balanced.breakfast.jpg - image removed due to massive offsite linking
Balance is important to health, both mind and body. Work, play, exercise, stretching, wake time, sleep time, all these need to be in balance for life to go smoothly. But there are many different balance points worth investigating.
Lately, I've increased my exercise level and I've found a greater total cheerfulness on my part. Today I unicycled around the lake. On the far side there's some exciting terrain where I plan to start building my mountain unicycling skills. On the other side of balance I've written some interesting code lately. I'm writing an application I've called Fermat's Last Margin. You can see a napkin prototype at the link. I've been writing the app by combining Flippi and Darcs, and developing using Test-Driven-Development. I've discovered that Haskell's HUnit was not designed to test side--effectful code, and therefore has no support for test fixtures. This make it challenging to test darcs integration.
The idea behind Fermat's Last Margin is...
I write a lot margin notes in books that I own, and research papers that I print out. To me, a research paper is an unfinished discussion. I like to argue, exclaim, deride, doodle, and generally get completely comfortable with academic publications that I read. There is a downside. Andrew Bromage once made some questioning comments about a Comonads paper on the #haskell irc channel. Six months later, someone else made the same questioning comments. I realized that we can't share our margin notes! Who knows what brilliant ideas we've missed because we had one half, and someone else had the other half? Fermat's Last Margin is my answer.
The names comes from the story of Fermat's Last Theorem. The story is that Fermat wrote in the margin of a book that he had thought of a novel proof for this theorem, but the margin was too small, the proof would not fit. If Fermat had this margin I am making, it would be the last margin he would ever need.
What do you think? I'd love to get feedback on this idea. The alpha version is nearly complete, should be done in a few days.