My creative energy is all going into Radian lately. I’m having a ball, working deep in the plumbing – thinking about tuples, monads, type inference, garbage collection, dataflow analysis, and concurrency – but the tool itself is a long way from doing anything useful, and there’s not much to talk about here.

In the meantime, here’s a neat article which shows how to set up a makefile that automates most of the annoying dependency management. Those of you building executables on unix systems will appreciate this.

I want a portable computer and I am thinking about getting one of those cute little “netbooks”. I had to send my Macbook back when I left Real, and got a Blackberry phone as a substitute. It works fine for email and light web browsing, but I’m still stuck in my bedroom whenever I want to write code, which has become a significant fraction of my free time. I want something sleek, light, quiet, and cheap, running Linux (preferably not nerfed), with a comfortable keyboard, a solid-state drive, and reliable wireless networking. I don’t need to play videos or even music; I just need to check email, do some casual web browsing, and edit lots of source code. Anyone out there tried one of these little portables? I’d love a recommendation.