september in review

content/post/2022/10/september-2022.md

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+---
+title: September 2022 In Review
+date: 2022-10-03T11:13:00+02:00
+tags:
+  - metapost
+---
+
+September 2022 is no more. Life started getting in the way of blogging frequently, with "only" 6 posts, compared to 10 in July and 9 in August. That's still more than 1 a week so no reason to panick. Most of my keyboard strokes went towards my new book _The Creative Programmer_ which is [finally released in early access](/post/2022/09/the-creative-programmer-early-access-release/)! A last peer review of the rest of the manuscript is due this week and we hope to start the production process for the final version somewhere in November. 
+
+In the meantime, I've been given green light to defend my PhD somewhere in June 2023. There's one more paper to hopefully get accepted today, one more to write, and then even more keyboard action will be required to put out a dissertation. Luckily, I can reuse the bulk of my paper texts, but it's got to be a coherent whole, with a main story line woven in. I hope that all _Creative Programmer_ manuscript work is done by then. Over the course of the last the last few months, it felt like one of those irritating open tabs in your browser that you constantly think and worry about, but are afraid to close because you might still need it. Juggling too many balls can be dangerous... 
+
+
+Previous month in review: [August 2022](/post/2022/09/august-2022).
+
+### Books I've read
+
+This month, I finished:
+
+- _Successful Aging_ by Daniel J. Levitin, a 568 page book that could loose more than a few pounds but at its core contains many interesting messages. I did pick up a few notes and integrated them into my work. 3/5---I liked it. 
+- _The Many-Colored Land_ by Julian May. A pioneering sci-fi/fantasy that takes place in a distant future where they discover a portal back to the Pliocene era. Guess what: four million years ago, the Earth was (temporary) inhabited by aliens that partly shared our genes. It's a classic from the eighties that I somehow never read. 4/5---really good.
+- _The Polymath_ by Peter Burke. See my notes in [the Polymathy blog post](/post/2022/09/peter-burkes-polymathy/) of last month. 3/5---I liked it.
+
+For October, I spotted a few walking related philosophy books (or the other way around) in a local book store that we convinced to walk back home.
+
+### Games I've played
+
+In case you've been living under a rock: on April Fool's Day, Ron Gilbert surprised the world with a _Monkey Island_ announcement he's been working on in secrecy for 2 years. It already hit the (virtual) shelves in September, so naturally, we had to play it. A friend shares our Monkey enthusiasm and bought it for my birthday, thanks Luk! Is it any good, you ask? Yes yes yes! See [my lengthy review](https://jefklakscodex.com/games/switch/return-to-monkey-island/). 
+
+![](../lowstreet.jpg "Mêlée Island's Low Street re-imagined in Return To Monkey Island. The tower clock is still broken! The game plays all its nostalgia cards exceptionally well.")
+
+To properly enjoy _Return To Monkey Island_, you need to have played at least the first two games, _The Secret of Monkey Island_ and _LeChuck's Revenge_. In anticipation of the release, we replayed those for the 4th or so time. The jokes, the atmosphere, the puzzles, ...---more than 30 years later, they still get to us. What a classic. No wonder [I have two posters of Steve Purcell's artwork](/post/2021/02/my-retro-desktop-setup/) put up at my desk.
+
+As an aside, Google announced it will be [shutting down Stadia in January](https://www.eurogamer.net/stadia-is-shutting-down-in-january), its game streaming service. And yet, they can't resist putting out dumb statements like this:
+
+> We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google [...] - as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.
+
+Yeah right, the future of gaming: streaming (lending) stuff off a giant that decides whether or not you get a frame. I'll pass. That reminds me, I bought a few new old Game Boy carts I need to try out!
+
+### Selected (blog) posts
+
+- [Generating art from lattice graphs](https://alexwlchan.net/2022/09/graph-generative-art/) by alexwlchan. I love these inventive Python-powered pieces of art.
+- [Firefly Sanctuary](https://fireflysanctuary.today/home.html) is a website of a home where a physical guestbook is filled in by visitors. Both ideas are great!
+- [The myth of the developer that can't code](https://www.neilwithdata.com/developer-myth) by Neil Sainsbury. I do have my own hypothesis on this one that agrees to disagree but it's nice to evoke a bit of discussion. By the way, [hiring is broken](https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10139106) by Behroozi et al. is a great related paper to read. 
+- There's a [RSS Club](https://daverupert.com/rss-club/) set up by Dave Rupert? The idea is to publish some posts exclusive as RSS items. It's an idea. Not a good one, but an idea nonetheless.
+- [OPL2LPT: an AdLib sound card for the parallel port](https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-adlib-opl2lpt) by Vincent Bernat. I love pictures of ISA cards, especially if they include a Monkey Island big box. 
+- [Pathfinding demystified](https://gabrielgambetta.com/generic-search.html) by Gabriel Gambetta. Very technical and informative. Gabriel's posts, like [emulator-backed remakes](https://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html), are amazing but very dense.
+- [The Beautiful Diablo 2: Resurrected Machine](https://fabiensanglard.net/d2r/index.html) by Fabien Sanglard. Fabien also explains in great detail their looting and Mephisto run tactics, just like old times. 
+- [Loneliness in academia](https://lemire.me/blog/2005/02/19/loneliness-in-academia/) by Daniel Lemire. Isn't it telling that I stumbled upon this post for the third time this year? _Sigh_.
+- [If I Die Before My Wife](https://dewetblomerus.com/2022/09/23/if-i-die-before-my-wife.html) by De Wet Blomerus. Investment advice passed on.
+- [Compressing and embedding a Worlde word list](https://nullprogram.com/blog/2022/03/07/) by Chris Wellons. I wish I was as fluent in algorithm juggling as Chris. 
+
+### Other random links
+
+- [Spacemacs](https://www.spacemacs.org/)---because "the best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim. It's Emacs and Vim!". I'm too scared to try it out though. 
+- The research group [Brains on Code](https://brains-on-code.github.io) conducts empirical software engineering research related using behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging studies to understand program comprehension. 
+- The [GraalVM](https://www.graalvm.org/ruby/) Java VM has a high-performance Ruby code interpreter called TruffleRuby. On that note, I was surprised there are so many JDKs available, and sites like https://whichjdk.com/ or https://sdkman.io/ exist to help you navigate them. 
+- With [Stackaid.us](https://www.stackaid.us/), you can fund _all_ open source dependencies at once: it distributes a sum among projects' direct _and_ indirect dependencies. Currently limited to JS projects. 
+- According to Ruben Schade, [Scoop](https://scoop.sh/) is a better Windows package manager than Chocolatey.
+- [Peanut-GB](https://github.com/timheigames/Peanut-GB-Playdate), a Game Boy emulator on a Playdate? Wow!