Archive for January, 2009

HN reads SICP, first meeting

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

So today the ##SICP meetings on Freenode took off. If you want to join us, here’s a bunch of links you might find useful:

Working through the whole SICP course (lectures, book, exercises) is a very rewarding experience during which we’ll learn about a lot of different topics: how to manage complexity, programming language design and implementation, logic programming, stream processing, compilers and interpreters, the Scheme programming language itself, lambda calculus, etc. So far, I’ve watched all of the lectures and done all of the exercises up to 2.39. I will later on post code for the solutions and notes on the book and the lectures when I’m done.

I think today’s meeting was quite successful overall. We discussed our solutions to exercises from 1.1 to 1.8 in about one hour. The following meeting will probably take a bit longer since there are more than twice as many exercises and the difficulty is increasing. It will take place in two weeks, February 8th. The exact time is yet to be determined, taking into consideration that we are in different time zones. I’ll post some kind of poll in the mailing list in order to know what time is convenient for most people.

You can find the log of today’s meeting here, in case you have missed it. Feel free to post it anywhere you’d like.

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So, what the hell, here’s a blog

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Hello, everybody, as you can see this is my first post. That’s usually the one nobody ever sees unless the blog gets really famous (no, I don’t expect that for mine) but there has to be a first post, right? So, let me say the following:

FIRST!!!!!11

Stupid overused Internet memes aside, I want to celebrate, um, for the successful installation of Wordpress. I was pretty scared of doing anything wrong that could jeopardize my online security (and that’s a big deal). I even dreamed that my site was vulnerable to XSS attacks. Quite a nightmare. Contrary to my expectations, Wordpress turned out to be incredibly easy to install and customize. I had to upload it a couple of times, fool around with the plug-ins, break it, reinstall, you know how it is. I’ve kept all of my passwords really long and hard to guess, but easy to remember, since Firefox does all of the remembering for me, and I’ve written them down in a sheet of paper that I use as mousepad. No, that isn’t insecure at all since neither my parents or brothers will try to hack nicou.org. I’d like to program my own CMS / blog software someday, but I’ll stick with Wordpress for a while, I have other stuff going on now.

The next thing I have to do is explain the reason of this blog. There are tons of blogs in the Internet, why would I start one myself? Well, I’m currently working through SICP, and I’ve had a bunch of cool ideas I thought I had to make public somewhere. A blog is the perfect place for that, right? So, what the hell, here’s a blog. It won’t be the great-looking site, nor the AJAXiest (that word does exist!), I won’t be posting often, I want to make clear that my level of commitment to nicou.org is really low.

So if you like what you see, you can subscribe to my feed, leave a comment, send me an email, whatever.

Thanks for stopping by,
Nicolás Canevali

my email

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