Long-term project SITREP

[pozorvlak]

Current status on some of my long-term projects:

Thesis: Up to

Comments

[stronae]

The latest Hugs (Sept 2006) managed to break my students' code (originally written against Hugs Nov 2002), so I had to figure out appropriate workarounds to get them functional again. Nothing major, but damn, that was annoying.

Also, SICP is awesome. You'll be right at home, I think. :)

Congrats on your thesis progress! I wish I had that much progress going on. :)

[pozorvlak]

Thanks! michiexile got me good and depressed when he came to stay last week, by announcing that he already has two papers submitted and is on course to finish his PhD in two and a half years :-(

[michiexile]

On the other hand, my PhD will be a "minimal defendable thesis" PhD, and has some extraneous circumstances you do not have pushing it.

You'll get there, and it'll be solid when you do.

[pozorvlak]

I've just ordered a second-hand copy of SICP from Amazon...

[totherme]

Congratulations - particularly on the weight (for a postgrad of your level, I reckon that one's probably the hardest of the challenges you set yourself).

[pozorvlak]

Well, that was the one with which I have the least experience, and I was worried about how difficult it would be. But actually, it's turned out to be one of the easiest - it's perfectly clear what I have to do to make progress (and after the first few days, the hunger wasn't too bad), measurement is easy and reasonably instant, and setbacks are generally minor and only of a few days' duration.

Keeping the weight off long-term will be the real challenge, I think :-)

[totherme]

I reckon there's a good chance you're already well on your way into a positive feedback look with the capoeira. I think the challenge of long term weight loss is like the challenge of long vs short term anything else. So here I'll draw the analogy to software: If the project starts as a quick hack plus some feature creep, then maintaining it long term is going to hurt. If the project starts as a long term project it'll take longer to get off the ground, but once it's going, it'll keep going.

Since you've been deliberately aiming for lifestyle changes (daily exercise, energetic hobbies, sensible non-crash diet management) rather than a quick loss, I reckon you'll find the long term easier than you expect.

Ulysses

[rossblog]

If it's any consolation, d'you remember when I was at the flat and I mentioned I was setting up this enormously ambitious Ulysses reading group that was going to change the face of modern literary theory and etc.? Well, it went tits-up about two weeks later and the ONLY person still reading is Mr hoity-toity englit teacher Jorj (http://www.blogger.com/profile/01670476320340313483) who made it clear from the off that he was only reading it in order to finish before me. So out of everybody I know, you and Jorj are doing best. You'll have to sleep for an awful lot longer before the tortoise manages to beat you on this one. Hurrah for you! (waves hankie)

Feel better? No? Ah well.

no more haskell posts?

[ryani]

That makes me a bit sad; I started learning (as far as I can tell) about the same time you did, and I came upon your journal while googling for an answer to a question I had.

I work at a big videogame company and my professional work is basically all in C++ or lower-level languages, so I like to learn other languages to keep my brain in shape. Last year I picked up Ruby (& Rails), and this year Haskell. Maybe I'll move on to something else next year, or maybe not; I'm enjoying writing Haskell for now and my naive Haskell code is actually close to as performant as naive C++ code, something no other "high-level" language has been able to do for me before now.

"Why's" guide is awesome. If you head into rubyland, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, before I got frustrated with how difficult it was to implement "undo" in the app I was writing.

Re: no more haskell posts?

[pozorvlak]

You've only been learning Haskell that long? I'm impressed - you certainly seem to have picked it up a lot more thoroughly than me. Maybe if I spent more time actually writing Haskell and less time ranting about it on Livejournal...

But the Haskell posts will at least dry up a bit for a while, yes. I don't want to end up like xah_lee. But don't worry - there will undoubtedly be Ruby posts or Lisp posts or J posts to take their place :-)

Re: no more haskell posts?

[pozorvlak]

I think the problem was that I went from a very forgiving language that intentionally offered few compile-time guarantees (Perl) to a very unforgiving language that tried to offer compile-time guarantees at the expense of other things (Haskell). This led to a different development style - debugging at compile time rather than runtime, for instance. Of course, learning a language that was very different from what I was used to was the entire point, but I think it was a bit too much of a leap to take in one go.

[nonstick]

For some reason it never occurred to me that Schiehallion (the beer) might be named after a Munro, never mind a slightly famous one.

(It's a nice cask lager, though - you should try it if you can track some down.)

[pozorvlak]

I know and love Schiehallion the beer. It's brewed in wormwood_pearl's home town, interestingly enough.

There are a couple of other interesting facts about Schiehallion the mountain - see here. Grant Morrison also used it as the setting for the final showdown in Zenith.