Ask HN: What are you working on tonight? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you working on tonight?

75 pointsdzlobin234 comments

What's everybody working on right now? I'll start:

I'm putting together a quick custom todo list app to organize my main project, because I'm not happy with the vanilla one in Basecamp.

What about you?

View on HN

Improving HN's performance. Voting is horribly expensive. That wasn't a problem originally but it's starting to become one now that there are so many users.

how many users are we up to?

11492 accounts, many of them inactive of course. There are more users than that, because many users lurk for a while before creating accounts. We now get around 45k unique visitors on weekdays.

awesome, out of curiosity, what kind of server is HN running on? edit: guy below me who maxed out the thread, server not language

It's a server written in arc.

as of ~a year ago: "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1"

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516118

It's still that one. We were starting to spend too much time gcing once everything got lazily loaded, but a few days ago I started throwing stuff out of memory and now it looks like we've got performance back into the tolerable range.

http://hnstatus.net/

One day, I will be able to load my saved items...

Wow, no kidding. And I'm certain items are missing from the beginning of the list. I know they're still saved somewhere, because I can't upmod those articles.

I feel like upvoting your comment because that sounds interesting and concerning everyone here, but I don't want to be part of the problem!

You're not. You're helping him test his improvements

Got an email from Microsoft -- I discovered a new bug in their F# compiler that breaks my startup app. I'm the first to find this fairly significant bug. I should be so proud.

So now I'm deciding how best to hack up my code to get around the bug.

Can't say I'm very happy about where I am, but I'll get it fixed soon enough.

It's very cool being on the cutting edge, as long as you don't bleed too much!

ooh... what bug? and are you doing f# for web or just f#?

I was going to blog about it tomorrow (never ruin a good chance to blog)

Basically for some reason F# barfs on large types, say types with 500 fields in them. I think the breaking point is 300 or so. There's also another bug that I'll save for the blog entry.

Microsoft was responsive as hell -- I had an email response within minutes and the engineer and I were emailing back and forth all afternoon. I was very impressed. The F# dev guys rock, even though I'm not happy at all with having a broken app.

yeah - that's been my experience too. the few times i've dealt with them, they've been back at me in hours tops. hopefully that'll continue despite them hitting RC

The odd thing was that the code was working in 2010Beta, but fell completely apart in 2010RC. It was a case of upgrading the IDE and having my app crash and burn. First thing we did was up the stack size, but no matter how big we made the stack, it didn't work.

interesting. well - we had the same problem with ndjango. worked fine with beta, crapped out with rc. that, and the shifty api is getting annoying. their last minute shift away from ocaml naming was pretty annoying.

That's because you are working on their bleeding edge software, if you are working on old platforms, usually they would just mark your bug report as "won't fix".

Winning National Novel Writing Month. I know that NaNoWriMo is in November, but I reserve the right to change February into another November in my personal timeline. I just have 618 words left. I've never written anything longer than about twenty pages before, and no fiction, so this was really a new and exciting experience for me. To my surprise, the book is actually pretty fun to read; I was expecting it to suck. I didn't know that any of this was even possible for me. This really has been an amazing month, and I look forward to doing it again when the official November comes around.

(On a more nerdy note, none of the existing word processors really felt right to me, so I'm using a text format of my own devising, a python script to convert it into TeX with the memoir document class, and emacs. And org-mode to handle the story notes. It's remarkably pleasant, and it was a fun way of procrastinating. Much like writing this post.)

Try Scrivener. http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

I hear that Scrivener is good, but I don't always use a mac, and I'm a starving college student. I like having something free that I can use over SSH in a pinch.

Good for you :) please post it when it's done. I got a chuckle out of the python/Tex thing - I was chatting with a friend recently about how we both want to start writing, but none of the writing apps feel right, if only there was a markdown-simple native mac app that would spit out latex, etc etc. We ended up agreeing we'd probably spend more time on the app than actually writing - kudos on doing both.

I think you're overestimating how long it would take to get something usable put together, if you're only trying to make it usable by you. It took me about one hour to write the python scripts, and another hour to learn the appropriate LaTeX document class, and then I just opened up Aquamacs and started typing.

(A nice advantage of this is that I programmed it to tell me how far I've gotten on my daily word goals. I don't know any word processor that does exactly this, and it's really handy.)

