The Golden Ratio

Finally the 1st of November has arrived, the first day of Nanowrimo. Up till today it has been a lot of fun plotting the story and seeing how it has changed during the process. The biggest change is that I first planned for the story to take place a couple of years after a civil war, but when I was writing the background history of the Empire I realised that it would be much more exciting to place it during the build-up and start of the civial war.

There are still some parts of the planned story that doesn’t quite work as well as I want them to. Even after multiple changes there are parts of the main character’s traits that still seem a bit forced, and some choices he has to make that need better reasoning. My hope is that those things will solve themselves as I write and learn more about the characters and the world.

To finish the 50′000 words within one month I have to write 1′667 words each day on average. Since I hope to have some time for other things as well during November I’m planning on writing 2′000 words the days that I manage to write, which should free up some time for days without writing or at least writing less than 1′667 words.

So far today I’ve managed to write 2′246 words. It went a lot easier than I had feared. Once the first sentence was written the rest just came naturally. Hopefully I can get some more words written as well later on tonight, maybe even breach the 2′500 word count on the first day!

The newest version of Ubuntu was just released, so I decided to do a fresh install on my laptop.

Yesterday I installed a fresh copy of Xubuntu on my laptop. I opted to go for Xubuntu instead of the default Ubuntu since I’m going to try out a tiling window manager, specifically Xmonad, so it felt like a waste to install all the default Gnome applications when I won’t be using them. To make the installation even more different I installed from the Alternate CD so I could get my whole system encrypted. I probably don’t need the encryption, but it feels better to know that it is encrypted when I drag the computer around with me and keep work related stuff on it.

Installing from the Alternate CD almost worked as easy as it should have. It started up just fine, and in the start phase there was an option to partion and encryption the entire disk. All fine and dandy so far. The problem arrived alittle bit later when the installation process was nearing the end. During the “Setting users and password”-phase the installation suddenly stopped. I checked the /var/log/syslog file, and the last logged message from the installer was user-setup: Done, but after that nothing happened. When I tried to reinstall again the same thing happened. This time I decided to ignore the problem, and reboot from another tty-terminal. The sytem then managed to boot the new Xubuntu, and everything seems to be working fine. I’ve been using the system for a couple of hours now and I haven’t noticed anything missing. I am a bit curious about which part of the installation process I skipped over, and when that will come back and bite me.

Recently I’ve taken it upon myself to learn Haskell. I haven’t had much time lately to work on programming projects at home, so I felt it was time to start something again. I decided to learn Haskell since I’ve never truly learnt a functional programming language. I’ve tried some functional programming some during a couple of University courses, but I’ve never got to the point where I truly understood it and naturally thought of functional solution to problems.

To help with the learning I bought the Real World Haskell book, and I’ve decided to do most of the exercises in the book and post my solutions to them here.

The first chapter didn’t have any proper programming questions of interest, so I’m skipping those and going straight to chapter two instead where we’re asked to create a lastButOne function that retrieves the penultimate element in a list.

After a bit of thinking I came up with the following solution:

lastButOne xs = if null (tail (tail xs))
    then head xs
    else lastButOne (tail xs)

It isn’t the most elegant solution, since it doesn’t work for empty lists, but it gets the job done. Enough to make me happy at this stage of Haskell-learning. What it does is check if the list is empty if two elements are removed; if it is then the first element in the list is the penultimate, if not it removes the first element and tries again.

Now I’m off to take on the third chapter, about data types and some other stuff.