妖怪世捨て人

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 It does have a native toolkit called McCLIM, but due to general outdated-ness it is not a very attractive choice.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.

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.