Working on my awesome blogging software. Here's the gorgeous coming soon page: http://www.heyreverie.com. Email me if you're frustrated with Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. and I'd love to have you test my site before I make it public.

I thought you were being sarcastic, but that is indeed gorgeous.

Thank you! Took a lot of time and work. And the landing page is pure art, serves no purpose whatsoever. Still a lot of fun.

Nice artwork on the landing page!

email you where? i'm interested in testing it out.

abii @ stanford.edu

I have absolutely no idea what the app will look like, but that landing page is absolutely drop dead gorgeous.

If for some reason you need a theme song: http://blog.purepistos.net/index.php/2009/03/18/debussy-reve... :)

Thanks for all the comments on the artwork :]

Tonight? Nothing aside from routine email. I need a mental health day.

Saturday? Nothing aside from routine email. 10 hours of day job followed by going out with friends to karaoke.

Sunday: Church, gym, minimum viable achievement system in Rails (was supposed to happen last Sunday but I broke site -- scratch one work day), A/B tests incorporating it, deploy live, blog post about solo founderhood.

I hope to finish the Rails Tutorial (http://www.railstutorial.org/) and then begin reading (and experimenting with) Agile Web Developing with Rails (http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Programmer...).

I'm localising the latest Flash game I sold, I was fortunate enough to get a good price and a great buyer on it. It's a ton of work setting up their multilingual and branding requirements but I have to get it done tonight, I got bogged down on my little startup (http://www.swfstats.com/) all week and next week I'm off to San Francisco for the Flash Gaming Summit so that really only leaves today and worst case scenario some of tomorrow to get this sorted out. : )

This is my game: http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701....

11:23pm

2:30am and dare I say it .... progress!

Drawing Feynman diagrams for my Modern Physics class. Here's the link to the assignment if you want to join in the fun: http://phys309.physics.tamu.edu/PA5.pdf

Thanks HN for the great timing on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150224

I'm writing a local HTTP proxy that connects to a remote JAWs [1] server, so that users behind a proxy that blocks proxy requests can still get to an unfiltered Internet.

[1] http://github.com/jrockway/jaws

Entities that think they can censor the Internet amuse me.

the same thing we do every night, pinky... plotting to take over the world... this time with a shivaplug.

Maybe the upcoming revision will tip the balance. ;-)

The baby my wife had on Tuesday, I guess. We just got home.

Congratulations. :)

Working on a Clojure client for Facebook:

http://www.github.com/myfit/clj-facebook/

Writing an iPhone app / webapp for givingturtle.org to release before SXSW. For that matter, for anyone looking for something worthwhile to spend a few hours on, let me know...

Documentation. Or if my eyeballs start falling out from that, a mass mailing engine in PHP for use on commodity-type PHP hosting. (For non-evil purposes, I promise.)

Working on a quickie startup using a domain name I've had since '03 which is foreverlist.com. It's a paid classified ads site where, for $5, you can list an ad with unlimited images that never expires and which you can change to anything at any time.

So, as an example, you have a classic car which just sits in your garage collecting dust. You're somewhat interested in selling it, but only for the right price, and definitely don't want to fuss with relisting the ad every 30 or 60 days like ebay, craigslist or kijiji. So, one day you sell the car and then want to sell your snowblower. Just change the listing.

Cheaper than ebay's fees by far, less hassle than CL or kijiji. The $5 keeps out the spammers and scammers. Yeah, I know, it's extremely saturated but like I said, it's a quickie.

I'd love to hear the reasoning behind down-voting this. In a thread with 225 comments, only my post and one making a pun about gays is down-voted to 0. If you have something to say, say it. sheesh

I was wondering the same thing

Reviewing the more esoteric Category Theory bits of Haskell.

A (commercial) Haskell + C project kicks off on March 4th.

I am looking forward to my first major project in Haskell but it will be hectic once it starts and I won't have too much time for lazing around or reading :-(.

Enjoying the last few days of peace :-)

I finished up a lexical analyzer I was writing in Ruby for a pascal variant we're using throughout the semester in my Compilers class. Now it's done and submitted, so time to relax and have a cup of tea before I start considering writing the parser.

