妖怪世捨て人

“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.

Last time we took a quick look at how authentication and authorisation work in Radiance. However, in order to avoid a kludge in Radiance I had to resort on a bit of a hacky way to let you authenticate yourself. This time we'll work out our own solution to the problem.

In death we are all alone – Or so the saying goes. I would like to go further than that and say that we are always alone. Your mind is isolated for all of time and nobody will ever be able to share that with you. Of course, we can also go in a different direction and question reality or what it means to be alone.

With four minutes delay (Anna had counted them) the organisers of the contest entered the stage. One of them, a man with a scraggly beard, square glasses, and a suit with tie stepped up to the podium. He coughed lightly, looked around the audience and started speaking with a coarse and monotone voice.

Introductory Note: Please read the introduction to know what this is all about.

If you ever visited my personal website you might have noticed an ongoing project listed: Story Time. Since you probably have no damn idea what that is about, I'll try to explain the core ideas behind that project and what Christopher (Mithent) and I are intending to do with it.

I'm not writing this because I actually think I have much to say, but rather because I want to slack off from working on Parasol. In particular, I'm dealing with internals related to getting things actually drawn. Computer graphics in general have always been a huge headache area for me, so it's no surprise that I'm not having much luck with Parasol either in this regard. In order to minimise the pain, I've laid out a small plan of action for this.

It's apparently been just 508 days since I first joined github. In that time I've written a lot of Common Lisp code and apparently made around 4000-5000 commits. I now want to make a retrospective and go over all the projects I've started. I'll omit some of the smaller, uninteresting ones though.

My first ‘real’ programming language I started with was Java. I used it for many years and I used it a lot. One convention that I never understood well and only forced on myself for the sole reason of it being a convention was the creation of setter and getter methods for fields. It never made sense to me because in most cases I won't do any computations on the fields when they're being set or accessed, so why a method?

Elegance is a word that is easy to throw around but hard to grasp. Or in the very least it seems that it is a word often thrown around even if it is not particularly applicable.

It's been too long since my last entry. I just haven't had much that I felt safe talking about. But, now that I'm mostly done with everything that occupied me for a while (Radiance and Purplish), I have more time available for other things. One of these things happens to be Parasol.

Continuing on from last time, we'll now take a look at users, sessions and authentication. Starting out the most obvious deficiency in our twatter application is that anyone could post as anyone.

I was bored enough to implement the SQLite bridge for Radiance last week, so I'm now ready to share another quick looksies into some more of Radiance's ecosystem with you. This time we'll have a first gander at the interfaces system and database interaction, an important component of many an application.

This is a bit of a difficult entry to write for me, mostly because I don't want to give the impression that Radiance is finished. So first of all, here's a big disclaimer: What I am about to show might change radically in the future as I iron out flaws in the design of Radiance. Nevertheless, I hope it serves as an example and insight to the basic principles employed in Radiance's structure and workflow.

That's great! I'm really glad to hear when people show interest in programming. Before you rush into it all though, here's some things to consider.

I've been wanting to learn Japanese for a while and have had a multitude of attempts at it, even going as far as to learn ~1700 Kanji. Unfortunately I've forgotten most of them again already, but I will get back to that some day, I promise! Now about two months ago I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned Pimsleur's audio courses. I thought that might be a nice idea to try since I've never done audio based language learning before.

No, this blog is not about another ISP issue, but rather about the issue of routing in the context of web frameworks. I've mentioned this problem briefly before. The first question that needs answering in order to solve this problem is this: What does routing even need to be able to do?

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is a Swiss author –primarily of crime novels– and he is one of my favourite authors, if not the favourite. There's a lot of factors in his works that fascinate me and I'll try to talk about a few of them and why I find them interesting here.

This confession is out of sequence because I wrote the initial sketch for it earlier and can only now publish it because it is rather heavy in code for a change and that required the new blog version. Anyway.

I suppose it's time I talked about this since Radiance2 is now actually live! Well, at least it's partially live. The blog, as you probably noticed, got a significant overhaul both design and software wise. Plaster also got upgraded, since that was the only component that Radiance1 really had running.

Software development is a lot like baking cakes and you always get to eat the cake too! That's really great, except for the fact that you're also building your kitchen at the same time and all the instructions are missing, wrong, incomplete or in some strange language you can't even begin to comprehend. Did I mention that you probably aren't that great of a cook to begin with?

Is it ever gonna be enough?

Since I live in a city that has been described as the ‘Silicon Valley of Europe’ it means that we get access to a lot of technological advancements very early. It also means that we get construction sites all over all the time, but that's a rant for another time. This time I'll focus on the ‘fibre revolution’, or at least the journey I've had to undergo to participate in it.

All too often I hear people complain or insist that they aren't creative. I have a hard time believing that. That isn't because I am probably seen as a creative person by some, but simply because creativity isn't something that is a mere trait. Being creative is about how receptive you are to ideas.

Since I still don't have any more ideas for neat stories or actually intriguing topics to talk about I'll do some more self-indulging and say some words about my hopes for the future. These hopes will mostly be technology related since that's the area I'm most interested in.