Mike Schaeffer's Blog

I've spent a little time doing some things to tweak Bloxsom so that it fits better into my website. So far, I've:

• Changed the html flavour to refer to my CSS file and use it correctly.
• Set up a simple hierarchy of post topics.
• Gotten static rendering working (as a test, it's not in use now.)

None of this is all that earth shattering, but it was all trivial to do in Bloxsom. For a one-file, 16K Perl script, Bloxsom brings a lot to the table.

Next on the adgenda is getting a web form set up for posting and hopefully editing blog posts, and then setting up a web-based way to upload images into the blog. My current workflow for posting to the blog involves two levels of nested SSH logins and the use of vi. shudder.

vCalc is the other side project I have going on right now. It's a simple RPN style calculator written for Win32. Underlying vCalc is a Scheme interpreter that I talk about a little here. The ultimate goal for vCalc is to have a calculator that can be easily extended with Scheme functions, in addition to the keystroke sequences you might expect. As it turns out, there are a lot of interesting problems that crop up trying to make this work right. I hope to blog more on this in the future.

Like Noisemaker, vCalc is shareware available through IceGiant.

One of my side projects is a little tool called Noisemaker. NoiseMaker is a utility that runs in the background and generates white noise over the computer's speakers to mask out distractions like the TV, phone, annoying co-workers, etc... If you need it, you need it badly...

It's available as a shareware program at Icegiant Software.

One interest of mine is programming languages, and more specifically, Lisp and Scheme. Lately, the blogosphere has produced a couple interesting blogs that tie to this interest:

• Lambda the Ultimate
• Planet Lisp

Planet Lisp aggregates a bunch of Lisp-related blogs, while LtU is more general and more of a discussion site.

Related, I came to Lambda the Ultimate via Eric Lippert's Blog on Weblogs @ASP.Net. Eric is a developer at Microsoft who's done a lot of work on Windows scripting and the Windows script languages.