This week, I’ve been working on a couple of things.

First up, in Open Dylan was a blog post about function types and why we want to add them to Dylan 2016. I’m now working on a new blog post about how the type relationships involving function type should work. The important type relationships in Dylan are: instance?, subtype? and known-disjoint?. For function types in Dylan, the tricky one is the subtype? relationship as we have keyword and rest arguments to consider. Fortunately, some work was done on this in 1996 at Harlequin.

I’m also working on some other blog posts, including a follow up to the LLDB integration post.

Outside of Dylan work, I’ve been working on a heap / memory profiler for emscripten. I’m working on getting some parts of this submitted upstream to emscripten now, while I continue to work on the server that collects and analyzes the data. This is built in a client/server model so that a program compiled for emscripten is submitting data to a server rather than trying to perform the analysis within the same web browser window as previous tools have done for emscripten.

This tool is turning out to be really enjoyable to work on and I’m trying to make it pretty general. (It can do a lot more than just memory / heap analysis.) It also needn’t be restricted to only being used with emscripten. Someone could write code for other platforms to submit data to the collection server without too much trouble. (Although I’d have to modify the collection server to be aware of some additional data, like thread IDs.)

I’m continuing to work on my PureScript book as usual. This week is the chapter on monads and interacting with the browser.

I’m writing an inductive programming tool.

I’m working on scraping the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus tracker API to build a database of bus stop events (i.e. times when a given bus stopped at a given stop). The idea is to provide a tool that will let people advocate for better transit by seeing how the actual frequency compares to the scheduled frequency. By storing everything in PostGIS it should be really easy to do things like compare median wait times across different neighborhoods or wards.

Tying up loose ends on a couple personal projects. I released theft, a property-based testing library for C, and am working on getting an MQTT client library for very low memory embedded systems ready to release as well. Most of the remaining work is on the documentation.

I’m also finishing up an embedded project’s bootloader, and infrastructure to do reliable firmware upgrades over unreliable packet radio.

I’m finishing my work on subtitle upscaling today, at least for now. I ended up doing a few dirty hacks, like diving into codec-specific private data in FFmpeg, because the information I need to decide when to scale is not exposed through their subtitle API. It seems to work fine on my desktop, but I still need to test it on-device (it’s an embedded product).

In my spare time, I’ve been helping out a friend with his master thesis, which is a recommender for recommender engines (very meta). It extracts certain properties about a dataset of reviews or purchases, and then uses Weka to predict which recommender engines and configurations are likely to work well for this dataset. No idea if it will actually work.

I’ve also been playing with terrain generation, working on a modified diamon-square algorithm to generate height maps for a sphere using the Peirce quincuncial projection.

Last week, I pushed a few more commits to hython (https://github.com/mattgreen/hython).

I started in on classes, objects, and attribute dictionaries. The latter is a key part of Python, so I have some work in front of me to express almost everything else in terms of it. In the process I learned there’s no real magic in implementing OO, just book-keeping. I’ve been accruing technical debt in the parser, so I’m going to have to start paying that down to support method calls properly. (I don’t want to switch away from Parsec, but it might happen.)

I’m also excited to sit down and use the ContT monad to express control flow better, but I need some time to play with it.

More Rust docs. The guide is pretty close to getting finished! Five more sections. I think that means it’ll be wrapped up next week.

I really, really, really need to write a second post for metaphysics.io. I want it to be an introduction to Marx, that doesn’t say it’s about Marx till the end. I also want to write a post about “Disrupting Disruption,” and how ‘disruption’ has a whole lot of negatives associated with it that we don’t talk about.

I’m continuing work on merging MongoDB 2.6 work into TokuMX. It’s not glamorous but it’s well worth doing. The changes in MongoDB 2.6 are largely refactoring efforts, but they’re leading to some good code cleanup (though some is in danger of introducing performance regressions, we’re being really careful about that) and some nice features or general improvements. In particular, the routing in the sharding layer has gotten a lot better, it’s more careful, handles batches much better, and issues operations to multiple shards concurrently, which has the potential for massive throughput improvements, especially for hashed sharding.

i’m trying to do more work on my thesis.

i found this pomodoro thing - https://github.com/tobym/pom - that i think someone posted here - useful for forcing myself to sit and think about stuff.

Spent some time over the weekend finishing up Creek. This week, I’m not working on anything technical outside of the day job. I’m trying to get everything ready before I move to Berkeley in two week’s time to start grad school.

I’m wrapping up a W3C CSS3-compliant tokenizer and parser in Go. The project originally started as a port of LESS to Go but I realized that doing a solid CSS3 parser first would be easier. Ultimately my goal is to make a fast asset pipeline tool (LESS, SASS, Minifier, etc) with zero dependencies. Just download and run.

