Voyaging Mind

I enjoy using Emacs. It is an editor that I find quite relaxing to use. Yes it takes a bit of setting up. Yes I know about the Emacs "Distributions" but find them a little over the tops for what I want. So eventually I settled on a few customizations involving Evil mode, projectile and a few others. It is nice, not perfect. I tend to use Emacs over Vim as Emacs has OrgMode and a few other niceties. I like the idea my editor can show images. Plus there is Evil mode so you can still have Vim in Emacs But the world moves. Great cross platform support for editors is now a common. Emacs port to windows should be show casing the application instead I suffer from stall and freezes. It has reached the point where if I try to code in Rust, Haskell or C++ in Emacs it is a frustrating experience. Perhaps it is the language server providing me the auto completions. I don't know and honestly I don't want to know. I just want it fast. Now I have not seen these problems on L

Excuse the quiet. I have been fairly busy with work and life, and then cold struck me down. One that was strong enough to beat me into submission and on to the sofa for about 4 days. Obviously I don't particularly like having a cold but with a family in the house there are enough vectors of attack so it is not uncommon. Having a cold brings a certain calmness to my life, well I mean my brain. It is a shame that my ability to think is reduced down to 25% of its normal capacity. There is a point in the recovery where my brain is back at 75% and recovering fast but the calmness remains at least for a little while. I enjoy being in that place. I would love to know why I observe this effect and often I wonder if I could achieve this calmness via some "Mind Hacks" such as meditation, yoga, even Internet usage reduction. So far my attempts to regain this inner peace when healthy have failed. Within a week my mind will be whirling all over the place. While suffering on the sofa b

Slightly late, I try for Sundays although I am not totally committed to a weekly update just yet. Life is bound to get in the way at some point. I faltered on using Rust mid week. I was getting frustrated with Iterators and the Peekable types. It was not quite working how I expected it to. I eventually arrived at nice is solution but was a bit annoyed how long it took. Really I should expect these things as I am learning the language, for fun I went ahead an rewrote the code in C++ just for comparison. While the core of the code was a little cleaner and it compiled a lot faster I appreciated more of Rust was doing and providing for me. Just having the ability to derive Debug printing is such a nice win. I continue with Rust with an improved understanding of the trade offs. Learning Haskell is still progressing. It seems the pattern I am settling into is doing about 30 minutes of learning Haskell about 4-5 times a week. The more I learn Haskell the more clearly I can see Rust ha

One of the fun things about the beginning of the year is it is a time of planning for the year. This year I not only set out some of overly ambitious goals for the year but also managed to think about some 5 year goals. Well the 5 year goals are less definite more where I want to head. To give guidance/direction to the year long goals. Planning that far ahead is quite alien to me but I think it has some value. The next step is actually starting to work on the goals. Which pretty much means figuring out how to execute them. Some things are obvious, for instance I have a number of books I want to read, so just make time and read. This is also true for learning Haskell, I have the book so carve out time to study. Having thought longer term I am find myself happier to spend some time learning. In fact I suspect I will spend about 50% of my time learning this year and then gradually reduce it next year. I kind of arrived at the decision to use Rust for most dev work. This means I am g

I have decided to start posting on this blog again. I currently have voyagingmind.com where I occasionally post, it uses Hugo as a static site generator. While I enjoy using static site generators (for the control) and Netlify for free hosting it does present a certain amount of resistance when blogging. I use multiple computers which means I need to keep syncing git repos just to work on a post. Not exactly a smooth user experience. As it is the start of a new year I decide to return to using blogger, I will still keep the actual website, although I may remove the blog part. It will serve as a store for things I make - should that ever happen! Really this is an attempt to simplify life a bit and try to focus on creating and learning things I like. Making blogging easier will also help to capture random thoughts that come into my mind, something the Hugo site was not doing for me. I do worry that blogger will eventually be closed down, it doesn't seem to get many updates anymore. I

September always seem to be my so called geek month for me. August is usually pretty busy so September is a good time to get back into computers. So far this month I have taken the time to learn a little bit more about CMake. That is actually read some tutorials and updated my knowledge to a more modern version of it. I have renewed my knowledge on building things with emscripten and then started to combine the two to start to create a simple little game library in C++. Only a few hundred lines so far but progressing. An of course I have written this blog post. I have not written a blog post for such a long time. On the list this month is getting opengl/webgl working with the game engine and a few other small things on the TODO list. After that I am not sure, I think I make take a look at the programming language Zig as it has been on my watch list for a while. I have spent a bit of time with Rust this year and enjoyed some parts of it but am happy to wait a little longer for the Eco s