Desperate...sort of

I'm back from holidays, and I just scan the blogs and don't get started with work. A year or so ago I stopped reading usenet, and now it's blogs... Anyway, finally I did start work, and then almost got desperate over my brain not immediately wrapping itself around every line of code of that smallish programm I'm supposed to extend (in a way rather cross to its design).

At the same time I wonder why I read so much about Haskell et al where I should be wanting to do some work with it. I got it into my head to attend the haskell workshop end of september which is conveniently located quite close this year.

I even got the strange idea of giving a talk there, about solving a relatively specific communication problem in haskell. Problem: I haven't used haskell for more than ten minutes yet and thus doesn't have hardly any idea how to implement it at any level, the submission deadline is in mid of june, and I have sufficient urgent real work on my desk to fill most of may.

So if I'd be any serious about that I should be prototyping haskell like crazy instead of continuing to read blogs, shouldn't I? Seems not... At least I'm not alone with programmers block.

And they I am not sure about the motivation for the workshop. See exciting things, maybe get a gig, or both? I suspect mostly academia there, so not much of a commercial opportunity.

So many ideas, so little time, and drive.

Synchronizing

It is a longstanding problem of how to really synchronize mail folder, schedules etc. between home and mobile computers. Again, I can't remember who observed that originally. But the problem is about to dissolve instead of being solved, simply by being always online and no longer needing multiple replicas of one's data.

Now, a similar thing has happened before: There has been tremendous effort to make precise clocks as these were needed to get exact coordinates in ship navigation. You were on sea for months and did not want more than a minute of error. Then radio came and soon allowed worldwide transmission, and the need for mobile precision clocks disappeared.

Spell checking

A blog post completely irrelevant to this topic complained that some software's spell checker did not know firefox and some others. Reminds me primarily that I practically never used them. The wiggly red line just had too many false positives. I seem to have a rather good spell checker built in anyway, and I wondered what an external checker would do to the internal one.

I found a strange analogy. This year I had a hiking stick (of the old-fashioned kind), and in the mountains it still had snow. The stick proved very useful to keep the balance crossing small snow fields, or, more exactly: It made me feel saver, but it damaged my ability to cross them without its help.

Although this analogy is quite probably limping, I shall continue to stay away from spell checkers. And let haskell check my spells.