Work and Snorkeling

I have been teaching Sabrina how to snorkel in the pool. It may be quite useful for our trip next Spring Break, though it's quite different to do it in the sea as opposed to do it in a pool. She's quite good, but she still has to practice her blow-out technique. It's coming. She did a lot of progress today.

I have been working on contracts and a personal project throughout the year, and the personal project is starting to take solid shape. I have a lot of projects coming up, one in progress, and I find that because of the tools I have these projects are long to build. There should be better tools and for the past 6-7 years I have been toying with the idea of building my own (I've also been doing a lot of testing for this particular project over the past five years). I've been waiting for something to come up the way I need it and some have, to a very lesser extent. In January I decided to go full steam and build the tool.

It's a big project for it involves creating a computer language that's out of the norms and spans over different base languages but hey, I'm a computer scientist ( the guy who creates the stuff the engineers use ) and since I've only been doing engineering work for the past 23 years it's kinda good to get back into the real fun and complicated stuff.

To build my tool I had to build an editor that would be able to build the tool. That editor took a good month and half to put up. With it I was able to quickly build itself but using the language I created.

The trick is that the one in the middle, created with my language, can do the same thing the hardwired one (on the right) can do. The difference? The one in the middle can be built in a day. The one to the right took me almost two months. I haven't used the hard-wired one (on the right) for the past couple of weeks even if the newer one was not fully functional yet. The new one, written in my new language, now looks like:

The reason I'm talking about it today is because as of today, the one created in my new computer language can actually create or load apps, and it can add objects. Soon it will be able to change the properties of the objects that make up an app (application, or program). Previous tests have seen the program easily access databases. Very soon I hope to use One Happy Kid as the first application written with it. Today is a small but relatively important milestone that's been achieved. I am a few days away from erasing the hardwired editor that got me here. Cool and fun stuff for me.

Family Past
A picture of my father when he merely was a year and a half old. Thx mom.