The loved one is working on a novel. It turns out that “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp” (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out. Inspired by this, I’ve been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn’t have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I’ve missed two days in the past couple of weeks, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I’ll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3.
I’ve also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: “Salmon” (Feferi Peixes) and “Kingdom” (Eridan Ampora). I doubt they’ll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form.
At work, we have until the end of this month to move all our live sites from the old Solaris SPARC servers to a new bunch of hosted Ubuntu VMs. (Our stuff is Java webapps running in Tomcat, so this is not at all difficult conceptually.) So I’ve spent the last couple of months making as absolutely as much as possible deployable in a completely automated fashion—automating everything I’ve done by hand for ages, and actually defining all the accumulated cruft (magical symlinks, etc.) the apps rely on. Since we use ant for builds, I’ve been using that. Even with ant-contrib mixed in, it’s like playing with an esoteric programming language whose particular conceit is requiring all code to be correctly-formed XML. As such, I’ve evolved a new law of the universe:
If your hammer is Turing-complete, you will one day have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.
or:
Every Turing-complete domain-specific language evolves into brainfuck.
It’s the largest useful piece of coding I’ve ever done. Even as a non-coder I think the code is horrible, but the spaghetti is mostly concealed behind not-very-horrible targets and macrodefs, and working to the rule “get the data format right and the code will follow obviously” is giving good results. And—and this is the important thing—it actually works. Everything I’ve been doing is directly useful. The eventual goal is to have the ant-based deploy automation controlled by Puppet, and be able to say “Puppet, go install an instance of that app over on that node, taking care of all the little details.” “Righty-ho!” (done)
Oh boy, Homestuck music stuff. Nice. Salmon sounds a bit dark though- seems more like a Feferi and Condesce combo. Kingdom makes me think of his time on LOWAA, kind of actiony but dark or sad or something. Anyways, cool.
Thank you :-) I was consciously filling out “Kingdom” with bits that might go well with an animation (e.g. the piano figure). Yeah, “Salmon” does sound more like power realised rather than just aspired to.
:-D Both are actually old pieces, but the contest pushed me to get them polished in that particular direction and call them “done”. “Kingdom” is just like Eridan: angsty and humorless. So “Salmon” (which was its working title all along, but the fish theme fits Feferi) went well as the other half of the pair. I can hear the failed moirallegiance and why it was doomed: she’s just utterly out of his class and he’ll never understand.
The loved one is working on a novel. It turns out that “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp” (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out. Inspired by this, I’ve been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn’t have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I’ve missed two days in the past couple of weeks, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I’ll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3.
I’ve also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: “Salmon” (Feferi Peixes) and “Kingdom” (Eridan Ampora). I doubt they’ll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form.
At work, we have until the end of this month to move all our live sites from the old Solaris SPARC servers to a new bunch of hosted Ubuntu VMs. (Our stuff is Java webapps running in Tomcat, so this is not at all difficult conceptually.) So I’ve spent the last couple of months making as absolutely as much as possible deployable in a completely automated fashion—automating everything I’ve done by hand for ages, and actually defining all the accumulated cruft (magical symlinks, etc.) the apps rely on. Since we use ant for builds, I’ve been using that. Even with ant-contrib mixed in, it’s like playing with an esoteric programming language whose particular conceit is requiring all code to be correctly-formed XML. As such, I’ve evolved a new law of the universe:
or:
It’s the largest useful piece of coding I’ve ever done. Even as a non-coder I think the code is horrible, but the spaghetti is mostly concealed behind not-very-horrible targets and macrodefs, and working to the rule “get the data format right and the code will follow obviously” is giving good results. And—and this is the important thing—it actually works. Everything I’ve been doing is directly useful. The eventual goal is to have the ant-based deploy automation controlled by Puppet, and be able to say “Puppet, go install an instance of that app over on that node, taking care of all the little details.” “Righty-ho!” (done)
Oh boy, Homestuck music stuff. Nice. Salmon sounds a bit dark though- seems more like a Feferi and Condesce combo. Kingdom makes me think of his time on LOWAA, kind of actiony but dark or sad or something. Anyways, cool.
Thank you :-) I was consciously filling out “Kingdom” with bits that might go well with an animation (e.g. the piano figure). Yeah, “Salmon” does sound more like power realised rather than just aspired to.
I like Salmon! I want to like Kingdom, but Eridan is just such a dooooooouche~ ;_;
:-D Both are actually old pieces, but the contest pushed me to get them polished in that particular direction and call them “done”. “Kingdom” is just like Eridan: angsty and humorless. So “Salmon” (which was its working title all along, but the fish theme fits Feferi) went well as the other half of the pair. I can hear the failed moirallegiance and why it was doomed: she’s just utterly out of his class and he’ll never understand.