Arbitrary Update 1797

Still haven't really had time to finish up my next proper write-up, but I need to mention a few things. So this is another quick, disjointed journal entry.

I remember reading somewhere that the best way to stay current was to never stop learning. This piece of advice was imparted in such a way as to imply that there exist humans who believe it's not possible to keep learning throughout your whole career because there isn't enough to learn. Which is different from saying that it's not possible to keep learning through the span of your life, but I'd vehemently oppose both statements. Assuming they exist, What arcane secrets of knowledge acquisition must these people possess? Alternatively, how big are the blinders they're wearing? I ask because I'm getting along in years here, and given my recent pace, could probably keep on learning for several lifetimes before approaching anything resembling "done". So the idea that someone thinks its possible to get there in something like 40 years means that they have radically more effective learning processes than I do, or a vastly different definition of "done".

Fuck, I don't even know where I'm going with this really. It's a bad idea to read too much into snippets of not-particularly-well-researched wisdom from the internets. Especially when you're badly in need of a vacation.

Stuff I've got on the to-read/to-watch stack includes |1| and lecture notes as will fit into my head, a second pass of RelativityThe Catsters, a bunch of

Things I have done deserve some note, I guess. For starters, those fact-base changes I discussed last time have been implemented and pushed. There is now a proper time-traveling interface that deals with on-disk history and is exposed to users in the form of rewind-to and rewind-by methods. The next step is going to be fork-at or something similar to let you copy chunklets of existing fact-bases around, and to finally bring the cl-notebook history browsing front-end into striking distance.

Next up, here's the source of that visual compiler I mentioned. The diagram source is included, but I can't yet show you the editor I used to generate it. What you'll see if you take a quick peek at the main .lisp file is some pretty in-depth examples of logic programming, in the context of compiling simple visual languages. I'll write more about this shortly, but I wanted to point you at the source in case you were extremely interested. Also as a sidenote, yes, this is the same sort of thing we're doing for FBP code at work. It turns out to be simpler than it sounds.

Finally, here's an implementation of a session token generator that I'll shortly be making use of in house. And here's the packaged version of Doug Hoyte's ISAAC implementation that the token generator uses underneath. As you can see, it's heavily based on Hoyte's Session::Token, in that it's a purpose-built random string generator for custom alphabets. The idea is that you hand it the appropriate parameters, and get back a generator you can keep funcalling for more random tokens. If you haven't yet, I thoroughly recommend reading through Doug's writeup, particularly his discussion of mod bias.

So that's that, I guess.

Still alive, still working, will have somewhat ass-kicking stuff up shortly. Ish. Fuck, I hope. Wish me luck.

Footnotes

1 - |back| - After which I will hopefully understand in more detail where and how light-speed limits come into play.