chip the glasses

glass, soap, etc. … especially in Scotland, but only upon such rocks

“In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition.”
– alfred north whitehead, process and reality

I have completed my senior thesis project at earlham college.

It is stored in its entirety (code+paper) at github; although if you’d prefer a PDF over tex source there’s that too.

Here’s the video of my presentation (accompanying slides):

I’ll be graduating college in December (thesis willing) and, as if retiring, have a growing list of things I want to ‘get to.’

1. FreeBSD on Lovecraft (sticking with linux)
2. Better music streaming on Lovecraft
3. Upgrade Kafka to Karmic/KDE4.3
4. roll my own Ubuntu for my eee901 (used karmic alt-installer)
5. make a webcomic
6. take piano lessons
7. start a hacker house (scheduled for this month)
8. wake up at 7a every day
9. learn Haskell
10. learn OCaml
11. Revisit Scheme
12. Design a functional language that is a proper subset of Perl perhaps I should actually become a better functional programmer first

I have a monstrous preference for darcs over any other kind of version control. I love its interface, the theory behind it, and the fact that it’s written in Haskell.

However, I’ve fallen in love with github. It’s one of the slickest, most useful web interfaces I’ve ever used. It alone has made me start to learn and use git (albiet begrudgingly).

I’m in my final semester of my time at earlham college, which means it’s senior capstone time. We were encouraged to look over other computer science major’s past projects and work logs, stored in the departmental wiki and student webpages, respectively. I noticed that most students, when expected to regularly update an .html file in the midst of classwork and general procrastination, updated 3 or 4 times and then never touched their log again.

I had considered using this blog for my worklog (just using some tag to group it together) but decided that as long as that manual need was there I would be lax in updating. It occurred to me that I had been planning from the beginning of the semester to use github to store my code; while sitting in class the other day I realized I could just tell my professor to look at my commit log.

I then realized that, if all the students in my class were using github, our professor could just subscribe to the feed of all of our commit logs and immediately assess all of our performance.

So, thus, we have all been mandated to put our papers and coding projects in git repositories for the world to see. I will blog about it again at the end of the semester to report on the efficacy of such an endeavor. In the meantime, check out my evolving thesis at github.