妖怪世捨て人

The fire crackles quietly as it gnaws on the dry campfire wood, slowly turning it darker. The orange flames dance silently surrounded by a ring of charred rocks. Despite the rock's cold and uncaring stare the flames go on dancing long into the night. But even their dance must end eventually. All that remains behind them is a pile of smouldering ash, lamenting the beautiful spectacle that once was.

Note for the uninitiated: This is an answer to a question that was posed on an in-character blog. If you are not familiar with the Touhou universe and characters, this story is likely going to be difficult to understand to its fullest. A good starting point to understand it however would be to read some parts of the wiki entries about Yukari and Ran, the two characters this is about, and about what a Shikigami is in the official works.

Note for the uninitiated: This is an answer to a question that was posed on an in-character blog. If you are not familiar with the Touhou universe and characters, this story is likely going to be difficult to understand to its fullest. A good starting point to understand it however would be to read some parts of the wiki entries about Yukari and Ran, the two characters this is about, and about what a Shikigami is in the official works.

It's been a while since I updated this blog, let alone with personal stuff. To cut to the chase: right now, I'm not doing very well at all. I haven't been doing well since last Friday when I was once more pulled into the abyss of self loathing.

Change is a fickle thing. While it might make things a lot better, it still only actually promises to bring one thing: uncertainty. Uncertainty makes people anxious, makes them worried and stressed out, irregardless of how things are likely to turn out in the end. It isn't surprising then that in a lot of folklore, any time that brings forth change is associated with a time for demons and all sorts of other evil-bringing creatures that cause humans grief and suffering. While this story is indeed about a time of great change, it is however fortunately enough not about demons, even if looking around the room could have very well led us to believe that some sort of demon must have done his deeds here. While for some people children are indeed embodiments of the devil himself, we shall abstain from such metaphors for now.

After a long time of frustration, trial, and mostly error, qt-libs finally supports Windows. In this entry I'll do something that will most likely not be of interest to many people, but I still think it is worth recording for posterity. Specifically, I will describe the way to build the smoke libraries on Windows. As with anything that combines the terms “C++”, “building”, and “Windows”, I cannot guarantee that it will work straight away. Regardless, I hope that it provides enough of a framework to guide you most of the way, if you ever do find yourself in this unfortunate position.

It's now been about a year since I first started work on Parasol. In the process, I had to learn about UI programming in Common Lisp. It pains me a lot to say this, but it is definitely not one of the great strengths of CL. It certainly wasn't back then, and it still isn't now. Since Parasol started I learned a lot about Qt and in particular the Common Lisp bindings, CommonQt. While using Qt is your best bet at writing a native GUI, it just isn't as pleasant as writing other lisp code. Too many things can break, too many brick walls are laying in wait for you to hit your head against, too many things are simply not there infrastructure wise. However, as Parasol grew, and I grew tired of CommonQt's shortcomings, I started to write more and more systems to work around these problems and make the UI experience for the developer a better one. This is the goal of Qtools.

I think I finally managed to figure out what my generous hosts' names are. I always confused them for words before, but now I'm fairly sure that his name is “Ionas”, and hers is “Mia”. Though I'm not entirely certain that this is the proper way to write their names. I wish I knew a phonetic scripture to write them down properly, but I doubt there's much of a chance of me being able to learn such a thing here.

A good while ago Robert Strandh approached me about a project idea. Namely that of a form of unified document processor, that could be used for any document format. His argument was that basically any new document format boils down to a question of syntax, while everything else about a document would get reimplemented anew for each new format syntax, generating a huge amount of wasted effort. What if there was a unified processing model that a syntax parser could be plugged on top of?

Statistics and figures are often used to make arguments and provide evidence for certain points of view. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of these figures and graphs are misrepresentative, misleading, or outright wrong. Knowing what to look for in a statistic is extremely important in order to know whether you can trust its stance at all. This isn't going to be an entry about making statistics, but more about determining whether you can trust the data presented to you. I'll also explain some of the important terminology used to discuss statistics.

I'm currently sitting in a lecture hall at the ETH in Zürich. It's 8 AM⁹ in the morning, and despite having had a long night's sleep, I'm still quite tired. It's amazing what two days of just listening and talking can do to you. It also feels so much longer than that, just because of all the things that happened. I suppose I should start from the beginning though.

