Voyaging Mind

I have completed watching the first two seasons of Black Sails and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I admit to having a liking to that era in part because of the many hours I spent playing Pirates! on an Amiga many years ago but it is really driven by a slight fascination with the culture of the time. Although the reality of the harshness that people suffered seems to not be well represented in the popular history reporting. Not wanting to reveal any spoilers I will keep things vague. Black Sails has a mix of pirates some fictional and some using the names of real pirates from the time. The story arcs are good and the writing/acting is well above average - in my opinion. It has all the hall marks to make it a set of above average TV series. What sets it apart for me is a number of things. None of the characters are particularly good or moral, they are all capable of horrific deeds and loyalty is often fleeting, at the same time many do show compassion. I really enjoyed the fact that ...

It is pretty clear to me that Clojure is not going to be a language I will get good at in the space of a couple of weeks. Partly because I am taking a relaxed approach to it, sort of enjoying the journey you might say, and partly there is a reasonable amount to learn, not just the language but the tooling. So after reading through "The Joy of Clojure" I am sure I have not understood even half of it, a book to return in at some point in the future. The how to progress next question hit me. I could just start writing code, like the little text adventure I created. This would be immensely enjoyable but I would rapidly fall out of learn Clojure mindset to how can I make this game better and that is not somewhere I want to be at the moment. So I have decided to take a look at the book "Living Clojure". It is simpler than the previous book and presents a series of exercises to get you up to a reasonable level over the period of a number of weeks. Seems like a fun thing to...

Yes it has been a long time and yes I have been pretty distracted and I have not been coding much. I am slowly getting the rhythm back. The little bit of coding I am doing using clojure. A long time ago I took a look at it bit but it never really pulled me in. Now the tool set looks a lot more mature. That does mean I have jumped back into the world of emacs. Yes other editors exist but I am trying to not explore all of them. My attitude at the moment is pretty laid back, I have no expectations of becoming a master at clojure or for that matter emacs. The plan is to just enjoy the coding and anything I learn is just a bonus. So far I have written a tiny text adventure and read a couple of books. Reading the books has given me a good overview but none of the sections really sunk in. Why the laid back attitude? Well apart from the usual Summer business I also was training for a black belt. So the past few months have been pretty intense. Now I would like a few months to decompress...

Oh wow! I have actually created a new article over on the main voyagingmind site. It is about downloading stockmarket data from yahoo and you can find it here . I will probably do a couple more runs to proof read it, as I hammered it out fairly quickly and my brain is not in the mood for doing much in the way of proof reading tonight. Still I wanted to push it out tonight just so I don't procrastinate on it. I think I have finally settled on using pycharm as my python editor, much as I like both vim and emacs the zero set up and maintenance that pycharm offers is just too compelling. I am also thinking about doing a reasonable amount of Java soon (starting another game) so having a single editor (Intellij) that I spend most of my  at home coding means less load on the brain. I press vim commands a fair bit when coding in Visual Studio when at work... Having said that I have been playing with ipython and the notebook functionality it provides. I am very impressed.

Things stay roughly the same but also change a fair bit would be a fair way of summing up the past few weeks. First up python has really pulled me in. At the moment I just really enjoy it. I have read though the book Fluent Python and that really help for me to see that I needed to more past the "Yep python, I know it and code in it just like I code C++" stage that many have when learning python, well replace C++ with what ever language you know quite well. I have not put a lot of what is in the book to practice yet but am looking forward to doing so. I suppose I should explain that the goal of the book is to take someone who has a bit of python experience and explain the more advance features of python. It is about 700 pages (I got the ebook) and does a really good job in what it sets out to do. Well worth a read. The stock market is still attracting some of my attention. Just messing with little algorithms is such good fun. I should write an article or two about it. ...

Do excuse the slight break in blogging. It was sort of deliberate. I have been a little busy with a few hobby projects. I took a good dive into the Go programming language and I think I like it. No in a wow this is amazing more in a yep this can feel a little restrictive compared with C++ or others but I get what you are trying to achieve here and can like it. Probably the only thing I didn't like about it was the use of Capital letters to mean publicly accessible. It is weird that I don't like it  - it just feels well wrong. Given a few thousand lines of code I would get past this and if that is the only thing I have to complain about. In terms of development Go is moving pretty quick at the moment, lots of libraries appearing and generally a good vibe about it. I am not planning on committing any more time to it but overall I was left with a good feeling about it. One to watch in the future My other little project involved stocks and shares. After reading a couple of ar...

It would be fair to say I have not been productive during this year. I have done a great deal of learning rather than actually getting on with the project I had in mind for much of this year. We are now gradually heading towards to the end of the third month and all I have is a few abortive attempts at starting something. Yes I have learned a great deal about servers and some about more modern ways of doing client side web apps. I do like that style of creating apps perhaps because servers are still a bit of an unknown to me at least in real use so pushing as much to the client is my safe place. But so far the results are telling, I have produced nothing of note. So I decided to kill it. If a project is not gaining some development momentum after two and a half months then it is probably a good idea to move on. Perhaps I will return to it at a later date but for now it is dead.  It is funny how the decision to kill it came about, I was having a frustrating time trying to figure somethi...