This sounds like real fun! My compilers class was a joke, we made it as far as generating ASTs, then the semester ended. Laughable.

Me too. Writing code to minimize DFAs. Personal project, though. Not a student any more.

Drinking...

...water.

lipton green tea

Spanish beer

I'm trying to get laid, actually. And failing thus far :/

My interactive search engine for short available domains: http://www.nxdom.com/

I'm working to bring the advanced weighted sort order back, but optional so that new users can play with the simple sort order until they understand what it does. Work in progress is here, and full source code: http://master.latest.scoretool.appspot.com/ http://github.com/jcrocholl/nxdom

My 2-year-old son doesn't want to go to sleep yet, so he's climbing around on me while I write this.

FWIW, On Ubuntu/Chrome, the 'find available domains, starts with and ends with' lines are all on top of each other.

Thank you, I see what you mean. The headline wraps because the font is too wide on Ubuntu (in Firefox too), hope to fix it soon.

Very, very cool app. Nice job.

nxdom - awesome!

Submitting our latest film to IMDB: http://2soc.net/americancafe

A Python compiler using Flex, Bison and C++.

Is this for CS164 at Berkeley? It sounds like the 164 project.

Yep, Hilfinger is teaching the class this semester.

Email me (or better yet, put some sort of contact in your profile). I'd like to talk to you about something.

Contact info is now in my profile (via my website)

Thanks!

are you gonna post the code on the web at any point?

Probably not, simply because it is a project for a class.

A website for people to post latin texts, collaboratively annotate them with grammer information, and read both.

What's the site? I have a couple of latin grad student friends that would probably enjoy that.

It's not in any state for public use yet. The UI is very buggy, and the annotation system doesn't support more than the latin equivalent of "See Spot Run".

Starting an artisan-bread "sponge" which is a starter for the bread I hope to bake tomorrow (have started trying to teach myself to cook/bake). With cooking, you can pretty much cover yourself if you don't do something right; baking is much more of a "discipline"...

Hacker wise, thinking about ways to use Twitter and Facebook after listening to the recent Mixergy interview about it (Vanderchuyk? I think). I have a friend with a profitable site but it has stagnated and he has asked me to think about ways to improve it.

Working on a new website for a client to help pay for the bootstrapping of my own startup. Getting to mess around with a custom mootools carousel with some nice UX stuff goin on.

I scratched an itch today while collecting research materials. I had trouble keeping track of all the pages I was referencing, quotes I liked, etc.

So I made an app and then open sourced it: http://github.com/pplante/yourcached.info

Not totally finished yet. Waiting on DNS to resolve so I can add FBConnect to it and spread the word.

I only spent 4 hours on this so far. So it wasn't a complete distraction from what I needed to do...not yet at least!

Oooops, forgot the screenshot: http://grab.by/2GVy

Just made a little jQuery plugin:

http://github.com/zef/jquery_form_toggle

It makes it easy to show and hide elements based on the state of a checkbox, radio button, or select menu.

Demo: http://madebykiwi.com/files/jquery_form_toggle/

I'd be surprised if there isn't something like this out there already, but I couldn't find one.

If you have a suggestion for a better name, I'd be happy to hear it.

chide? It's a real word, but also mix of checkbox and hide.

I'm working on a Flash game using Flixel for a contest on Newgrounds. There haven't been many submissions so I'm basically just trying to get it done by the deadline :)

http://emp.ly/ - a job posting and sharing tool for hiring via social networks.

P.S. Don't forget: It's the last few days to apply 4 many startup incubators: http://shrt.st/cs7 (NYC Seedstart, Openfund, i/o ventures, Sproutbox, YC). Great chance to learn from best of the best. Also let me know if I have missed any from the list.

I'm going to see if I can make zlib a little faster with some SSE intrinsics.

Working on a JSON stream parser in AS3, reading data with flash.net.URLStream, for loading up GPS data progressively. The JSON for a ride like this (http://ridewithgps.com/trips/2000) is about 300k, and I think it will look much cooler if it draws as it downloads.

This sounds very interesting. Will it be open source?

My project: a "Foursquare meets Mafia Wars" game. You claim a real location, name it and defend it. Generate virtual currency over time and spend it on weapons. The code is complete and the family will be running some tests this weekend. Next, we will invite a few friends, get some feedback and figure out the next steps.

