Things of the moment

• My current side project is fixing bugs in Python's DOM implementation.

• Brainteaser: What if chess had a single level of undo? Specifically, after your opponent moves, you may, instead of making your next move as usual, roll the game back to the point just before your previous move and do something else instead. (Your game clock, though, would not be turned back.) How would this affect the game?

• I'm trying to understand Haskell's existentially quantified types, and (a shallower question) why there's no Data.Hashtable.ST, darn it.

• GoboLinux is a Linux distribution with a sane filesystem layout. From reading that one page, I like it. You can't fight with MSI for a week without realizing that the people who design installer systems have been working waaaay too hard, and that the fate of our civilization hinges on stopping them.

• Yesno is a toy programming language in which every method call returns something immediately ...and returns the correct result eventually. It's either hilarious or awesome, probably. The obvious next step is to make it self-host.

• In the spirit of yesno, here are two quick reviews of books I'm not done reading yet. (I'll refine these opinions later, maybe.) The Time-Traveler's Wife is too sentimental and too linear, and does not contain enough adventure or suffering. Oryx and Crake has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses as 1984, but much more angst.