Renaissance Grrrl

Hello all,

It looks like my old cl.indiana.edu/~wren is dead. I'm not sure why exactly (glancing through emails I couldn't find anything relevant); but it looks like all the non-faculty accounts on that machine have gone away, so I won't take it personally.

But fear not, for at long last I have decided to get my own domain: wrengr.org! I've corrected the links on the columbicubiculomania posts, so you should be able to get the pdfs again. If you notice any other broken links, please do drop me a line.

As part of the move I've also decided to finalize the switch from Darcs to GitHub for all my Hackage projects. The impedence cost of merging github pullrequests back to darcs has been a bit much, and I've been using git at work, so, much as I love darcs and hate git, I think it's finally time. I've pushed out a few package updates already, and will try to get the rest out as soon as I can.

Ever since community.haskell.org has died, I've defaulted back to using my cpan email for Haskell stuff. This is clearly suboptimal, but I'm one of those old curmudgeons who hates giving out the direct address for their personal email, and cpan seems like the only one still providing forwarding addresses these days. The webhost for my new domainname, alas, doesn't offer a forwarding-only plan so the only way to use them would be to spring for a full-blown smtp plan, which is a bit pricy for a single forwarding address. I'll prolly end up doing it eventually, but it'll take a while to justify to myself. Until then, please bear with the holding pattern of using the cpan address.

Got back from Vancouver a couple days ago. The return flight was hell, but other than that the trip was pretty good. Got to meet a whole bunch of folks who read my blog (hi!), which was super cool. It always gives me warm fuzzies to know people are actually interested in my stuff. (You'd think I'd get used to it after a while, but no, evidently childhood scars still remain years after developing a solid sense of self-esteem. Go fig.) Of course, now I feel bad about not having written much of late. I have a few posts I've been meaning to write —mostly technical ones—, and I'm thinking I might should try to kick those out as a way to get back into the daily writing habit needed for finishing up my dissertation.

Since handing out my card at ICFP, I've been hacking around on my website. I'm still working on getting my publications/presentations to be properly formatted, and the timestamps in the footers on a couple pages are busted, but other than that I think it's in pretty good shape. I also took part in a keysigning party for the purpose of building a WoT as part of the developing story for how we securely deliver packages in Haskell. My key is up on Keybase as well as on my website (along with all my other contact info).

After a week of great talks, too much drinking, and too little sleep, I met up with a dear friend from undergrad. It's been far far too long since we've had a chance to hang out (alas, he couldn't make the wedding last year), but he's one of those friends you can just fall right back into. It's funny how much can change and yet stay the same. In one of our ambling walks I dragged him into a clothing store —something I never would've done pre-transition. He didn't seem to mind. He just went along like it's the sort of thing we've always done. And it felt to me like the sort of thing we could've always done. Recently he's been ref'ing for roller derby up in Victoria, and after talking about it I'm thinking I might try my hand at it. Sounds like a lot of fun. We have a team in Bloomington, and they're doing a training/recruiting thing, though alas I'll miss it since I'll be in Mountain View on the 14th. I'll see if I can't find some other way to get introduced.

I have a new academic/professional website: http://cl.indiana.edu/~wren/!

There are still a few unfinished areas (e.g., my publications page), but hopefully I'll be finished with them shortly. The new site it built with Hakyll instead of my old Google-Summer-of-Code static website generator. I'm still learning how to implement my old workflow in Hakyll, and if I get the chance I'll write a few posts on how I've set things up. Reading through other folks' posts on how they use Hakyll have been very helpful, and I'd like to give back to the community. I've already issued a pull request for adding two new combinators for defining template fields.

In the meantime, if you notice any broken links from my old blog posts, please let me know.

Heads up y'all. My email at Free Geek will be going away in about a month. The following addresses are all still valid and point to the right place:

• cpan.org — for Perl folks
• community.haskell.org — for Haskell folks
• alumni.reed.edu — for Reedies
• indiana.edu — for business
• gmail.com — for friends

So it's official now, I shall be moving in a couple-few weeks. Out of suburbia and into the dangerous city. We managed to find a nice little pocket that looks clean and safe enough. Just off the lightrail and only three miles by bike from campus. Also near a little neighborhood that reminds me of Alberta.

That school thing seems to be coming along. This week my advisor and I'll be discussing where to place the final nails in the coffin. My post-graduation work is starting to get underway as well. And I've started releasing various bits of my Haskell code into the wild. Eventually I'll get around to updating my main homepage again to include all that.

Speaking of which, my posts have been rather programming-centric of late. I know many of y'all are into that sort of thing, but I don't want to scare the rest off. I've been thinking about joining Planet Haskell, though I'm wondering if I should spawn off another blog more focused for that (or, y'know, get the RSS feeds from my main site working again; though that doesn't allow for comments). Thoughts?