Interesting. I had a flash of real violence breaking out over the game.

There is a merge lane right out my window in NY. Horns honk all day, due to narrowly missed disasters, and occationally theres some contact. Soooooo, I pointed a webcam out my window and created the http://WorstMergeLaneEver.com

Writing a distributed control system in Io for my robot I'll take to the Sparkfun UAV competition.

As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.

The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.

Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape.

This thread looks pretty crowded already, but I'll throw this in anyways.

I'm adding a few screenshots to my part of my team's presentation. We have a program review tomorrow (today).

My project: http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet/

Working on my online game. Hopefully it will be more in a playable condition soon enough !

Trying to learn Django by coding up a new project and working on an existing PHP site.

Right now... adding some features to an internal application at work in C# (im at work).

Later tonight though, I should be preparing for my hiking trip tomorrow, and possibly working on some RSS indexing that someone I know wants for their website.

Playing Starcraft with my wife, exploring a new tactic, inspired by the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150669

And taking care of my 2-month-old.

aw that's awesome. your baby must be asleep now :)

Finishing up final negotiations on a licensing deal for some of the mapping functionality on ridewithgps.com -- original lawyerspeak in the agreement had too stiff of a non-compete.

Also, put up an issues page for users to publicly register feature requests and bugs, and then comment and vote on them. The idea is that we get alot of duplicate feature requests and reports of errata that take alot of time to personally respond to. By letting users see something is already registered, they can just upvote it and we have one less person to directly contact.

Tonight's projects included A/B testing, practicing piano, and making a delicious sausage pizza.

I'm currently considering jumping on the Feynman diagrams posted by dwwoelfel, because I kind of miss doing them.

Studying for a Computer Architecture mid-term on Tuesday. I got to program a little bit of a RESTful API for a big school project earlier today though, so the day isn't a total loss.

I'm actually poring over the list of projects that I'd like to get done one of these days, seeing if there's anything I can get some traction on with just an hour or two of work. I should be sleeping. I have a job interview in 8 hours. Well, by "job interview" I mean I'm talking to yet another headhunter. Mostly to satisfy the unemployment benefit requirement that I meet with at least 3 companies per week. I really don't feel like doing mid-term contract work without benefits.

Creating marketing brochures with html, so that I can use css to create a consistent feel across all of them. There's probably a much better way to do this, but I need them for next week.

To do it, I'm using webkit2png to make a png from the html page, and prawn to automatically put the png into a pdf. The whole thing is 6 lines of ruby (which uses python, then prawn), and it's working well so far, but I've had to fuss with the scaling so that it prints without pixelating.

Adobe Fireworks might be a good tool for you.

If we're going to be using Adobe apps, I would have thought InDesign would be more suitable.

Trying to find a vt100 emulator for lisp . . . not working out so great. Or is it? I just remembered emacs had one . . . reading the source code now . . . god help me.

Trying to get the video done for our YC app. We're seriously bad at saying anything cool or interesting on camera... all we can do so far is laugh at each other. :)

Give yourself a 15 minute deadline. Take whatever video is the best when 15 minutes are up.

Deployed a small app to appengine , to send voice messages via IM using twilio. Mainly to send my wife important messages without having to dial from work phone.

I was sleeping when this was posted, but now I'm working on a consulting project (embedding an existing game into OpenSocial and Facebook apps). Once I finish with that for the week, I'll carry on building the prototype for our SSD-based I/O caching driver. I'm hoping we can finally make that do something useful over the weekend.

Listening to jazz, hacking on an iPhone game.

Working on multiplayer Minesweeper, web-based: http://sweepminer.com

Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect), it's pretty crappy currently)

Just got back from the YC meetup in Seattle!

I am working on a fantasy sports business. To be specific, this evening of work had to do not with building features but with actually mending relationships busted up by good ole email miscommunication. My advice is to say what you have to say on the phone or in person. Leave emotional discussions off of paper/email.

It's 6.16 am now, and yesterday night I went to bed early so I could work on my projects this morning. So far I've written a guest post for my blog (since 5 am) and I'll now work on the backend of a bog engine I wrote myself in rails. I'll probably do many other things before 9 am where I'll start my day-work.

