Small Epiphanies

I was running this afternoon when it occurred to me that my running is a lot like my attempts at using emacs. Both start, go for a while, then stop. I think I’m over the hump with running though. I ran five miles today and didn’t feel like I had to quit at any point during the run. It took me three weeks and a lot of pushing through the little pains to get there though. First I had side splits, because my lungs were out of shape and I never really ran long enough to get past it before. Then my shins begged me to stop, but after running through the shin pain for a week and a half they seem to be ok with my milage now. All in all it wasn’t a terribly painful run, and it was the longest yet in my training for the Lincoln Marathon. What does it have to do with Emacs? I think learning to use Emacs as my editor will be the same way. One of the things that holds me back now is that I’m so used to the difference function in TextWrangler that whenever I need to compare files I just use that. What I need to do is work through the pain of figuring out the functions I need, I know they’re there after all. Another pain with Emacs is remembering how do cut and paste, which I still have to look up half the time (as well as doing regex searches). I imagine there will be a hump that I’ll cross at some point (and not know it) where I’ll know those things and it won’t feel so painful. I’m also aware that there are other pains I’m going to want to work through with Emacs like making the Windows key (at home) or the option key (at work) be the Meta-Key when I hold it down (instead of having to hit esc all the time!)... but I’ll work through that one in time too. I guess the key is to just keep at it.

Prediction: Next Big Language will be concurrent

I've been following the development of computing hardware and programming languages for a while now. Not as long as, say, Paul Graham, but long enough to have some opinions. Mr. Yegge recently posted about the Next Big Language. I think he's right on with it. The next bandwagon language that makes it big will, indeed, follow all of the guidelines he put in for it. One thing I think he's missing from the list is that NBL will have good, high level concurrency built in. The reasoning is that multi-core chips are going to dominate the next several years of processor advances. Processors built by Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun all ship with multiple cores. The upcoming lines scale the number of cores up greatly. These improvements solve multiple problems that have been around for years such as power consumption, the speed barrier. The problem with all of these cores, though, is making good use of them. The OS can dole out processes, true, however there are plenty of processes that could make good use of the extra horsepower. The problem is that doing so now is rather difficult and software engineers are going to have to come up with some way to ensure that concurrency can be handled with at least modest ease. This means safe process threads like Erlang gives, along with all of the other traits of NBL. Everyone can see where processors are headed and I can't imagine that NBL won't be in on it.

radio

03/03/07 - Note: I wrote this post over a year ago and a few things have changed. For one, the morning hosts got moved around, and the new ones just aren't quite as good. I don't mind much, though, because now I take the bus to work. The premise remains though, and I'm reposting this to remind myself to get the foxhole radio back out of the closet and get some pictures, write up a post on how I built it and try to get a station again.

01/06/06 - I was driving to work the other day, listening to the local AM morning hosts talk about everything from local sports and city government. A member of city council came on and talked about the upcoming agenda for the year, project priorities and budgeting. The reason I love AM radio so much is that no other news source feels as compact and useful. In a short stretch of time I can hear about a wide variety of topics of interest to me. The single drawback to this format is that I have no say in which stories are covered, and very little say in which ones I listen to (there are only so many stations in my area). The reporting, I’ve found, is superior to print media – papers in particular seem to be very bad at getting stories correct, and grammatical and spelling errors don’t jump out in radio. The stories are better than can be found on television, which is much more ridden with gimmicks locally and annoyingly repetitive nationally. Cable news is especially depressing because there is enormous opportunity to cover a wide variety of interesting news stories and they really drop the ball.

The second reason I like AM radio so much is that it is very accessible and nostalgic as well. I recently began fiddling around with plans for a foxhole radio. The concept is great, some wire coiled around a tube, a metal pin and a razor blade for a diode, an antenna, ground and earpiece, and there you have it, a working radio! Try building a television that simply. While it’s true that print media is far simpler to create and use, I find that words printed on paper are far more effective if they’re describing things a bit more intellectually hefty than what gets reported in USA Today. Things like programming languages, Christian history, political treatise (unlike the dribble spouted today). AM radio has shortcomings, I recognize that, but I still find it to be the best way to hear about what’s happening in my area, with some insights to the rest of the world too. Besides, it’s the best I can get on the drive to work. Thank you Nicola Tesla (notice, I didn’t thank Guglielmo Marconi).