It’s Friday night, and I have just finished my first week of my second year at the Australian National University. This is the reason I haven’t written anything here for the last week, and my blog rate will probably remain low for the next 10 weeks… but I’ll do my best! This semester I’m doing some rather interesting courses (and some not so much…)

• COMP2300 – Introduction to Computer Systems Which is about.. well computer systems. It covers topics like binary representations of numbers, C, computer architecture, etc. The thing I am however most looking forward to the most will be the third assignment, which will be based around the uni’s new T2 (the one Ben Lippmeier is using for most of his GHC on SPARC work)

• COMP2100 – Software Construction This seems to be more about how to write larger software, than actual programming (though it does emphasise programming weekly to get into good habits). I’m interested to see for the Personal Software Process (PSP) stuff goes, it seems to me that it can make you a more productive programmer quite easily. After only an hour of using the time keeping for it, i’ve noticed i don’t get distracted as much, because it’s not programming time, so all i do is program in this time. Means i distract myself less, which is very helpful.

• ENGN2211 – Electronic Circuits This is a second year electronics course, and should be fairly interesting too. Not much to say about this one…

• ENGN2226 – Engineering Systems Analysis This course is taught by a pretty cool German maths PhD, and focuses mostly on modelling systems, which is obviously an integral part of engineering. We’ll have to use MATLAB for this, which from what I’ve heard from others may not be very fun at all. Could be a good place to use some of the nice statistical packages for haskell…

Anyway, I’ll try and keep up with the haskelling, but I’ll be doing a lot of non haskell this semester (C, Java, ASM, MATLAB), so it may have to fall by the way side for now

– Axman

Well, it’s been over a year since I last had a blog of any kind (that’s a small lie, but who cares), and I have realised I now have stuff to blog about! I’ve finished my first year of uni, and damn has it been awesome. They taught me Haskell, and wow, I’ve been hooked ever since! I’ve finally found something that perfectly suites my needs and interests, and challenges me. So what have I been up to in haskell? Well lots of playing around, the most fun has been parallel and concurrent programming, which is easy, fun and interesting in haskell, I’ve also been playing a little with the ST monad recently, which is awesomeness. Not sure what else to add, and I’ve got more work to do on this blog* before I really start posting interesting stuff, but bare with me! *(Things getting markdown installed, and then getting it working with haskell hilighting. Shall be following in the steps of Conal Elliott and Olsner)