Trying to overcome my writer's block by jotting down some random thoughts.

1

My life is a cyberpunk novel. I rise tired after minimal sleep, slam stimulants into my system and run through a DDR-esque concrete ghetto to the tram stop. I only wake up properly at work where I juggle abstractions and try to teach robot hands to pick up cubes in a virtual reality.

2

The Haskell project course is chugging along nicely. People are encountering frustrating and sometimes even interesting real-world problems like FFI, installing libraries and handling exceptions in pure code. I plan to blog on the exception issue soon.

Also, we've been thinking about the future teaching of functional programming at Univ Helsinki. There's a course on formal type theory (with Coq!) coming up this fall.

3

At work we've moved to Roundup, a pretty pleasant issue tracker that is easy to customize. The default templates could be a bit cleaner tho. (E.g., there's support for storing different queries in the db but the menu uses hard-coded GET parameters).

I've been working on compiling our stream computation DSL to jvm bytecode that just loops over a bunch of arrays. It's been sweet so far.

5

Foundations for Programming Languages is a great book. Tackles some type theory but mainly other cool stuff such as algebras (as featured in algebraic datatypes), different models of lambda calculus and logical relations. A good complement for TaPL.

7

Have travelling to do this summer:

• The IMC competition in Bulgaria
• A trip to Austria, including hiking in Hohe Tauern national park and some Vienna
• Cottage and boating trips with parents & grandparents

Random links

for your browsing pleasure

• http://multigrainknackebrod.blogspot.com/ -- a somewhat interesting blog
• http://kdice.com -- nice simple risk-like game
• http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml -- a conspiracy theory
• http://jpatokal.iki.fi/music/mp3/gnosis_at_inkvisitio3.mp3 -- some nice gabber