Hi All (So, just Jon)

I've decided that my blogs are too diffuse.  Anybody who's looked at my profile is probably going "No... really?  You think so?".  I've decided to repurpose my "progress" blog into a sort of personal hub.  My current plan is to abandon most of my blogs.  Either they've served their purpose (the whole vampire thing doesn't really need updates), or I think I can realistically aggregate them here.  (First Circle was a failed experiment, with its spiritual successor at the GDL forums—go there, by the way—and well, politics is personal.  The way things work out, I really love that "almost genocide" crack, but it only works on a political blog, and I don't do enough politics posts to justify making Le Blog Pour Le Blog my main blog.  So, writing goes over at Pepto-Bismol, everything else goes here, more or less.)

I'd better update the other blogs with this information.

This is my most 'me'-y blog, so this post goes here

I am extremely honest. This has gotten me in trouble in the past. I wish I meant that I exposed some wrongdoing and got unjustly punished for it, or something heroic like that. No. I have a psychological aversion to lying. It screwed me up on a writing assignment in elementary school, and it's screwing me up now.

Then, I had to pretend that I saw some meaning in a novella about the Iditarod, or something. I didn't see the meaning, so I talked to the teacher about it. She told me what meaning I was supposed to see. Knowing that, I could write up the one-page-or-so assignment on the novella. I could not, however, refrain from pointing out that I still didn't see the alleged meaning. I don't actually know if it wasn't there, in retrospect. Point is, blunt honesty. Not endearing.

Now, I have to write a cover letter for a professional seminar. This requires a level of interest that I reserve for [REDACTED]. A level of interest that I feel totally unqualified to fake. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Random Things

Weight is around 180 now. I laugh at people who talk about diets! Laugh! Over and over, until their spirits are crushed!

Got another project, slow going. Trying to work on Hyatt and game.

25 Days Later: Like 28 Days Later, but on a leaner budget

So, my weight is hovering around 185 now, which is great progress, overall.

I checked in with Ramla. Will have to check in once more, to see if I should tweak my schedule any.

Been rewriting Hyatt in a form of Hungarian Notation of MY OWN DEVISING *THUNDERCLAP*.

Game project has a better name now, I think. However, I need to get to coding the scaffold that it rests on.

After about a week...

Weight is eh, somewhat to be expected. Should go walk tomorrow first thing after breakfast.

Been coding up improvements to Hyatt that separate disk I/O from orthogonal operations. Need to work out the right way to break up data to avoid latency in large tables.

Thinking about porting Meritous to Python, more as a way to check my understanding than because of any special properties of either.

Today

Frantic bike-ride... No progress on serious code, but coded up a ludicrous multiplication module just for the heck of it. Plan to upload it to Launchpad once it comes back online. (Here)

Should get back to Hyatt... have giant list of functions to implement.

Not much has happened

Been tweaking Hyatt's code a bit. Walked for a while today, weight is a bit iffy.

The Man Who Was Thursday is an amazing book and you should read it, by the way.

Next big step in Hyatt is to make string handle 'exceptional values'. Setting up handlers properly will enable me to implement the 'pointer' internal type, which will make setting up a variety of things much more sane.

AARGH

Have to rewrite columns to support domains, which means reading about domains, which means I have to read up on category theory again.

Weight is okay, really should get in touch with Ramla, Wintendo setup successful...

Thought...

Thinking of porting Hyatt to Lua if speed is unsatisfactory, and running tests. Of course, this presupposes that I have a Hyatt to port, which I don't really yet.

July 7, 2009

Made some modifications to Hyatt. I... forgot some important code. Point is, it's in there now.

There's some stuff I've been meaning to take care of that I won't say much about. It doesn't occur to me that there's much for me to do today... really, besides this, finally getting the MBR set up, and, eh, classes...

EDIT: HOLY SHIT I JUST GOT THE DEAN'S BOOK I WANTED

AWESOME

Update for July 6, 2009

Decided to scrap one of the fancier bits of Hyatt-NG, for the moment. It could work later, but not for this. In essence, constructing many independent trees manages to be easier than my supa-fancy sing-and-dancy idea.

Unloaded dishwasher, need to find stuff in order to vacuum.

Stuff on July 6, 2009

So, Hyatt's primitive table type is set. I believe I've got two or three more types to set up before I'm through.

Got some chores, off to do them. More stuff later.

Progress For July 5, 2009

Need to fix up the storage for Hyatt-NG some more. The indexing was full of bugs. (Later: think I'm finished fixing it.) It occurs to me that I don't really know much about concurrency-related stuff, which is... kind of important to Hyatt.

Tonight, working on pad.

Will have to get to work on winstallation.

That's not what they mean by water weight...

"For the heck of it, I shall weigh myself now."

*showers*

"For the heck of it, I shall weigh myself again. ... That's five pounds more."

*blowdries*

"Much better."

Nearly done with the storage part of Hyatt-NG. I just want to be able to mass-index it, and .hgc should be set as a file format. Since that takes care of the 'geometry' of tables, the next step is coding in constraints, I think.

Weight loss efforts are... failing to make any kind of logical sense. Yesterday, I lost way more weight than I was trying for. We'll see how that all works out. (*Gets mobbed by angry female friends*)

Hell, if I lose another ten pounds, I might go for five more, just to fuck with stuff.

