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I've been very busy this week, but have managed to absolutely geek out a couple of times. As I occasionally do, I got to thinking about a geeky project this week. It was something to do while I was failing to fall asleep but unable to stay awake. Anyway, my project is genealogical in nature and deals with dates of various flavors. While doing some searching for date algorithms I found a page on Doomsday calculations. It's not about the end of the world, but it's neat number games with days of the week. I heart John Horton Conway.

I then did some further searching and found the Julian Day Number calculations. This was exactly the thing I was looking for and in my opinion an elegant solution to the whole timekeeping problem in general.

Let me tell ya, I was geeking out hardcore. I sounded like Beaker on speed.

Confessions of a hopeless geek time. I am reading Bruce Schneier's "Practical Cryptography". For fun.

Keep in mind, Bruce is the hands down best technical writer I have ever encountered. His style is very readable. He can clearly and concisely explain his subject matter. He could be writing novels but instead he's co-authoring world class encryption schemes. Admitted, some of the math bits go well over my head (tronella might get them, but they are out of my league). It's interesting anyway; brain food.

If you even a passing interest in the field or are just curious, I encourage you to pick up "Practical Cryptography" or Bruce's near legendary work "Applied Cryptography", now in its second edition. It's for geeks what mainlining heroin is for junkies.

Yesterday I got the idea for a program to convert from GEDCOM, the standard genealogical file format, and the standardized HTML required for the ebook. There are a few programs out there to make HTML from GEDCOM, but for the most part they were for a Microsloth environment or would require a lot of rework to make what I want. At first wasn't inspired to actually do it. I felt I wasn't in the mood for lots of fiddly little work. But I was bored, so I started.

Five hours later I got up and went to bed. I didn't want to go to bed, but it was notably past bedtime and I was at a good stopping point. I hadn't gotten up except to go to the bathroom the whole time. I hadn't said two words to derien, who most likely realized it was useless to try and talk to me anyway. I was happier than a kitten with a ball of yarn.

The program is progressing well. I'll probably stay up tonight until I finish it.

Today I disassembled the little (mostly) busted mp3 player I got off ebay. Incredible. Whoever designed that puppy was clever to the nth degree. The single platter hard drive is so tiny and the battery is about the same size and even less weight. I'm going to mod it by putting in a higher capacity battery and a 50% larger hard drive.