Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

So here we go. A bit a Haskell a day for a month. Let's see for how many days I can keep this up. At my energy levels right now, I predict 4 days at the most.

I am going to follow this tutorial http://learnyouahaskell.com/

In any case, here is my first day. I am going to add some commentary as I go alone.

Day 1.

I installed it.

http://learnyouahaskell.com/starting-out

I am running ghci. Wee!

It seems that if you want to handle negative numbers, you must surround it with parenthesis. Seems too cumbersome, but the intro promised that Haskell is so flexible that the rest will be very concise. Let's see if it actually works out.

For Boolean operators, we have our old friends && and ||. To negate, we have not

Testing for equally is ==
Testing for inequality is /=

>>Awesome point: << the operators are functions. The * operator is an infix operator. :D

When a function takes two parameters, you can make a function to be infix if you use backticks such as
92 'div' 10

I am going to stop here for tonight. I will do the baby's first functions tomorrow.

Since December, I have made monthly goals where I list things that I want to learn about, personal projects, and personal habits that I want to do. At some point I will talk about the whole project, but for right now I am going to write about my February goals.

February started well, but I got sick with some nasty cold that lasted about two weeks. This slowed down mainly the projects. As I was getting better, I was able to reach my goals of learning sessions on PIC micro controller tutorials, a refresher python tutorial, work more on a rails tutorial, and learning more about QGIS. Not included in my goals, were tutorials that I finished on log4Net, Redis and Mongo. I also got a lot of math reviewing done. I found one of the best books on statistics that I have found, and I have been reviewing the subject.

I also enhanced a personal Pomodoro application that I made. It now gives me a sound and visual cue that time has ran out.

So even though I felt that the month was wasted, I actually was able to learn a lot, so I consider the month a success, especially taking into account the long-term illness.

I wasn't going to have new year resolutions because of my doing monthly resolutions, but then I changed my mind since, thinking back on 2010, I got many of mine done, at least those that I thought most significant. So it is good to set yearly goals to give general direction for the year.

I guess my biggest one is to focus on process. If

So here are the new ones:

0. Set up a continuous integration environment
1. Learn more about dependency injection
2. Learn Rails
3. Become good at using qgis

I also have an musical education plan: I will listened carefully to the same piece of classical music for a week until I really know it.

At this point I realize that I haven't been feeling well in the last 4 month, due to some routine changes, and my health wasn't that well. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good, so I had less energy for many things outside work such as writing on this blog. It seems that I have the urge to write about my findings, and as long as I can write about it somewhere, I am happy. So I have been writing a lot of my findings in a private wiki. I think I should start writing more here so that other people can benefit from my struggles with different technologies.

As a summary, I have been doing a lot of work with Silverlight. I don't have experience with Flex, so it has been taking a while to get used to the different metaphors and technology that Silverlight uses. Don't get me wrong, I can make things happen in Silverlight, and I have been doing so for the last 6 months. It is just that actually getting the Silverlight way has taken while more. The good thing is that I feel that I am about to actually get it, so I may write about that in the near future. Overall, I have a lot of respect for the platform, with some qualifications.

In another area, I have been doing an XNA tutorial. It is pretty good, and again, I must admit that XNA looks like a very nice framework. This is my big hobby tutorial for the holidays.

I have also been working on a lisp tutorial. This is the third lisp tutorial that I do in the last 10 years. My first one was this cool online system that a university created as an experiment to track learning. Although the system claimed that it was teaching lisp, it was actually just teaching recursion using lisp, which was great, actually. I am now working on Practical Common Lisp. I just finished chapter 3, and I already learned a lot that I can use in other languages.

And I am doing the prolog p99 in Erlang again. I haven't touched Erlang since last year, but I find it interesting how it seems that doing a chapter or two of a Prolog tutorial earlier in the year improved by Erlang skill so that my functions to solve the same problems I did last year are using a lot less lines of code.

This is a short, quick reaction to Shirky's post.

I agree with a lot of what Shirky says.

We just got to be careful about fully embracing the idea of simple beating complex. Small beating big has always had a great appeal to us humans, and the motif occurs a lot in ancient literature. This should make us even more careful about it because it has a romantic appeal to us.

