Safety Valve

Wow - I've not updated the blog for a year and a half. Amazing how writing a book can turn you off all other kinds of written expression (apart from the odd Tweet). The book's been out for a month now and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. But following the release, I haven't had the energy to do anything creative when I get home after work, so I've just been playing video games and, well, not writing . I've felt entitled to it, though: for the last year, I've not had time for anything else, so I've built up a huge backlog of books, films and games that I'm now suddenly able to start working my way through. The only problem with that is that it too can start to feel like work. In particular, my long list of TODO-notes and feature requests for my pet programming projects has felt too overwhelming to try to pick up. In many cases, I've completely forgotten where I was, so it typically takes half a day just to look over the code and figure out...

While midsummer eve was as cold and foggy as any I can remember, these following days have been beautiful. The winds are still a bit chilly, which can be deceptive since it makes you forget how much sun you're actually exposing your poor skin to. I spent most of a day mowing the grass around the house, and got myself a really superb redneck tan. An hour or two ago, a White-tailed eagle circled a few times over our house, as usual supremely unimpressed by the gang of annoyed seagulls that tried to chase it away. A cuckoo is, well, cuckooing, in the distance, and the water is glittering. In fact, it's bloody hard to get any real work done in a place like this. Over and out.

When I planned my trip to California for the Erlang Factory conference, I followed a friend's advice and set aside a couple of days to go and see Yosemite Valley . I don't regret it - it was absolutely fantastic. Yosemite is about 4 hours drive east from San Francisco, up in the high Sierra Nevadas, and it's one of the most stunning landscapes you can imagine. Nothing I had read about it beforehand had prepared me for the feeling of actually being there and seeing this amazing valley in real life; not even Google Earth (although I recommend trying that for yourself - the 3D detail is really good). Of course I took a lot of photos , but it's not until now that I'm done going through the lot of them (discarding more than half), so I've waited with writing about the trip. I stayed two nights in Curry Village, a camp site of permanent tent-cabins (complete with beds, but no heat) that are the cheapest option if you don't bring your own camping equipment and want...

A couple of weeks ago, I went to San Francisco for the Bay Area Erlang Factory . The conference was great, but I also took a few days off to be able to do some touristy things on my own first (not to mention working off the 9 hour jet lag). I had a lazy sunday in SF and took the opportunity to visit Alcatraz for the first time. I was really lucky with the weather and took a whole bunch of photos .

" The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages ", the classic book by Simon Peyton-Jones (et al.) has been out of print for years, but has now been released as a free book in several juicy formats. Just follow the link.

This last weekend, I somehow came to think about the wonderful old space trading game Elite, and the way it managed to cram a vast universe of planets with names, stats, and fun descriptions (along with the 3D space flight simulation, which was an amazing feat in itself) into the tiny 8-bit home computers of old. Only minutes later, I had found Ian Bell's Text Elite web page, where Ian, one of the two original authors of the game, has published a reconstruction in C of the main universe-generating algorithm, along with a simple text interface to actually let you "play", i.e., buy, sell, and jump between planets. Great! So I rewrote it in Erlang . And had a lot of fun doing it. Apart from the nostalgic kick, there were two points with the exercise: First of all, I just wanted to see the main algorithm as cleanly implemented as possible. But second, I wanted to see what it would be like to rewrite a piece of classic game code that was very clearly not written with function...

Lately (well, for almost a year now), I've been watching a whole lot of the British TV series " Time Team ". If you've never heard about it, it's a show about archaeology. Before you fall asleep, let me assure you that it is as far removed as possible from any boring documentaries you have may watched (you know, the ones with a voice that drones on and on about some kings and battles with a slideshow of still pictures for illustration). No, this is a show about digging. Also, the fact that it's been running since 1994 should tell you something of its popularity. The idea of the show is to follow a "crack team" of professional archaeologists over three days, as they attack a particular site of interest. The sites are chosen based on various sources, from previously known places where some finds have been made before (but no proper investigation has been done), to the back garden of some family who found something strange when they were buring their ca...