Soon, the work begins..

I have not had much time up unti now to work on my project, much less to blog about it. So: "Hey there, fellow Coders of Summer!" and of course to whoever else is reading this: "Welcome. Wait, what are you doing here?!".

First a small introduction for the folks over at Planet SoC:
My name is Andreas Scholta and this summer I will be working on an improved game script bytecode decompiler for ScummVM. And if that wasn't exciting enough, I will be using Scheme as my language of choice, at least for prototyping that is. Because this is my first time applying for/participating in SoC I do feel lucky and elated for me to have made it this far. Naturally, the blunt of work is still ahead and I hope I am able to successfully complete my project by the end of this summer.

Work is officially supposed to begin tomorrow and hence I have finally taken the time to talk to my mentor about basic project infrastructure things. As a result a SVN branch has been set up and a wiki account was created, which I will use for project internal progress reports and possibly for documentation of specific ideas.

Much thanks goes out to the people who have encouraged me (some indirectly) to take part in this beautiful endeavour and whose silent support up to and loud cheers upon my admission filled me with motivation and a subtle anxiety to finally be able to get to work. You know who you are.

For now, what else is there to say but..
Happy Hacking!

Google Summer of Code

"Dear Applicant,

Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. [..]"

... when that mail appeared in my inbox an hour ago, I screamed for excitement. Accepted! Woooooo! This summer I will be working for ScummVM, writing a new bytecode decompiler for scumm scripts. It will be an interesting experience to say the least :)

Aaaaaaaaaah, this is going to be a beautiful summer!

...

What can I write? I feel speechless and somewhat drained of emotion. It's as if I've spent most of it on the second half of that anime I have been watching the past couple of days: Kanon, the 2006 remake by Kyoto Animation to be exact.

And it seemed like an innocent harem anime in the beginning too... except there was no slapstick humour and its male lead was not a klutz. He was just asshole enough for his harem to react in interesting and entertaining ways. I am no anime blogger and I won't spoil this for you. But heed this warning and don't take it too lightly. If you decide to watch this show, enjoy the first half of laughter and general lightness, but don't let it fool you: soon a series of character centric story arcs will emerge, each sadder than the previous one, gradually working towards a final, devastating attack on your male (if you are male, that is) ego with the obvious goal of making you empty your lacrimal sac under the pressure of overwhelming sadness.

I am spent. I am glad I watched this and I am starting to realize how much I regret having seen it all already. What a ride.. :) Oh! Maybe I should not mention it, but yes, it has a happy end.

Emacs Theme

I wasted today, tweaking David O'Toole's color-theme-cl-frame.el to be more clowney ("colorful"). I will not upload the tweaked theme ever. Ha ha ha.

[update: fugly color-theme-brx.el]

Switching to Google Reader

So, a friend has given me a heads up on some Google Reader developments today: it has improved. Never having tried any previous version, I opened the page, imported my feeds and.. decided to stay.

For now I will keep my Bloglines account, but I can already imagine me trashing it. Bloglines is great, don't get me wrong, but Google Reader has a few obvious things going for it (see Kiko vs Google Calendar).