About me
I am a recent computer science graduate, and have an interest in many various subjects. I have worked on a few independent projects, with the most important one being iobin, a collection of easy-to-use installer packages for the Io programming language. I have also worked on several other projects for personal use, such as silica (a musical modeling language), jedi (an esoteric programming language), demi-16 (a dcpu-16 emulator), and Yellow Notes (a command-line note-taking/todo list app).
I have some level of experience in multiple fields, and have a passion for music, both recording and listening to. I play several instruments, though none of them well, and I record and release CDs in extremely limited numbers. More information on that is available from my portfolio pages.
I have a working knowledge of several languages and environments, including (but far from limited to) Java SE6/7, Java EE5, JSP, C (ANSI, Stellaris LMS, NXP LPC, TI MSP430, Arduino), C++, IBM's LIME, MSP430 ASM, Motorola 86HC11 ASM, PBasic, Visual Basic .NET, C#, Processing, Common Lisp, Io, HTML, XML, PHP, Perl, Python, haXe, Erlang, Haskell, JavaScript, SQL, LaTeX markup, Windows/DOS batch scripting, bash scripting, and Redcode, and I have a healthy interest in learning Lua, Groovy, Clojure, fantom, loop, idris, and Scala.
I am currently employed as a Unix Systems Administrator at a university hospital, and loving my job.
About this blog
This blog used to serve primarily as a place for me to discuss software development from the viewpoint of a computer science student writing personal projects for my own use, and this is reflected by the first fifty posts (from 23Aug2010 to 28Apr2012). During that period, the blog was known as the completely unimaginative "~suspended-chord dev blog" (boring), and was running on a PHP script that I wrote called "blahgger" (fitting).
As you can see, the name has been changed to "a→ab". This blog will still function as a place for me to discuss my software development endeavors, however with this new name comes a broadening of scope. The subtitle "computation, math, science, and thought" says it all: instead of just development journals, I will be posting some articles on wide reaching topics in computation, mathematics, science, psychology, philosophy, music, and cognition. This is more of a breathing space now, where I can just sit down and type out my ideas. And I've needed something like this for a while. Oh, and it's running on a different engine now: toto.
So, about the name (a→ab). How is it pronounced? You could say "a maps to a b", or "a implies a b", or "a right-facing arrow a b", or "a to a b", or even "a a b". The first option was my intended choice, but I realized that with the new, wider scope of this blog, any of them are valid. So, what does it mean? Well, going by the first option, this is either a rewrite rule in a context-free grammar, or a production in a L-system. Or perhaps it's a production rule in a Post canonical system. Or a state transition in a finite state machine. Or part of a configuration of a specialized Turing machine. Or, to bring it all back to software, a key-value pair, or a functional dependency in a relational database. Or in the field of logic (in particular the sequent calculus), we have some statement a which metaimplies a or b, which equates to a true statement. Or in mathematics and Markov analysis, there is a likelyhood that a will be followed by b. Or in genetics, there is a base pair denoted a, which is followed immediately by another a and then b. It's really however you choose to see it or think about it. But most of all, I just thought it was a cool name.
Welcome to a→ab
Contact information
If you would like to contact me, make suggestions for future posts, or just to drop a line, you can email me at suschord@suspended-chord.info, just be sure to put [BLOG] somewhere in the subject so I read it. I am also available to talk to in the #io and #boardgames channel on freenode quite regularly. I go by the nick gatesphere or some variation thereof.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy your stay!
-->Jake Peck, 11Jan2013