Type Slowly

Day log, 22nd October 2010

I didn’t get quite as much done today as I’d planned - I popped out to meet a friend of a friend to discuss a web-based business idea they had that they wanted some advice about in the early afternoon which went on longer than expected and Vicky’s brother had dropped by to visit when I got back, so I had a pleasant, if not entirely productive afternoon. Ashamedly, it was the day-job work that lost out in all this, but I’m going to have plenty of time over the weekend to catch up with that, so it’s not all bad.

Some things I did manage to get done:

• Headway on my java programming project - I’ve implemented a class that represents the mandelbrot set, and can present itself as a two-dimensional array of booleans representing membership of the set for a given point in the complex plane. Now all I’ve got to do is write the view and controller code that’ll render this! I’m also going to look into changing the array representation to return ints rather than booleans, indicating the number of iterations before the sequence settles down into an orbit, which i can then use to colour the visualisation.
• Worked through the first three parts of “Let’s build a Compiler in Haskell” - a Haskell port of Jack Crenshaw’s text, which is really firming up my Haskell-fu, as well as familiarising me with some of the stuff I’ve been learning on the Architecture and Hardware course at school, as well as teaching me loads about compilation and language design.
• Starting reading Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, which so far is really interesting - it gives loads of historical and mathematical context to a lot of what I’ve already been learning about, as well as providing a solid, readable introduction to information theory.

Anyway, on my travels this morning, I  found myself in SE1, so of course (not being in the area very often) I had to take the opportunity to stop by at Utobeer. Therefore, I’m now going to sit down and enjoy the bottle of Kernel Export Stout that I picked up there (one of my favorite beers at the moment, it’s simply stunning), and maybe read a bit of my stats textbook. Plan for the weekend: put in a good few hours of Harmonypark work, finish the java coursework, and write up all the dissertation ideas I’ve had so far in order to start fleshing them out a bit and seeing which are actually viable.