xhiris

Notes From The Edge

Yes, I'm still here. Just haven't really had much to say recently.

I've been exploring a number of things, stuff I could not before. This could have been from the stress of working for someone with a Napoleon complex (I've since changed bosses - to the better), or from some general sense of apathy.

Whatever the cause, much of it has ceased, permitting me to explore my craft in more detail. I'm looking at some tools and concepts I hope to improve my skill, or at least make things easier to understand.

To wit:

LEO - a "Literate Programming" text editor. It allows one to express concepts in an outline, generate code, has syntax highlighting, whatever. I've already found it useful for learning about complicated bits of code I've never worked with before (available at leo.sourceforge.org).

Code Browser, another project at Sourceforge does something similar. You may highlight blocks of text and shove them into "folders", or make links to content in other files. It implements these as comments in your code - but you're not limited to code, you can make a poor man's (or woman's) Wiki with minimal effort.

Python! Finally, a language that acts like I think! This is what LEO is written in. I confess I'm having some difficulty - things I can do in my sleep in VB or even Javascript have proven difficult. This may be due to lack of experience.

I don't wish to bore you with technobabble - right now it's what I can write about most lucidly.

I have had many insights over the past few months, whether from ideas that appear in dreams, to things other people have said of whatever.

I've documented much of this on my Livejournal rather than here - honestly I'm not sure whetre the division between stuff appropriate for LJ and that for here is. I've been treating LJ like my "home base" and this more of an annex; it seems silly to divide comments between both or to replicate content.

Anyway, enough of this pretentious babble, back to the laboratory, Igor!

- Dan, as "Xhiris"