Live jazz hip-hop at a local bar, no cover

Just had dinner with my girlfriend. Now finishing up this months pro-bono work to clear my plate for next month.

Not yet night here, but I'm just finishing writing up a heat-mapping multi-user system for work.

I should also be working on 10 other programming projects that are due by april 1st, and 2 other personal projects as well, but don't seem to have the time nor inclination.

I think I want to go with MikeMacMan's suggestion and drink. =)

Copy for my current project: http://readwarp.com. I'm trying to come up with three short sentences for the front page to describe a) What it is, b) What it can do for you, c) What you should do next.

If you can figure out what it does, you tell me :)

You should definitely make a <title> for the page

Absolutely. I just added a title that updates with the stories. I've also added a (ugly) favicon so it's easy to distinguish from other tabs. Thanks for the suggestion.

A raytracer as part of a class project.

Raytracers are fun. Tonight I'm hopefully going to start threading my (slow) real-time raytracer. I've never done threading before, and I'm very interested in seeing how the performance plays out, what strategy I should use to optimize cache usage and generally getting stuck in with what has always been an interesting topic to me.

Using CouchDB to set up various payment methods for a personal project. The schemaless stuff is great.

Working on my word-learning application. Partly to learn Dutch (though the program can be reused for any pair of languages, with some features (irregular verb forms) making it more suitable for Germanic languages - Dutch, English, German etc), partly to get experience with C#.

Trying to deal with hotel issues that come up at the 11th hour of negotiations for my 'Rails 3 on the Beach' event I am hosting in Jamaica in August.

Things never go as planned...I know computers can be difficult to deal with some times, but people are even more unpredictable.

Finishing touches on porting my chinese checkers game to Android. It is mostly an exercise in writing a HTML 5 app for Android, as I don't expect many people to be interested in chinese checkers. Then, start working on the next Android app.

The Plan: Finish documenting the little i18n library for .NET that I built last week and release it open source.

The Reality: It's 95 degrees here in Cartagena and my fingers are sweating onto the keyboard. Cuba Libres sound like a much more viable option.

Playing with bottle.py and Twilio

Gutting ADODB from the IMVU website to eliminate pointless data conversions and several hundred microseconds from each cached query.

I love being able to refactor the database layer, relying on automated tests to prevent me from taking down the site.

Playing around with streaming video and Adobe Stratus, and contemplating making my own Chatroulette-like site.

Let me know how well it (doesn't) work: http://cam-mash.appspot.com/listen

working on a similar idea.. :) maybe we should collaborate

Sounds interesting. Shoot me an e-mail with more about what you're working on?

Merging the code I wrote on the road last week with the main tree on the dev box.

Working on photo upload in a new web app I'm working on. It spawns ImageMagick to do the conversion into multiple photos of different sizes. I had doubts about this until I read that it's the technique Flickr uses.

Here's something you might find interesting Gamma error in picture scaling http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

Learning Clojure (by reading Programming Clojure) - oh and trying to setup VimClojure and failing miserably (file detection is working, but everything else including syntax highlighting & indentation isn't).

- ask on freenode #clojure, the guy who wrote vimClojure hangs out pretty frequently

- the suggested "least stress" alternatives are netBeans/enclojure or emacs via ELPA/swank-clojure

Packing to drive from Los Angeles to San Jose tomorrow. Spending the weekend watching friends' movies at Cinequest film festival.

Also meeting with a friend in SJ about a facebook app idea we've been kicking around forever.

Working on my web based jukebox project: http://github.com/trevorturk/kzak

I'm dropping Bundler support right now because it's still broken in so many ways ;(

Studying IA for my exam tomorrow. Fortunately, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition)" is a great book. (I said fortunately because I need to read half of it tonight - I`m half done).

I'm in the process of leaving my job to start my first company, so my time tonight is split between writing wiki articles for my soon-to-be-ex coworkers and creating a minimally viable product.

Hey, me too. It's my last day. It's way out of my comfort zone, but I realized if I don't take these risks now, I never will. I'm oscillating between excited and horrified.

Best of luck to you.

This Friday night, I'll be working on getting the Orlando Defcon Group together at Stardust Coffee and Video @ 7pm.

This will be the first time the group has convened since it was marked inactive in 2006.

