I’ve made a lot of changes to the site this weekend. Nothing too visible at this point, just a lot of back-end changes like the addition of Textile (via RedCloth and acts_as_textiled) for marking up posts. This is my first experience using Textile, and so far I’m really impressed. It allows you to enter formatting (like bold and _italics_) in plain text (like *bold* and @_italics_@). It’s very good for doing HTML editing in plain text entry like in textarea forms.

I have a few future entries I’m working on, but I wouldn’t get too excited just yet :) I have a feeling there will be a little throat clearing on hear for a while. But I’m OK with that… so it goes.

I had good intentions. Intentions to post here once or twice a week. But that obviously hasn’t gone so well. I actually have a somewhat lengthy post in draft, but I’m realizing that at my current rate of draft and revision that I’m not going to be making my 1-2 posts per week. And while I eventually want to emphasize quality over quantity, I think at this point it might be best to just focus on getting the creative and writing juices flowing.

So, without further ado, I announce my post-a-day program. My goal is to post here at least once a day for the next month. I’m aiming for at least a small paragraph on some relevant topic. Relevant meaning a completely arbitrary choice by me of course. In the rare event that someone happens across this lonely blog, here’s a random list of topics that I anticipate will come up at some point during the next month.

Ruby – Rails – Emacs – Lisp – JavaScript – Compiler Design – Linux – Kernel Hacking – CSS – Web Design – Software Architecture – Hacking – Startups – Entrepreneurship – Open Source – Java – Software Develop – Creativity – Writing – Photography – Web Frameworks – Business Ownership

Wow, I’m excited already! It’s going to be fun month!

I first got interested in Lisp through the writings of Paul Graham. If you’re not already familiar with his essays, I strongly recommend you click over and browse around. You’re not going to find that kind of quality here (not yet anyway). It’s hard to pick just one article, but I would probably start here (even though it’s not about Lisp directly).

Actually, my first “encounter” with Lisp was by way of the Computer Systems Engineering department head at the University of Arkansas some time around 1995-96, Dr. Ronald Skeith. In one of his classic tirades about the strengths of C and the flaws of Perl (or was it the other way around?), he said something like… “Of course, you could just throw the whole thing away and go write it in Lisp”. I don’t remember anything else about the context of the comment (or what it was that we were throwing away exactly), but the expression always stuck in my head. Mainly because the way he said it seemed to imply you would be stark raving mad, or stark raving genius, to consider writing anything in Lisp, and probably a little of both. In hindsight, I think he was trying in his (not so) subtle way to point us toward the path of true enlightenment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I won’t go into all the details about how Lisp is the language that all modern languages are slowly evolving towards, or how Lisp is a language for writing other languages, or how Lisp gives you a competitive advantage over hackers using other languages, or how it is the One True Language, but I will share some of my thoughts in the coming weeks as I continue to learn more.

I received a call right at 5:00pm this afternoon about a critical, last minute before launch, must be fixed bug. The problem was buried in some old data, in a horribly designed schema, in a decrepit old system that’s been around for about 7 years now. I was not happy.

I’ve been realizing lately how much I want… no, yearn… to work on code and systems that somebody loves and cares about.

It’s been 12 days since I last posted. My plan was to post once a day for the next month, so I’ve obviously fallen off the wagon a bit. In retrospect though I don’t feel bad because I’ve made good progress on several other projects I’m working on.

• ANSI Common Lisp — I’ve been reading and working my way through this book. I’ll save my thoughts about Lisp for a separate post. I do like the style of this book though. It reminds me a little of the famous K&R C book in that it’s sparse yet efficient. I’ll post some more thoughts about the book too once I’ve finished.

• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide — I got this book just about a week ago and I’ve already read through both the core and web specific sections (not including the reference material), which is something like 500 pages I think. It’s funny, but I never imagined I would get so excited over JavaScript. I can’t believe that I’ve gone this long as a web developer without really knowing the underlying language. Again, I’ll have to save my revelations for another post, but I would highly recommend this book to anybody who deals with JavaScript, and especially for anybody doing any serious (Dynamic HTML/AJAX) programming in JS.

• Introduction to Algorithms — I’m going back to school. I owned this book as an undergrad, and now I own it again. This is a meaty one… I’m just getting started, so it’s going to take a little bit.

• bonesisalive.com — I’ve started work on the comments feature. I was about half-way through adding support for Akismet to block spam comments, when I realized it was really a bit of premature optimization considering I don’t even have any readers at this point. I know full well I’ll have to implement it at some point, but I think it’s much better to just get the feature out. Especially because once I get the feature out I’ll feel better about publishing the link to this blog around. It feels kinda silly to have a sight that no one can comment on at the moment.