Because of the lack of l33t h4x0rz at my current place of employment, I have taken to reading the books and essays of people who have the same inner need for creativity. I stumbled across an essay called "Teach Youself Programming in Ten Years" and somehow made my way to Hackers and Painters, which I'd skimmed before. (That link is to an essay form, but there is a full fledged book.) The book is also available through Oreilly's Safari bookshelf thing, which rocks.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I put a certain Debian-related (Linux) distro on my laptop a number of weeks ago after feeling like something was missing. A proper JRE, Eclipse, Python(s), MySQL, Apache httpd, Tomcat, hex editor, etc...
I messed around for a while writing a bunch of utils and the like, including some bootstrap-type tools that do the "I'm tired of coding this every time I start a new project" kind of work for me in a way that is more succinct and elegant. When I did this, I noticed that what I was doing was text crunching and parsing and making lots of lists of things. Not really a revolutionary revelation, but that, plus the H&P book in the back of my mind, means the next thing I added was Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and Cusp (Eclipse SBCL-friendly plugin). I'm trying to get that up and running as I type. After a few false starts with wrong versions, misleading installation instructions, files in the wrong places, etc, I think I am on the right track. About to get to the make-or-break point. Will it make, or break?
It breaks. Hmmm.
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