I’ve spent the last Friday afternoon trying to get my radio controlled airplane talking to my transmitter via a ZigBee link. I’ve deemed the traditional RF connection utterly useless as I’m getting rather severe glitches as close as 15 meters away (maybe I shouldn’t have tinkered with the receiver, who knows).

My friend and I bought four ZigBit modules a few months ago, but I didn’t find the time to work on them until last week. The BitCloud stack provided in the SDK is surely impressive, though unsuitable for real-time control.

This is the catchphrase associated with the presentation given by Andrei Alexandrescu during boostcon 2009. I heard about that blasphemy a while ago, but I had neither the time, nor the interest to read it back then.

I finally read it today. You see, I was implementing an incidence graph (as defined by Boost Graph Library) yesterday; to do that one has to write an iterator that, for a given vertex, traverses a sequence of its outgoing edges. Since the graph was potentially very huge, it wasn’t represented explicitly. Instead, the set of adjacent vertices was calculated on-the-fly.

This Monday there was a deadline for submission of bachelor’s theses at my faculty. My girlfriend submitted a thesis on chaotic attractors. It concentrated more on their visual and aesthetic aspect rather than the scientific one, but I think it’s still worth reading through even for those, who can’t appreciate art.

I’ve been noticing for a while that in a conversation, I sometimes tend to stop my thoughts mid-sentence, leaving the listener wondering about the points I’m trying to make. These interruptions of speech are caused by nothing but a lack of vocabulary—stopping to search for an appropriate word, but effectively ending the conversation instead.

So here I go. I’m starting a blog. To improve my communication skills.