Summary 2004
December 31st, 2004 at 9:48 amThis is a summary of 2004 (the first complete calendaric year for my blog).
Projects / Coding
1. Completed my “largest Perl project ever” – a data decoding tool at work, actually a family of tools, complete with Tk GUIs and fast binary data crunching. 6 KLOC of Perl can do a lot…
2. Began the Jamca chess agent project (see my website for details). The idea: a complete chess playing program, developed step by step with a fully documented development. At the moment it’s a functional chess program, lacking just smart search, about 3 KLOC of C++. It’s “on hold” – hopefully I’ll have time to continue with it soon.
3. Began writing the “Algorithmic Forays” column for GameDeve. So far 6 articles were published, which develop a regular expression engine from scratch (with full implementation, about 2 KLOC C++).
4. Wrote an application with wxPerl, packaged with PAR. My first go at both technologies.
5. Wrote a MIXAL parser / assembler. It’s not finished yet, but soon it will be (it’s my current “pet project in focus”). Using Parse::RecDescent was great fun – bar lacking error reporting, it’s a great tool.
6. Implemented a complex, multi-threaded serial port monitor, first in Perl and then it C. First go at serious serial port programming, and first go at Perl threads.
7. Wrote tons of VHDL code at work – some of it very complex.
8. Made some good progress with ESMS – finally released a major new version – 2.7, and organized the code (currently amouts to 9 KLOC C++).
All in all it was a productive year. For 2005 I hope to finish the MIX/MIXAL implementation and make progress with Jamca. Also, I hope to continue writing the articles for GameDev as it gives me a good chance to explore new things. Other than that, I can’t always know where my imagination takes me… maybe next year I’ll finally code something serious in Lisp.
Reading
These are the books I completed in 2004 (chronological order – first is earliest):
1. “How to read a book” by M. Adler, C. Van Doren
2. “Peopleware” by DeMarco and Lister
3. “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand
4. “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
5. “The Hidden order: Economics of everyday life” by David Friedman
6. “Code complete” by Steve McConnell
7. “Living to tell the tale” by Gabriel G.
8. “Who moved my cheese” by Spencer Johnson
9. “Programming Embedded systems in C and C++” by Michael Barr
10. “Resurrection” by Leo Tolstoy
11. “The Flanders Panel” by Arturo Perez Reverte
12. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. “The art of UNIX programming” by Eric Raymond
14. “Free to choose” by Milton and Rose Friedman
15. “The Odyssey” by Homer
16. “High st@kes, no prisoners” by Charles Ferguson
17. “Efficient C++” by Bulka & Mayhew
18. “The power of your subconscious mind” by Murphy
19. “Extreme Programming explained” by Kent Beck
20. “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” by Robert Pirsig
21. “My family right or wrong” by Ephraim Kishon
22. “Getting things done” by David Allen
23. “Fool’s experience or the key to enlightens” by M. Norbekov
24. “Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Trading Methods and Applications” by John J. Murphy
25. “Don Quixote” by Miguel Cervantes
26. “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown
27. “The curious incident of the dog in the night-time” by Mark Haddon
28. “Successful Lisp” by David Lamkins
29. “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Richard Feynman
30. “Norwegian wood” by Haruki Murakami
31. “Think and grow rich” by Napoleon Hill
32. “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” by D. Hoftstadter
33. “Diamond chariot” by Boris Akunin
34. “Metamath: the quest for Omega” by G. Chaitin
35. “Signals and Systems, made ridiculously simple” by Z. Karu
36. “VHDL Coding Styles and methodologies” by Ben Cohen
37. “Spanish with Michel Thomas” by Michel Thomas
38. “Dubliners” by James Joyce
39. “TPJ’s Computer Science & Perl Programming” ed. Jon Orwant
40. “A random walk down Wall Street” by B. Malkiel
41. “The Wedding” by Nicholas Sparks
42. “A short history of nearly everything ” by Bill Bryson
As always, my reading is a mix between technical, non-fiction and fiction books. If I’d be asked to pick my favorites:
In the technical category it would probably be “Successful Lisp”. In the non-fiction category it’s, no doubt “Godel Escher Bach” – although a reread, it’s hard to compete with this magnum opus. In the fiction category the choice is difficult, I’d say “Resurrection” and “Fountainhead” are the main contenders.
In 2005 I’d like to read no less, and if possible even more (duh !). I’m on the verge of running out of books, so a large Amazon order is due soon 
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