newstalk

The days are just packd.

First warm weather of the year this week. Spring is here! Summer near! Everyone on campus is wearing shorts and experimenting with sitting out on the grass, even though the late-March wind has been especially mischievous.

Myself, I’m plugging away. Work started out busy this week, but has been subsiding again. After a long hiatus of barely a book a month, I’m suddenly reading like I am in school again, tearing through two-and-a-half books this past week. Today I started “The Metamorphoses of Ovid (View product details at Amazon)”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=newstalk-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=0801847982%2526location=/o/ASIN/0801847982%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82 (translated “freely into verse” by David R. Slavitt), and it’s actually been quite good. I’ve starved myself of the Greek and Latin classics far too long, I think.

I’m also making lots of progress on my “previously mentioned program”:http://newstalk.eykd.net/oldspeak/2005/03/13/radio-friendly-unit-tester/, which has been coming along slowly but surely. In the meanwhile, I’ve learned lot about Python (many thanks especially to Mark Pilgrim’s “Dive Into Python“:http://diveintopython.org), and even contributed my first bit of code to the “Python Cookbook”:http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/392115. As for progress, I’ve finished first drafts of all the spacegear.org “Base Types”:http://spacegear.org/schemas/BaseTypes/index.html, meaning that all the unit tests (115 at last count) pass, which means, hopefully, all the data types do at least the minimum of what is required.

Now I’m working on some of the more “complex types”:http://spacegear.org/schemas/typesindex.html, which means I get to start building on top of the foundation I just finished laying, recombining the small pieces into larger constructs.

Example: one of my next tasks is to create a “KeplerianOrbitType”:http://spacegear.org/schemas/KeplerianOrbitType/index.html, which is just an object class that keeps track of all the parameters one needs to define the orbit of a body around another body in space. All of these parameters are just numeric quantities in units of time or distance or degree, and since I already have base types that handle each of these, all I’ll have to do to create this class is simply write a few lines of code that tell the class how to create, store, and retrieve the data, never having to worry about minor details like, say, converting miles to kilometers (or light years), or degrees to radians, because it’s all taken care of. This is unspeakably cool.

For anyone who zoned out on any of the previous paragraphs, I offer a translation: I’m having lots of fun, but I probably need to take a break and go catch some sun.

On that note, I’ll sign off.

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