news of the tycho

This is a post that's just meant to keep you all updated of projects that I've talked about recently, but haven't had time to write or talk about extensively about recently.

• I'm writing. Not as much as I'd like, but pretty regularly. I expect that come hell or high water I'm going to start the new fiction site the week of July 14th.

• I suspect in my next post to tychoish I will cross the 400,000 word mark for posts on this website (and tealart which proceeded it). Thats crazy, though my verbosity should come as a surprise to no one. Also, I think that July 1 is probably as good a marker as any for my first anniversary of blogging at tychoish.com. It's been awesome, and I'm not stopping anytime soon.

• I'm making a formal effort to learn how to program in Python. I've gotten the O'Reilly "Learning Python" book, and I'm enjoying it, and I think I'm at a point where I might actually be able to make a go of this.

  • I've done a little programing in the past, mostly a little PHP (for the website) and some shell scripting for day to day stuff that I do around here. But I've never actually tried to learn something, opting to just tinker around instead. But I'm starting to get to a point where there are things that I need or want to learn how to program, and I've decided that python is probably the best/only language that I need to learn. It seems to combine both straightforwardness with flexibility, and does away with the aspects that I find most annoying about other languages (Perl, not straightforward, lots of modules; PHP, not incredibly useful outside of website programing; ruby, oy; C/C++/Objective-C too much overhead; anything else, too marginal). So I'm looking forward to it and enjoying it mightily.
  • Having some moderate level of proficiency in a real programing language will--with luck--be helpful in the job search.

• Another high level project for me at the present is my job search for the intermediate term. I think I want to go to graduate school at some point, but I'm more interested in doing something in the interim that might flow into graduate school eventually, and something that isn't just marking time. More than anything it's weird to go from having things so thought out and certain-seeming, to not throughout at all. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, it's just wierd

• Now for a couple points of geekery:

  • I've changed the color scheme for my terminal window, and as a result have found myself using vim more often. It's teal, which is better than the navy that it was before. Easier to read, and it's sort of fresh and inspiring. Oddly. I like vim a lot, though I must say that I need to spend some time learning emacs key bindings, because I don't know them and Cocoa on the mac uses them, so not knowing them is a hinderance.
  • I might have mentioned this earlier, but for the past eighteen months or so I've been using subversion (svn) to organize/collect/backup my files. I write a lot (no really) and spend my working day and night munging text files in various ways and it makes a lot of sense to me to use version control to stay on top of this. Anyway, I've been thinking about switching to git recently and I think I'm going to go through with it later this fall. Here's my thinking:
    • My current setup involves having svn repositories on my hard drive, and then backing up dump files semi-regularly to a flash drive and to the cloud. This replicates a lot of functionality of git (the local repository) which makes commits fast and frequent, but I'm unsatisfied with the backup/offsite component.
    • Though svn solves the problem with copying and moving files and their histories which CVS (apparently) couldn't deal with, merging and reverting to previous versions is a royal pain in the ass, as a result I'm not prone to doing it. Git would help ameliorate this problem.
    • A lot of svn "features" (tagging, etc) rely on you lying out the repository in a certain sort of way from the get go. This is fine if you're a programer, but the truth is that I don't often think to arrange my writing projects and whatnot in this way, and as a result a lot of this is lost on me.
    • All the cool kids are doing it, and I'm nothing if not a joiner. (Ha!)
  • A few weeks ago I completely hosed the installation of ruby on my computer. Lets not talk about it. I have something marginal working but I should probably do a reinstall of the operating system, but I'm resistant.

I think on the whole I'm doing pretty good, I'll (of course) be in touch.