Getting my brain handed to me on a plate by a Google tech screen has convinced me that I need, regardless of my professional life, to have at least some kind of relatively advanced technical effort going on at all times if this is actually going to be my life's work. The work I'm doing is, in large part, beneath me. That sounds arrogant, but today I'm fixing up hard-coded registry key paths, so it's not like the bar is real high.

My two current free-time development targets are:

Semantic Diff

Martin Fowler describes it best:

Quote:From MFBliki:
Good diff (and merge) algorithms are around for text and binary files. The trouble with these diffs is that they are rather dumb. All they do is look at the two artifact versions and generate a simple way of getting from one to another.

A semantic diff would understand the purpose of the change, rather than just the effect.

Current leads:

• Antlr


• MolhadoRef


• SSDiff


• Something (not sure what) from the Sun site about the Java parser

Thoughts:

• First things first, need a graph of the code structures in both cases - how to handle code that doesn't compile? - research topic!


• Need to figure out if a line is the basic diff entity - compromises between simplicity of implementation (tokenization/parsing) versus simplicity of use (manageable, distinct entities) - stuff to try!

Physics/Engineering Sandbox

I don't know what exactly this is going to be yet, but I have a couple of ideas. First, the "physics":

• Rigid & Soft-body dynamics


• Fluid dynamics


• Electromagnetic interactions


• Thermodynamics


• Optics (primarily "caustics", as the cool kids say)


• Chemistry - this one's pretty ill-defined at the moment, but the use cases will help, maybe

Some potential use cases to demonstrate interaction between systems:

• Oersted's wire and magnetic needle


• Steel Wool + battery


• Creation of sparks by striking metals together.


• Filling up a windsock or waterballoon

After that, maybe some engineering - see if I can get some simple cases first - ropes pulling vehicles along, units combining and diverging, some armor-piercing and armor-destroying interactions, etc. All on the road to a foundation for liquiddark.