reply was something like "I've done hard labor" and her reply was a "When have you ever? *laughs*".
I've had a word count tracker for this site for quite some time. It's nothing special, just counts every "word" in posts and in comments by me, defining word as a string of symbols not including a space. A bit of logic filters out quote blocks or code blocks. (I had previously forgotten to filter code blocks, but duplicated the logic for span blocks so that should be good now...) Some quotes/code…
A couple months ago I was surprised to read in a couple places that the book Land of Lisp was "much maligned". This was surprising because it has high reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, and I personally liked it overall too. I remember getting it not long after it came out, Christmas of 2010, but I didn't really make time to read it much. I was busy with college and my job, and at some point I got…
So around May of 2024, I finally got around to reading this article on lisp gamedev with ECS. It's very good and explains things really well. The author created a nice ECS system and if it fits your development style, by all means, use it and let's have more Lisp games!
According to Amazon, I purchased my first hammock in October 2013. I've been sleeping in one since, trying out a few different types over the years or just replacing one as it wears out and gets a rip.
Previously this post was called "Feature request to self: draft posts". Its original contents will be below. But I've decided to make it into a public scratch pad for drafts after all. It's important to allow others to see my sloppy incomplete thinking, or things I was interested in at some point. I should try to date things too.
Previously.
Back home after a month trip (Japan Trip 6, will make a separate post later). It's so nice to be home.
I love the title, though the talk isn't quite a match. Whatever. The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUgl6pFx8Q
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjH2B_sE_RQ
This article about a new gout study is really quite annoying.
There was a twitter thread a few days ago that ultimately got deleted because too many people made uncharitable reads of it. The underlying idea was a bit interesting though. I wanted to riff on it, and twitter's not a good place for that. So here's some unorganizeed thoughts.
Just a brief thought or lament on a common pattern in open source development. It's the dependence on "heroes" of the ecosystem.
Nowhere in sight.
I came across this silly song today, Colors of the Lisp. At the bottom is a link to a youtube video of someone performing it. I don't mean to be rude to the singer; my opinion is that it's kind of a bad performance.
In one of my last projects at BigCo, I had to implement a bunch of metrics monitoring and alerting for our services. This was years ago now but every so often I think back on it and how it drove me a bit nutty... Here's a short write up of some of the problems I remember, from just considering one of its aspects: metrics on a single API endpoint request.
I was listening to a bit of my grandma's funeral service recording. Not yet ready for my mom's, but as next month is the 10 year anniversary, I'll do hers then. My mom only did a short segment for grandma, to read a poem, that apparently she read every Thanksgiving at grandma's? But I don't remember that, or the poem. My memory is so shot on these sorts of things. It's embarrassing.
Been in a slump the last several months. Going to try an experiment, that I suspect will fail, of writing down daily or at least weekly blurbs here of things I've been up to, like things I've been learning or doing. Or if nothing else, maybe some food I've been eating or music I've been listening to. In short, a public journal, but without trying to be super detailed -- but maybe some entries will…
Previously.
I've migrated my blog and other things over to OVH, leaving Amazon's EC2 behind. The DNS switch has been made, though my local machine keeps trying to talk to the old server I have shut down to encourage not caching the old IP. I also had to upgrade to PHP 8.2 and recreate my database. I've fixed a few errors so far, but there might be more. Anyway, just a warning as the title says in case anyone…
One of the few Shakespeare lines I like.
Most people in all of human history didn't leave much of a mark. The greatest, longest lasting contribution for most of them was simply having children.