I’m really looking forward to this long weekend. I should have a few minutes to work on two side projects: this blog design and learning a new (programming) language.
Blog Design
Hard to say what I’ll get done. I really need to put some ideas for what I want down on paper, so I can start knocking them off one by one. As it is, the simplistic look isn’t really bothering me (I kind of like a simple clean look), so I’m not as motivated as I really should be. Simply ending the weekend with a punch list will be a nice result.
Haskell
I started learning a new programming language earlier this week: Haskell. This began a month or so ago, when I started using XMonad as the window manager on both my work machine with dual 1920×1200 displays and my 1024×600 netbook. It’s a fantastic tiling WM that works great in both situations, but the program–and its configuration file–are written in Haskell. I managed to hack together a decent configuration from plenty of examples and sample code, but it bothered (and still bothers) me that I didn’t understand the syntax.
Making Haskell more interesting (and difficult) to learn is the fact that it’s a functional language, rather than an imperative language as I’m used to from C/C++, Java, Python, and others. While this should work well with my math background, it’s still a different way of thinking from what I’ve been used to for the past 10 years of programming… I’ve been working through some material here and here and I’m looking forward to gaining some more understanding over the next few days.
I covered the new, plain layout in my last post, but there are even more changes today.
I’m taking advantage of the Google Font Directory to bring some better fonts to the site, without requiring readers to have any particular fonts installed on their system. Google hosts the fonts and most browsers are supported. I’m using Crimson Text for the basic text and Inconsolata where a monospaced type is needed. By the way, Inconsolata is a fantabulous font for code and is the default for my terminal and Emacs on every machine I can configure.
As for the name… I just got sick of the old one and it was time for a change. Then, at work over lunch, we were talking about serial communications, start/stop bits, parity bits, and checksums. One of my coworkers became lost in a side conversation, missed a few references, and loudly declared a “checksum failure” and reset the conversation. This seemed more than appropriate, so I’m running with it.
Hopefully, this post will be OBE in a short while, but I just changed the site over to a very plain theme. The immediate advantages are not clear, but in the end it’s all kinds of better. The new theme uses HTML5 to mark-up the site in a more semantic fashion. Instead of everything on the site being enclosed in a <div> block, posts are within <article> blocks, sidebars and navigation elements are labeled, etc.
Of course, there aren’t a lot of themes that have this and a design that I like, so I’m starting with a basic H5 template, and will work from there.
Q: What does a Lensbaby have in common with drinking?
A: They both allow you creative focus on a variety of subjects.
I got two things I have been looking forward to for a while this past Friday: a margarita (or three) and a Lensbaby 2.0 lens for my camera. Amazon had a great deal on the last generation of this lens and overspending on our credit card allowed me to use rewards points to pick one up with no cash outlay.
I’m still figuring it all out, but it’s horribly easy to move the sweet spot of this lens around and get incredible blur radiating out from it. This is not a great image, but I love the focus on the drink while the stem and base of the glass dissolve nicely keeping the eye coming back to the drink.
Yet. Another. Return. To. Blogging.
I don’t know how many times I’ve written this post over the years. I blog for a little while, then get busy or blocked and the updates stop. Months pass then I write a post about how busy I was and how I hope it’s different this time. I’m sure I’ve written one or two here, and I know I’ve done them on other, now deceased attempts at blogging. So, this time it’s going to be different, right?
Well, it’s not.
So why start back up right now when I’ll only fizzle out in a short while? It’s simple: I feel a great urge to be creative and I can’t focus that energy; the excess is now spilling out into this blog.
I see all sorts of individuals around who have created awesome things on their own or with a small team, and I want to be a part. Look at:
The first two are great websites that I frequent and the last is an iPhone application written by a co-worker of mine. All of them had a good idea that they took and worked for years and developed into something cool they could share with others.
So how does writing this help? In many ways it doesn’t. There’s no great idea that I’m kicking around this moment, trying to gather momentum or community around. But there is the catharsis of getting *something* out and into the world, which is my biggest problem. I can’t tell you how many 80% projects I have sitting around because they’re not quite ready for others to see. (I even have three or four draft posts from months ago that I never finished to my satisfaction and helped herald the great silence on this blog.)
So, I’m dumping this crap out there, as the first little buckshot in my shotgun approach to getting something into the world. A post here. A snippet of code up on Github. A new photo on Flickr. It just may be enough to get the creative juices flowing…