Anyway, I've yet to get the pad working, though dad believes that the modification he's had me do should eliminate noise. Then, I might want to switch back to capacitance instead of shorting myself across the detection circuit. (However, I'd like to do so in a way that avoids slippage.) Also, some of the velcro ripped up the yoga mat, and we've yet to superglue it back together.

Oh, also: tomorrow, plan to work on getting the tower to dual-boot, if the weather is good.

'Nother update

Actually coded up stuff for reading data from the files for Hyatt-NG. Thinking of giving them the extension ".hgc" because not much seems to use it. It shouldn't be too hard to set up modify, insert, append, and delete methods now. (Although the __init__ stuff needs some checks. Currently, it can't handle... a great many things.)

Weight is... okay, currently. I'm going to have some milk soon... so hungry...

Update in general

Haven't done much exercise, been losing weight, finished up driving. Apparently, I know everything, but need to relax.

Have got a blueprint for some of the more important aspects of the Hyatt-NG system typed out. Lillian was confused by my improvisational attitude towards CS.

Pad still not so hot. Dad suspects radio station is interfering. Will have to hook myself up to oscilloscope to check. Scientology loses this round.

Will have to work on Hyatt, or begin the blueprinting for S3 that I may have mentioned. Also, screen is filthy, causing that last period to look like a comma.

Stuff for June 25, 2009

Just finished taking a walk, about 50 minutes.

Have some thoughts about my new plan for Hyatt, which I'm going to power S3 with, because all of the alternatives piss me off in some way.

Pad is being annoying. I can't figure out how the wires map to the inputs any more, even though I verified the correspondence myself.

No progress yet on S3: Ambitious Sub-Plan. It could take as long as a week to sort it all out, hopefully will take less time.

Plans for NOW

Going to calibrate pad. Not ten minutes from now. Not five minutes from now. Now.

Plans for June 24, 2009

Driving after noon. Temp work, about an hour's worth. Mapping stuff for S3. Seriously, the pad should be done, just use it for a bit. Still classes, and preparing for other job.

Goals for June 22, 2009

Slightly... slept through yesterday. I did make some progress on S3, though.

Anyway... Already today, I've showered, backed up my hard drive, installed iWork and iLife, and printed out some stuff to work on for S3.

I've got some work to do, tempwise, I've got friends coming over, stuff to read, still have to finish up course selection stuff...

I think that's it.

Goals for June 20, 2009

Well, I got driving done, and dad finished wiring up the last of the mods to the pad. I really should get it calibrated and go.

I'd also like to sketch out the big-picture relationships that S3 will depend on.

Ask for overrides for classes, pick Honors Seminar.

In the end, reading or TF2.

Update, since I forgot to post: pad detection is considerably enhanced, and at only a slight risk of unpleasant death or injury. Calibration will have to wait because the script is being a butthole. Playing a bit of TF2, then other stuff.

June 19, 2009, Update 1.5

Generally worked out what should be done for one of the 'workhorse' sets of tables in S3. Going to need to use triggers to insert functionality that should have already existed. Oh well.

Also, I still maintain that whoever is responsible for InnoDB's 'extension' to the SQL standard re: foreign keys needs to be kicked in the shins.

June 19, 2009, Update 1

Made some progress on classes. Still need to get an override for chem, and choose an Honors Seminar.

Also, there are blatant bugs in the course selection website.

Also also, got more familiar with SQLAlchemy. Once I'm sure of how it handles views, I'll start mapping stuff out.

Goals for June 19, 2009

Already did driving lessons, so that's taken care of.

Tonight, make hopefully the last modification to the pad.

SQL in general, and mapping out what I want from whatever ends up running S3.

Class signups.

Reading.

Um, let me see...

Calibration is screwy

Right now, the circuit seems to be stuck in More Magic mode. Discrimination would be better if it were wired for Magic instead, so I'm going to wait for dad to come home to extend the ground wire. He's also bringing an SQL book, I think, for all of my bizarre abuse ideas.

Going to hang out with friends, hopefully.

Okay then...

Got some questions about SQL, going to wait, try to calibrate the bits of the pad that I can calibrate, dance, and shower.

June 18, 2009, Update 2

Most of the way done with tutorial. Going to start mapping out tables and views, etc, on whiteboard.

Ugh...

Current versions of MySQL have a constraint on VIEW algorithms that would slow S3 to a crawl. Guess I'll just have to wait to implement that bit, or something. Or maybe just manually optimize the stuff.

Guh! It's been years since someone proposed a fix, and there isn't even an ETA for getting that done! I'll just have to hack up a fix at the Python level, or something.

June 18, 2009, Update 1.5

Pad calibration is a bitch and a half. Going to skip that for now.

June 18, 2009, Update 1

Got tape. Ready to recalibrate pad.

Goals for June 18, 2009

Buy gorilla tape, finish modifying ddr pad, and spend at least 30 minutes on it.

Read through w3c SQL tutorial, and begin working out tables for the S3 project. Start learning SQLAlchemy, and write first revisions of setup scripts.

Get any temp work done, and refresh memory about FB groups.

Check in with friends about what they're doing.

In my copious free time, read that one book that I obtained. Or maybe that other book that I obtained. Point is, I've got books to read.

Progress will be noted as I make it. Expect updates within an hour.

What this is for

I need a concrete record of my daily progress in various endeavors. I expect this to not interest people, but this is all about me. Me. Mememe! So yeah, if anybody happens to read this, that's the idea.