The subtitle for my blog has been "Projects and Pastimes" throughout all of it’s various incarnations. My original intention was to blog about the things I do in my spare time. In practice, though, I’ve just been blogging about whatever happened to catch my attention (and with irregular postings). It’s time to change that. I’ve decided to start a project, which incorporates a pastime, that I will write a weekly blog post about.
I’ve been peripherally aware of Go (a.k.a wéiqí) for a while now. However, I recently began investigating it in ernest and I found it to be a fascinating game. The rules are simple, but the strategy is subtle and complex. The game has been around for thousands of years, but still has a large and active following. I first tried playing against other people online, but I was handily trounced in every game. I figured I should practice on my own for a bit first. I found a facebook application that used GnuGo. It was nice because I could gain experience by playing a lot of games against a computer, but the interface was a little awkward and buggy. I installed gnugo on my laptop, but playing it from the command line in ascii mode is still akward.
Here’s my first project for this blog: create a nice jruby interface for gnugo. This project will incorporate several things I’ve wanted to learn about for a while now. First of all, I’m interested in jruby. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. From what I’ve read, you can leverage the benefits of java while programming in ruby (my current favorite programming language). Jruby also allows you to create your own application (with a Swing interface). Second, I’d like to learn git and I figure the best way to learn is to create a project and use it. Lastly, everything I do is web-centric and I’d like to explore some other types of programming.