A cold wind blew through my hair, decorating it with snowflakes. The vapour clouds that rose from my mouth looked like puffs of cotton, almost solid enough to grasp. It was very foggy all around me. I estimated that I could see twenty, maybe thirty meters ahead of me. In every direction I looked there was nothing but trees and the never ending blizzard. The cold had already made its way through my thick fur coats, rendering everything stiff and heavy. Nevertheless, I trudged onward. Where to, I had long since forgotten. Anywhere but here was good enough.

It's past midnight and I'm not feeling all to happy with myself. So, what better time than this to write a confession. After all, this was initially supposed to be another daily thing so it won't matter if it is more on the short side of things than usual.

I've been staying with the couple for a couple of weeks now. I still can't understand their native tongue, but I've been able to pick up on a few phrases. Most of what needs to be said is exchanged through gesturing and acting. It's frustrating at times, but also strangely amusing. I really don't know why they put up with me though, my unexpected arrival must have drastically altered their lives, not to mention that my cluelessness and prior illness means they have a lot more to do than they would normally.

It's been a while since I've made a blog about my personal life, even though I recall promising that I would. So, I suppose it can't hurt to quickly summarise what's been going on, and what will most likely be going on in the near future.

Some deem it unfortunate, others are not bothered by it at all, but the fact remains that Common Lisp does not have a standard GUI toolkit. It does have a native toolkit called McCLIM, but due to general outdated-ness it is not a very attractive choice. Generally I'm not one to linger long on decisions when it comes to learning something, so after quickly evaluating the options I chose to try CommonQt, a library to allow using the Qt framework with CL.

It has been a long time since I've had the chance to write an entry. A lot has happened – too much to think about, let alone put it into words. Many a thing that I've experienced is still strange and foreign to me, as if from a bad dream.

I haven't come across this anywhere yet, but I think it's worth writing a quick entry about, just so that it's referable. So, writing tests is a common enough occurrence in programming and Common Lisp is no exception. The vast amount of testing frameworks is both a sign of the repeated desire to have a comfortable way to write tests and the general ‘I can do it better’ syndrome prevalent in Common Lisp. However, this blog is not about those things, but about another, much easier aspect: Running tests.

In this series of articles I will be trying to discuss topics about stylistics, mainly in the sense of what it means in a context of art, but I may very well expand it into a more broad concept at a later date.

Usually when we talk about optimisation of data structures the concern for optimisation lies within the operations of adding, updating, deleting, and/or retrieving. I've never really heard of any algorithms or data structures that try to optimise traversal. After all, if you have n elements, how can traversal be anything but O(n)?

Just yesterday I finally finished the last big problem that plagued Radiance since its conception. Actually, the issue dates even further back all the way to when I started TyNET, since I never really did solve it until now. Though the main reason for this long delay is that I wasn't completely conscious of the issue until about half a year ago. For better or worse, things worked just well enough without absolutely having to solve it. But, ever since I grew aware of it it has been a thorn in my side as I couldn't figure out how to elegantly solve it.

I feel like I'm, in a lot of ways, lacking in direction. Given that I hear that a lot of people around my age go through similar experiences this doesn't really come as a surprise to me. Even so, it is quite bothersome.

In order to ensure that writing modules is easy and doesn't result in spaghetti sauce spilling everywhere, Radiance has rather strict encapsulation rules in place. However, since modules also need to be able to interact in some form, be it due to extending or sharing functionality, we need to offer some kind of interface to exchange data between them. If possible in a well-specified manner.

An alternate version of the awards ceremony story. This was written independently from the same prompt.

“The sixth place goes to the Zürich Park project.” The screen showed a large photograph of an idyllic, green park. The city's crest and a building company's logo were displayed on the bottom and a short blurb explained what the goal of the project was. “Miss Eglin and Mr Furrer displayed great aptitude with their Photography and chose an excellent subject. The intent of the advertisement is clearly portrayed and it seems as if it were taken from an actual poster from our city. It is well deserving of the sixth place and will be displayed in the halls around the University” concluded the beard. Two figures stood up from the front of the rows and hurried onto the stage. As before, they shook everyone's hands, took their certificates and returned to their seats, chattering in excitement amongst each other. Applause.