I'm setting up a development environment to work on writing a FTP search engine tomorrow afternoon. It's a new laptop (new to me, Thinkpad T30), so it's not all perl'd up yet.

Putting the finishing touches on the app I wrote this week, a co-founder finder.

I also got a Droid this afternoon, so I've been having a hard time avoiding the distracting shiny, shiny new toy.

cool - I bought the domain 'FounderStar.com' with the intention of building a site like this. but at the moment I'm too busy with other sites. If you're interested in the domain let me know - either way, I'd be happy to give input or try out anything you deploy...

Make sure you test the voice quality when you speak into the microphone: https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630...

Finishing up a few homework assignments then keep on teaching myself Lisp. I probably should learn a bit more LaTeX at the rate i'm inserting equations in Google docs though.

trying to make my way to Brussels, stuck overnight in Chicago due to a maintenance issue followed by a domestic dispute followed by over the maximum time for the crew.

A building thermal performance model written in Octave/MATLAB.

Working through pickaxe ruby, tinkering with lisp program to decode pcap files and explain packets/protocols, keeping an eye on the Cluster, figuring out xen.

Looking into memcache http://bit.ly/ceIa49 Beepl's (django) eating up 400MB of mem/apache process. :-(

Btw, it worked - beepl's now fast like a rocketship!

Signals and Systems problem set http://mit.edu/6.003/S10/www/handouts/hw3.pdf

MVP on GAE. Minimum Viable Product on Google App Engine.

That's so GAE.

I know you meant it as a joke, and it is indeed clever. However, usage of 'gay' as a pejorative is kind of offensive to some of us. Please be careful with your puns.

Edit: Seriously, guys, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here. What's with the downvotes?

Civility has nothing to do with it. It was a not-so-clever pun. I wasn't actually using it as a pejorative. That should be painfully obvious.

It was a pun on a pejorative use of the word - if you disagree, look up "pejorative".

At the risk of seeming "PC" to oversensitive folks, using social identities as pejoratives is inherently insulting; you're associating their racial/sexual/etc. identity with something undesirable, even if you don't think of it as a slur. "Gay" to mean stupid or annoying is of a piece with terms like "gyp", "indian-giver", or "nigger-rig".

EXCEPT THAT I WASN'T USING IT AS A PEJORATIVE. Jesus fucking christ, this isn't "PC" this is just stupid.

You weren't using it as a pejorative, but your pun was based on its use as a pejorative.

And? Some guy posted using the word "nigger". He may not be calling people "nigger", but he used a word that is racially insensitive! Booga booga!

Jesus.

This has less to do with political correctness, and more the idea that posts like yours are just kind of annoying. The tone makes the site seem a lot less civil. It didn't add anything to the thread. Now all we have is you acting very annoyed that we didn't like your joke.

Humor is encouraged on Hacker News, but only when it is actually funny. Your joke wasn't funny.

Yes, it was funny to no one. This is why the comment has +5.

A designer friend and I will likely play with a redesign of some mutual friends' university club's website.

EDIT: And then I notice that this was posted yesterday. :)

Was running database migrations. I'm now rolling back.

Filling out paperwork to commit to more bandwidth from our colocation facility as the monthly overages are getting high.

Guess you gotta spend money to make money :-|

I am fixing JMathPlot exception so that we can use it for my graduation project (brazos.cs.tcu.edu) Those 3D graphics will look really good !!!

I'm working on initialization scripts for my VPS: automatically taking it from newborn to installed infrastructure and security settings.

And a glass of bourbon.

Linode StackScripts?

simpler, just # do this # do this # do this. On slice. May do something like StackScripts later.

building riak on a couple ubuntu 9.10 virtual servers. checking mem usage n 32bit vs 64bit for a new project. riak > node.js > jquery.

Hacking on a GitHub client for Palm's webOS.

http://robmerrell.github.com/gitopotamus/

Building a barebones game framework for HTML5 Canvas. Or at least, decoupling the reusable pieces of code from a game I've been building.

I'm writing a Bit Error Rate simulator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_error_rate

Sleeping, I hope. I haven't slept a full night for a while.

G'night.

NOW: Working to pay rent

TONIGHT: Adding graphical reporting into Femtoo.com (to view graphs of change history of trackers)...and then getting drunk.

