Even though I mostly use Java, Ruby, and Haskell, I have also been getting my head back into using Scala in my spare time. I took Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala class three years ago, and although I really enjoyed the class (he is a great lecturer!), I didn't much care for the tooling for Scala at that time. I ended up mostly using Clojure (with a little Haskell) for my day to day most used programming language. I experimented with Scala.js a while back and thought that it compared well with Clojurescript. Sweet to write client code in either Clojurescript or Scala.js but I think that sometimes it is faster to not have the extra complexity and the need to transpile and just use plain old Javascript. I took a class in Typescript this year and really liked it but with ES6 quickly becoming a standard some of the benefits of Typescript go away. This morning I was looking for an interesting template project using Scala for the backend and Scala.js ...

Two Clojure projects? Well, actually, I had just one Clojure project until today. I refer to my project as KB2 (KnowledgeBooks.com 2) and it is basically a kitchen sink for everything that I thought that I wanted in a personal (and perhaps small group) research and content management system: A personal version of Evernote: allows me to collect eBooks, web pages snippets and notes in a personal repository that is searchable. I use a Firefox add-on I wrote to capture multiple selections on web pages and send them to the web app. Uses NLP to identify entities in eBooks, web pages and notes and add an information icon that provides DBPedia (WikiPedia) information on the fly. Uses the Bing search API to find information on what my NLP analysis code considers if the main topic of eBooks, web pages and notes. I enjoy meditation (also practice Yoga since about 1975 and Qigong for about two years) and after my early morning mediation this morning I had one of those ah-ha moments: In us...

It is, IMHO, a very good thing that net neutrality now has the force of law behind it. The Internet is the most important artifact for sharing information ever and is worth protecting as a neutral platform. Even though there is a lot of value in walled gardens created by Google, Facebook, and Apple I still hope to see many more systems developed that support individual control of our own data and better support for privacy. I think that Ward Cunningham's new Federated Wiki (on github: github.com/fedwiki ) is a very interesting idea for combining local storage with federated sharing of content. Something to keep our eyes on! I have been working on a combined document repository and general research tool that is tailored to my own needs but I will also sell it as a low cost commercial product (or I might make a compiled version free with the source code available with a commercial license for inclusion in other products - I am not sure yet). I want a system where I can store PDF...

For a personal project I want to make a web app with a "rich client" interface. I had originally planned to write this app in Haskell with the Yesod web framework. However, as much as I like Haskell, I do still have occasional time wasting problems with cabal, Yesod, and sometimes with non-pure Haskell code. My gut feeling is that I will get things done faster if I use Clojure. In the past I have experimented using Clojure and Ember.js but until today I have not spent much time with ClojureScript and Om (I have written web apps using ClojureScript, so the learning curve is trying to use Om). Getting started with Om is straight forward. I used the chestnut lein plugin to create a new Clojure + ClojureScript + Om project. The chestnut plugin is very nice - it set up a reasonable development environment without having to go through a learning curve. After experimenting with the generated project, I then starting substituting in code from David Nolen's Om tutorial into ...