COLLEGE

On August 29th, I'm leaving for the 16-hour car drive to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, US. It's a small liberal arts college, but it has reasonable departments in math and CS. I'm entering it as a Freshman this fall, and I'm really, really excited. I'm not sure whether to major in math, computer science or something else like economics or linguistics because I want to study everything. But I don't want to spend all of my time on the computer, so I'm banning myself from programming Factor and blogging during the month of September. I need to build a social life there, and this has the potential to ruin it. But don't assume that this blog is dead after the end of August; just come back October 1 expecting a nice posting on something practical, like XML (ugh), Unicode (2x ugh) or a little useful script I made.

Before I go, there are a few tasks that I need to accomplish. The most important one is implementing conjoining jamo behavior so that Korean will work properly in Unicode. (Korean will take a huge amount of room in memory, which I'll describe soon in another post.) Additionally, I have to finish Unicode collation and fix some problems with pull-elem, which will probably require huge changes in extra/xml/xml.factor. Those last two things might have to wait until October, but the first one is essential because there are people waiting for Unicode support, and strings of UTF-8 which Factor thinks are ISO 8859-1 won't cut it. I hope proper Unicode handling, including 8- and 32-bit strings, are made a part of Factor .90, or at the latest .91.

If I have any readers (or if there are any other Factorers) in the Northfield area, or just the Minnesota area (besides Doug), please contact me.