Beer.

The serial interface for the MIPS microprocessor that I am going to be spending the rest of the semester implementing on an FPGA.

Adding more polls into my photo poll page @ http://i-am-bored.in/polls/

Writing a Python photomosaic generator, and an iPhone app for my university bus system (iPhone apps seem to be popular tonight).

Editing a new interview I did earlier in the evening with Steve Welch on getting traction. Hoping to upload and post it today.

Working on getting data to be more easily imported for http://graphbug.com

Continuing to hack away at my Footy Tipping site... the start of the season is casting demonic shadows over my shoulder...

Watching some cloudera videos. http://www.cloudera.com/videos

Trying to figure out how to query the UMLS metathesaurus's WebService (Soap 1.2) API using Ruby. Not having much luck :(

Working to get one step closer to nirvana :)

Debating adding the deals from my iDealyzer iPhone/Android apps to the supporting website hoping it will help SEO.

Building a hotel site. Fixing some irritating join statements when searching by station name (it's for Tokyo).

Reverse engineering a C++ game and patching it. The usual thing fans do to fix their favourite broken games :)

Writing copy for webpages of a service that helps ecommerce sites with high chargeback rates reduce fraud.

Just spent 2 hours rehearsing the Verdi Requiem. Next up is probably looking at a FreeBSD Errata Notice.

Writing a lab report for my lab class. I'm using electron diffraction to measure the Planck constant.

Making my current project -- a hierarchical outliner -- support multiple documents and user accounts

Working on the new financial reporting requirements and preparing my financial courses startup.

Working on my Google AppEngine based website. I hope to launch by the end of this month.

Aggregating http log data (request timing, custom fields) in redis. To be open-sourced.

Backing out the latest changes we spent the week building because it "wasn't right".

Been working on a new bug/ticket tracker for a while... Continuing to do so :)

Real C# support for Thrift, consisting of WCF metadata providers and channels.

A web interface for MongoDB.

Working on chapter two of a book I am writing on how to increase conversion

Searching my email / Paypal accounts for orphaned / unlogged receipts.

Finishing up a presentation for code show and tell at work tomorrow.

Creating fixture data for an old project with no test coverage.

I'm working on my "day" job. Ask this again on the weekend :p

Fixing stupidity, tagging plugins for the cakephp framework.

Seriosuly using cakephp? .......why?!

SOAP, WS-BPEL, and supply-chain modeling in Common Lisp :-/

trying a programming puzzle on rosettacode http://rosettacode.org/wiki/24_game/Solve

Trying to get the hang of the Furnace webframework.

Deploying a tiny, tiny app onto a public server...

not a virus, I hope

getting over some kind of sickness (generic cold, perhaps, but it hit hard) and working on setting up my new 55g saltwater reef aquarium.

hooray hobbies

Alternately learning twisted and writing software

Just finished plugging memory leaks.

Coverscans, coverscans, coverscans.

Preparing for admissions interview.

Helping a friend start a business.

Patent office action response.

TronBot

MW2

ZumoDrive.

Learning to use Joomla.

working on my future...

I'm working on Forrst.

starring at my phone

A better database.

writing a SGML parser for a search engine :-P

chrome extensions.... still.

playing around with android

bug fixin'

Working on our backup path. I run some Limbo[1] code using Windows Scheduled Tasks. This copies the contents of My Documents and Desktop (or wherever) to a Venti[2] server running on Linux on the LAN. The storage arenas of that server are extracted in 500Mb chunks and encrypted, along with the scores for accessing them, using GPG[3]. These are then copied offsite, via the internet and bundled into DVD sized groups and burned to optical when appropriate. As Venti arenas are append only this is minimum transfer, secure backup. That's obviously just the Windows machiens that use Limbo. Unix likes have native clients. Our Venti store also contains data from other soruces such as the website and imap servers. Though it might make sense to separate them out, that's the decisions I'm working on as I go along.

I would also like to find an encryption method that uses fixed size chunks so I can upload only the appended data. That's something I need to look more into. I know they are around somewhere.

[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ [2] http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html [3] http://www.gnupg.org/

Trying to catch up on way too much Elance work while watching the Olympics... oh and watching Lost that I missed the other day.

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