One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.
However, side projects are totally fair game 😀
At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate. Perl is certainly up to the task, as is Ruby and I’ve been wanting to learn Ruby for a while, but some upcoming PhD stuff requires me to know Python, so I figured this would be a good starting point for it, so apt-get install python and away I went. Continue reading →
