It had to happen sooner or later. This blog has been open, with a somewhat regular publication in English since March 2008, more or less a year ago. Before that, it was more sporadic, and used to be in Catalan, just to output some ideas or share a picture with a friend.
And the day had to come. To celebrate this approximate anniversary, I’m moving to my own domain and preparing a new look that will appear in about two weeks.
It is a widely accepted theory that the use of tools determined the development of the human brain. Nowadays, using tools is thus a quite common endeavor everybody does.
But ask a carpenter if he would use a jagged saw, or a draftsman a broken pencil. It is not only using the tools, but using the best tools.
But what is for the best tools? Using the best possible tools is not enough: you need to love your tools.
The pleasure and pain of time management In this post I’ll review some time management systems to get the most out of your workday. Of course, keep in mind that you also should have rest time.
Start strong Start your day doing some work for at least half an hour straight. You can do this at home, before leaving yo your office (if you usually spend at least 1h between getting up and leaving) or just on arriving to your office.
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m on my way to learn forth, and to do so, rewrite my Lispy raytracer into a.. Forthy raytracer. Of course, the first steps are deciding on some implementation ideas.
I decided to allocate a few global variables (for “current point”, “current vector”, “light source”, etc), to avoid too much clutter in the stack. This way it will be cleaner, maybe even cleaner than my Lisp version.
After following a twitter feed about programming, I got overwhelmed by FORTH related posts. I had already read something about forth before (stack-based, somewhat fast, good for embedded devices), but so many bit.ly links pointing to webs of implementations of FORTH and FORTH things made me decide to, well, take a deeper look.
Looks like a nice language, having something I enjoy about Lisp (interactivity) and something I like about PostScript (stack based).
The easiest way to debug: valgrind with the most powerful text editor: emacs A few days ago my office mate told me about the great debugging tool known as valgrind. Before I have been using the great pairing of emacs+gdb to debug segmentation faults and memory leaks… Now I would never use gdb for this. Moreover, I found a way to somewhat use it from within a shell in emacs to allow fast error browsing.