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title: Personal Log - March 2009
content-type: article
timestamp: 1238385840
tags: personal_log|wedding|ruby
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<p>Another month <em>without</em> the Internet at home. This is getting really annoying, and I decided to change provider, <strong>again</strong>, hoping that I&#8217;ll eventually get my broadband back, someday. Luckily I can still go online at work, but of course it&#8217;s not the same thing: my time on Twitter and Facebook is now basically limited to weekends only, when Roxanne and I go down to Tuscany to stay with her parents.</p>
<h3>Concatenative programming</h3>
<p>For some weird reason I became fond of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenative_programming_language">Concatenative programming paradigm</a>. I started reading about <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy/j00rat.html">Joy</a> and then started to work on a Ruby <span class="caps">DSL</span> able to do the similar things: <a href="/concatenative/">Concatenative</a>. Another pet project &mdash; as if I didn&#8217;t have enough things to do already!</p>
<p>Some people seemed pleased about it, especially on <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/887kn/concatenative_programming_in_ruby">Reddit</a> and <a href="http://dzone.com/links/concatenative_programming_in_ruby.html">dzone</a>. The downside of it is that it&#8217;s still fairly slow if compared to Ruby code (which is not exactly fast, either!), so if I had some spare time I should really try to implement it as a C extension, maybe.</p>
<h3>Learning new programming languages?</h3>
<p>Incidentally, I&#8217;m still fighting with myself on whether to learn another programming language or not. At this point, learning <a href="http://www.factorcode.org">Factor</a> could turn out to be more natural than months ago. However, I would only learn new programming languages as a hobby, as I don&#8217;t need to do so for profit: luckily I&#8217;m still a happy technical writer and I enjoy my job.</p>
<p>I admit, I&#8217;m still looking for <em>the</em> perfect programming language which is fun to learn (not easy: fun), elegant, minimalist, fast, general purpose and cross platform (meaning Linux, Windows, and Windows Mobile as well). Of course there is no such thing out there and there will never be, so I&#8217;m still evaluating the current alternatives. Possible candidates are Haskell, Factor, some dialect of Lisp or C. <br />
Why C? Well, because I didn&#8217;t do much with it since my first year at uni, and it could still be useful to write Ruby extensions or implement something at a lower level. After so much time getting spoiled by high level languages, I kinda miss the low level stuff. Ahhh where are all the pointers gone?!</p>
<p>On the other hand, I&#8217;m getting married soon, and I should use these months to help my wife-to-be a bit more with wedding planning (see next section). After all, I can always learn a new programming language <em>after</em> getting married, right? &#8230;<em>right?!</em></p>
<h3>Wedding planning</h3>
<p>Roxanne and I are slowly getting more and more things done for the wedding. Every attempt I made to introduce her to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_things_done"><span class="caps">GTD</span></a> failed miserably so far, or better, it worked too well: she is now getting used to make lists and deciding on our <em>next actions</em> for the weekend. <br />
This weekend we booked our flights to Ireland, looked at cottages and hotels for the three days after the wedding (not the honeymoon yet, we&#8217;ll have a late honeymoon in autumn), chose the waistcoats for me, my bestman and the ushers, and &#8230;booked the wedding car!<br />
Now, this turned out to be good fun! Take a look at <a href="http://www.alleventslimos.com/Wedding/rolls_silver_cloud.html">Ruby</a> (yes, yes, I know&#8230; ), a Silver Cloud II 1961 Rolls Royce which will be ours for (less than) one day!</p>
<h3>Other tech-related tidbits</h3>
<ul>
	<li>I successfully migrated to Ubuntu 9.0.4 Jaunty. Everything works, except the flash plugin for Firefox.</li>
	<li>I&#8217;m now using TweetDeck as my main Twitter client on both Windows and Linux.</li>
	<li>I&#8217;m thinking of buying (after the wedding) an Eee PC (no Macs: Ubuntu is sleek and powerful enough &emdash;and free, too).</li>
	<li>We finally got an XBox 360 from eBay, this time it came through the post.</li>
	<li>Roxanne is thinking of buying a big <span class="caps">LCD</span> TV to go with it &emdash; I&#8217;m politely (and sadly) postponing till after the wedding.</li>
	<li>After listening a <span class="caps">FLOSS</span> Weekly episode featuring it, I think I&#8217;ll get myself an <a href="http://arduino.cc/">Arduino Board</a> for my birthday.</li>
</ul>