Friday, September 30, 2005

Running a business while going to university, while being very exciting, is already hugely frustrating. You permanently feel you're underachieving in all cathegories:

1. I feel I am not as good a mathematicians as I could (should) be, due to time constraints imposed by programming and running the business.
2. I feel I am not as good a programmer as I could (should) be, due to time constraints imposed by studying and running the business.
3. I feel I am too slow in dealing with business paperwork etc. etc. due to time constraints imposed by programming and math.

Anyhow, I guess that's the price of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades (or at least being unwilling to give up two of the three things I am doing).

What is good though: We finally finished SABRE BinNavi, and I personally think we brought
debugging into the 2000's. Very few people realize that debuggers have been stuck in the 80's for a long while (here is your registers window, here is your data window, here is your code window), and BinNavi is definitely a step forwards. Now I need to get Jython tied in to v1.1, so I can have the scriptable debugger I always wanted to have.
(blatant plug: check these flash movies to see what I mean, specifically Chapter 4)

Aside from that I have been reading Forster's Lectures on Riemann surfaces, and slowly getting back into it. The good thing about working on Navi was that it has made me unapologetic about drawing lots of pictures to clarify math situations, even though most mathematicians I talk to look down on visualisation.

Still on my to-read-list: Rudeanu's "Lattice Functions and Equations" and a larger volume here on computer algebra and various (surprising) applications for Groebnerbases.

I still have a stack of IDAPython crap that I wanted to post to OpenRCE. Hrm. I need longer days.

Anyhow, back to Forster.