Hobby-hacking Eric

2006-09-24

back from Haskell Workshop / ICFP

Got back yesterday early afternoon. Have spent the weekend just being a lazy slob, something I tend to do right after a trip.

But need to get things into gear.

Still need to writeup the patch theory 2.0 discussion we had, mostly droundy, Igloo, lispy and some strategic insight from kosmikus (and me furiously writing notes on the laptop and asking questions of the style "I clearly have not been listening to the last 10 minutes of this discussion". You know the kind...

There be patches in queue too.

Other than that, I have bought myself my first laptop, an ultimate white Macbook. Was relieved that compiling darcs on it wasn't very hard (need to toss '-package mtl' into the Makefile, as Will on the mailing list found out). I was starting to find the lab's iBook G3 a little slow for my needs (mostly [re-]compiling darcs). Am installing Debian on a Parallels virtual machine as we speak. Plan to do Windows XP as well, although I am a bit worried about it not being fast enough for me to compile and play around with darcs. Other than that, the main blocker is that I don't actually own any Windows license keys. Perhaps Micrsoft would be generous enough to donate a couple of keys to the project? It might help us debug stuff, after all.

Actually what would be better is if some Windows gurus decided to join the project. Come on, Windows hackers, you want to be a darcs developer too and you know it!

Gah. Planet Haskell. It's so embarassing to think that people are actually reading this. I'm not sure what makes me more self-conscious, people looking at my code (GPL forever... or at least until I find myself employed by somebody that objects to it), or my English (I'm an almost native speaker, so that's not the problem). When I read myself, I hear a mixture of valley girl blended with remnants of my choppy Malaysian accent and sprinkled with a good dose of whining and uninteresting detail (today I ate cereal) for good measure. Sigh... hit that Publish button eric, and get it over with.


2006-09-09

koweyunstable

It's official. Today I begin my role as darcs unstable maintainer, thus switching from hobby-hacking to hobby-patch-and-bug-tracker-watching. We've have been planning this for some time now, as Juliusz has some hefty time constraints to deal with.

I'm somewhat worried about this, and would rather somebody more competent did the job, because I don't exactly have the same foresight or discipline in thinking about the consequences of patches. I'm really more an incremental improvements, add a small feature kind of guy. Oh well. No better way to learn, I suppose. Plus I get to feel all important and stuff ;-) But maybe now we should have a motto for the unstable branch, something like, "darcs unstable... and we mean it!"

Now need to become more organised so that I can stay responsive, while keeping this, the wikibook and the wxhaskell stuff a fun hobby, something to take my mind off but not get in the way of the thesis.