Wanderlust
I'm getting that urge to move on to something else.
Where shall I go next? Oz? Joy? Perl6? Maybe follow The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming? Do the readers of this blog have any suggestions for interesting new programming language explorations?
In Schizophrenia: Delusion without Illusion, research implies that schizophrenics are much less affected by visual context. Similarly, I wonder if ADHD explains why I hear such a difference between mp3 and lossless encodings like FLAC. I wonder if the visual experiments have been repeated with various other 'disabilities'?
I've been searching for ways to electrically or magnetically manufacture a heat gradient for years. The recent discovery of the Phonon Hall effect sounds like just the thing I want. I suspect this could enhance the Stirling Engine for example.
A few days ago, I was trying to configure Windows for the first time in several years. I discovered that you can't crank up the resolution to 1600x1400 on a seventeen inch screen because the standard font can't be changed system-wide. As much as Windows may claim to be ahead of Linux, that's a pretty obvious flaw. Happily, Gtk doesn't have this problem.
I have this idea that immutability and garbage collection on the hardware level will lead to easy use of NUMA without cache coherency, and nearly transparently allow an arbitrary number of levels of cache, with no write checking required.
I think I've written about this before, but let me describe the idea again in hopes of more clarity.
In the case of infinite memory, you could just allocate another chunk instead of changing existing memory. Garbage collection allows software to pretend that it has infinite memory. If you always allocate more memory and never change existing memory, cache coherence is not a problem, because there are no changes to cause updates. The hardware still has to deal with garbage collection, I don't know the best way to do that yet.
A further Under this scheme, each layer of storage, {cache, ram, drive, etc} would be separately garbage collected. Higher layers would be 'caches' for the layers below, and lower layers would be 'virtual memory' for the higher layers.
The snow outside my window is now deep enough that it requires snowplows to push it aside.
I have the sudden urge to write a screensaver that generates random type theory proofs. They just look so cool.
Word of the day from Darius Bacon is ambimoustrous.