Work stuff will be dominating my time for the next few weeks.

The refactoring of the case reporting library was successful. The whole project was successful, actually - it proved that more elaborate case reporting and analysis tools were needed, and now I'm looking into commercially available options. I guess once the higher-ups got a taste of what's possible it opened up the option to spending money. I'm more than happy to put this project behind me. It was a valuable learning experience, but extremely dull.

Now I'm looking towards what's next. I started this journal to keep a record of my progress in learning to program in C, but what wound up happening is that I laid a foundation for learning to program in anything for whatever reason.

I've spent some of this evening researching microcontrollers. There has been several times in the past few years where I've almost purchased an Arduino, but I didn't go through with it because I was worried that it was too high-level to be a good taste of real microcontroller programming. Now that I have a better understanding of the tool chain (as well as what being an Arduino really means) I realize that's not necessarily the case, so I might pick one up soon.

I started reading Charles Petzold's Code. It's absolutely brilliant. I picked it up because I wanted to learn more about assembly programming (specifically for the fictional DCPU-16 that will be featured in Notch's Ox10c game). The book starts with things like Morse code and Braille, telegraph machines, and relays. It then bridges those concepts with (I believe it's called) set theory, and then on to combinatorial logic and gates (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, etc). That's where I am right now - right at the part where all these gates are combined to make half and full-adders. It goes into a decent amount of detail about how to use these to add and subtract binary numbers, but I'm afraid I'm getting a bit lost with the subtraction and I'll need to work it out on paper before moving on. I think that soon the book will transition to flip-flops, memory, and then eventually how it all combines into something that can be programmed.

I have a good idea for a next project to stretch myself, but I need to plow through more of the Objective-C book first.