Continuing to have more fun with OpenBSD and flashrd, as time allows. They gave my Alix board a good refresh.

In my free time I’m starting to mess around more with Rust. I’ve played with it a little bit long ago, but that was long before Cargo and many other new things. I’m not working on anything in particular with it just yet, just re-learning my way through it since I never really developed a feel for it the first time.

At $WORK we are continuing to learn about AWS, preparing to move a project there. Our business is quite spiky, so it’s mainly for peak scaling, but also flexibility in tooling & access for developers.

No projects lined up for home, unless you count working hard at relaxing. Playing board games after work with some colleagues tonight.

Following a friend blogging about taxicab numbers, I spent the evening figuring out a way to do this without much manual intervention. Started off with ruby & sqlite, is currently using bash (hell yeah!) scripts & MySQL as the data store. And maxing out my laptop somewhat as it generates cubes of numbers and adds them together. The SQL query to find a taxicab number for a given value of n sums is pretty quick though, yay for SQL!

For work, some classic Rails app related to airlines, not that fun so far be it’ll become much more interesting when we’ll start crunching big amounts of data.

On the hobby side, I slowed my Clojure readings and now focus on coding instead. I started building some Rails backend with a Clojurescript frontend. So far it’s really fun to code, Om and Clojurescript make the front end much more interesting and meaningful than it used to be. I could do the backend in Clojure instead of Rails but it’s so damn easy to build a basic backend when you’re used to Rails and it allows me to focus on client-side in the meantime.

It also allows me to spark interest for Clojure in my environment, which is mostly choosing Rails + AngularJS for every project no matter what.

Last week I added compression to messages in Fire★. I got distracted doing that instead of working on my secret game FCFODS.

This week I am going to work on the game. Though I am a bit discouraged now reading all the posts about how much money Indie gamers make. Sad really. If I get a 100 bucks out of this, I will be happy. It is that sad.

At work, I’m testing and adding polish to our Ubuntu OpenStack Installer.

At home I have been working on my hacky script to import photos into git-annex and make use of their EXIF GPS metadata to add annex metadata: git-annex-photo-import (github). My idea is to use git-annex views to manage all my photos and the S3 & flickr remotes for backup.

Right now the biggest problem is that views are very slow here’s a short thread on the git-annex forum explaining it, Joey’s plan is apparently to use a sqlite cache DB to index the metadata, but I’m not sure what the status of that is.

BTW, if you have a much better photo management workflow, can you take this public gdocs survey and share what it is? Organizing and archiving photos is such a mess, and I really want to know if anyone’s got it figured out cleanly.

I am taking two weeks of vacations (deserved I may add). I am currently taking a bike ride (I am taking a break at the halfway point, I don’t ride and text) and I hope to keep doing non-CS things and recharge my batteries. I’m also playing Super Ghouls n Ghosts in the evening.

I’m studying Mandarin.

I’m doing a lot of thinking lately, both about personal things, and about things I’d like to fix technically. I have a bunch of projects on the back burner, that I won’t be picking up this week. If I do write any code, it’ll likely be experimenting with Cairo to build some simple visualization tools which can be utilized in command pipelines.

I wrote this awful one-liner the other day and wanted to append | linegraph to it and have it spit out a PNG to see what it looked like, but that proved trickier than I had hoped.

grep -C 1 '%MEM' pidstat.144731 | grep -v '%MEM' | grep -v -E "^$" | grep -E -v "^--" | awk '{while ( ("date +%s --date=\"07/31/2013 "$1"PM\"" | getline result) > 0 ) { print result" "$8 } }'

I’m working on getting Whitane Tech. , my go consulting business off the ground. I’ve got my first client (a startup using app engine) and I’m putting together a company site using hugo. The website needs work.

I’m writing a case study for switching to go based off a post I wrote previously. I’m hoping people looking to adopt go can use my case studies to get buy-in from the rest of their team.

I plan on quitting my day job by the end of the year. I’m writing down my goal in public to help force myself to commit. Wish me luck!

I’m working on an API which will index white papers for keywords and full-text search and let you retrieve urls for those papers via the API. Building it using Elasticsearch and Go for the webserver.

Massive piles of refactors at $WORK, par for the course.

Learning O'Caml in my spare time and putting together a minimal website for making training schedules for a race (running), based on a given date.

The TREC Microblog Track.

I’m working on the Tweet Timeline Generation task, while my colleague is working on the ad-hoc search task.

I also created a set of Go bindings for the Thrift server used.