Tao of Mac

Mar 13th 2014 · 2 min read · #hobbies #personal #status

Early Spring

Has it really been a month already?

In between a number of changes at work, another bout of eye trouble (it seems my seasonal allergies have found different ways to taunt me) a marked increase in and the upcoming Codebits event (which I’m helping steer towards greatness by dint of wrangling blog posts there), it’s been a hectic time.

Things of note, in no particular order:

  • I’ve got a bunch of new things to do, including a twist on community/developer/partner management that I’ll eventually be able to write about somewhere (things are still coalescing at the office, so I won’t go into details yet).
  • I’ve actually been writing a fair bit (for my own purposes, that is), but in Day One, which is so pleasant to use I’ve been mulling ways of using it to post here without relying on their newfangled public service (it might be easy and nicely implemented, but I agree with Marco Arment where being your own platform is concerned).
  • In that spirit, I’ve been poking at yaki-tng to the point where it’s nearly ready to take over this site, and were it not for the siren call of doing it all in it would probably be finished by now. That, of course, and all the rest around it, like my having picked up a NetBeans plugin for Clojure and doing tiny snippets of code in every day.
  • I’m about halfway through the Stanford Machine Learning course, which turned out to be rather fun in the sense that I’m revisiting Octave, which is much better than I remembered from ages ago. That in turn led me to start tackling Project Euler, and when thrown together with the above has led me to go out and grab even more academic papers to read.
  • My new hardware-related hobby is building a Raspberry Pi cluster to keep hacking on Hazelcast and trying out distributed versions of a bunch of algorithms. I’m currently lacking the time to wire up a few 10cm Ethernet cable shims so I can put it in a lunchbox-sized container and leave it running 24/7, after which I expect things will start to go faster.
  • As a sideline, I’ve been trying to build Firefox OS for the – albeit without significant success – and keeping track of the native Inferno port. The former stopped making sense pursuing a couple of days ago (after I realized I’d need to go a fair bit deeper than I intended to get a fresh trunk building), but there’ll be a post on Inferno someday soon.

Last but not least (and tangentially related to my interest in Firefox OS) I’ve been doing some really wicked things with and in the field of digital signage that will eventually see the light at Codebits 2014. Paradoxically, that also involved a slight detour into and , which would have been OK were it not for Eclipse.

But let’s not go there. Suffice it to say that I’ve had my hands full for a month and everything’s reasonably OK (were it not for my really needing to get a better feel of what’s happening in the mobile industry these days – I still miss it terribly, just as I miss speaking English every day).

But going out with the kids trumps all of the above, and the weather’s been improving to a point where it’s pretty obvious that everything else will have to take a back seat for a while. Who knows, I might even take up photography again.

Onwards, then, to Springtime.