And it can lead to some strange ideas, such as those of Microsoft when claiming their precarious business situation since they are threaten by Linux. If we start counting, Microsoft has been on the verge of collapsed threaten by little Linux for almost 20 years.

The reality is that big and complex has a strong advantage called money. And tons of it. They could make bonfires with it at their corporate camp retreats to sing around it and roast marshmallows without hurting.

And they can use this money to eradicate the competition through buyouts or just war prices. Even for quick radical internet start ups, the "live happily ever after" lines is "they got bought up by Google."

And even though some big. complex civilizations did go under, it took a mighty long time for many of them to do so. The Roman empire was very complex, and it managed to survive for about 500 to 1500 years, depending on how you count it.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-mo...

Well, I have finally enabled comments on the site. Although this is not entirely true: only new content will be have comments. I will see how good the anti-spam module is for a few weeks, and then I may figure out how to turn comments on every page.

My plan with chess was to play a game a week seriously in real time. Well, I kept putting that off, which means that I really didn't want to do it.

Well, it seems that chess means a lot more to me than I previously thought. And I do have to state that chess has helped me during the hardest times in my life. In any case, it seems that chess is very serious for me, so serious that it is even worthy to procrastinate an actual game.

Okay, if there is an uber-silly goal, is to become a chess master. Now, since I am more modest, I would be very happy if I can become a chess expert... and even that is pretty amazing.

After reading the talent code, I realized that the treasured chess book,
Comprehensive Chess Course, Lev Alburt, a chess-specific application of deep practice developed in the Soviet Union, could help me attain at least the goals that the book promises to deliver: take a serious student to Level A. This is actually my true goal, but hopefully I can move from there to expert level [:)]

Over the years the problems that I have had applying the lessons of the book have been that I have resisted memorizing the board, which is something that Alburt insists that it is important. I still don't understand why, but I decided to give it a serious try. Guess what? It took me about 8 hours of serious practice over a week to memorize the board. I could have done this 9 years ago.

Also, another problem of mine, is that I won't go over the board after a game. This is a problem because I don't learn from my mistake. I only learn from the overly bad mistakes, the ones that you get the instant pain from. But the more fruitful ones are the ones that one gets by going over a game and figuring out what is wrong. I personally don't like that pain, but it seems that that is the way of learning deeply chess.

So this is my goal: in 5 to 10 years, become a chess expert.

So my plan now is the following: do the exercises of the book, play over endings with the AI, play one game of 30 minute limit chess a week, study it, and repeat.

I will discuss my experience learning the board later. I will probably also start posting analysis of my games (Hey, if I wrote them, I may as well use them as content.)

My first goal is to make this plan a habit by the end of the year. Then I will set another goal :)

In the code sprint of last week, I learned many things that I feel I should put there here. I guess I will be putting them here as I go review the week.

Also, I got the muppets made and photos taken, so all what I have to do right now is put the pictures up.

In other news, I am up to chapter 17 of the Hebrew alphabet book; I have been practicing the abacus and esperanto on a daily basis, as well as violin.

Here is a list of silly goals that I want to do during my life. Some are easier than others. As I activate them, I will create a whole little node for them.

Done so far:
* Hike for most of the day with the kids
* Write a cheesy action novel

* Speak like a pirate for 48 hours
* Learn how to carry a tune
* Finish question game
* Make a 2d animated short
* Make 60 strips of a newspaper-style comic strip
* Make a history documentary short
* Finish my board game
* Create a nonviolent trading card game
* Implement my parliament game
* Implement my board game design program
* Make a kite
* Hike overnight with the kids
* Learn Klingon
* Learn Dutch
* Learn Finnish and Estonian
* Learn ancient Greek
* Learn ancient Hebrew
* Learn nahuatl
* Make a video game
* Make a robot
* Finish my college advice book
* Create a post-modern mariachi band
* Learn how to finger pick on the uke
* Make a cigar box violin
* Learn how to draw realistically
* Write a track for my invented religion
* Play and sing the uke on a metro ride
* Play and sing the uke in a bus in Mexico
* Write a simple simulation engine
* Learn how to dance Charleston
* Build a theramin
* Annotate Alan Mendelssohn Boy from Mars
*Read the whole bible