Recently I've finished the website called Choose Your Textbook. This is a Scientific Literature Browser. One can browse there through the tree of science (the branches are taken from the wiki), and see the short description of those sciences. To the right there is an Amazon search box, where the name of the currently chosen branch is dynamically loaded, thus it shows the (most) relevant books at Amazon for a specific discipline.

Technically speaking, this is a mashup, but part of mashing is done offline. It's with my tools written in Scheme, and it is possible to do that dynamically, as there exist Scheme-s embedded to JS. But not for this project. The tooling converts that specific wiki-page in a chain HTML -> SXML -> (filtering) -> JSON. The latter is embedded to the website's JS. A nice tree / graph renderer called JIT is used to show the tree. JIT does animation / morphing and supports a few layouts. Seems, though, it cannot switch between them dynamically. I've stumbled at some other restrictions also, e.g. couldn't setup decent automatic node sizes.

Despite I've designed the website as an Amazon affiliate, I knew there wouldn't be much popularity. I tried to put a link to Hacker News and to Reddit, but both unsuccessful. So, there are almost no visitors at all. Nevertheless, my point was to try a few things: make my first mashup, write some tooling in Scheme, including DOM-manipulation, try out some web graph renderer, and last but not least, I wanted to skim through the tree of Science looking with one eye on existing appropriate literature list. And those goals are accomplished.

Nemerle is waiting, but it have to wait more, while I'm learning Scheme. I have a plan to solve some problems from Project Euler, first with brute-force (however, it is not always possible), then using smarter ways, and post some solutions here under the tags "projecteuler" and "scheme".

Another thing, I am setting up currently a Gentoo Linux system on my workstation, so, some postings about this will come under the tag "gentoo". One of the reasons to install it is an unexpected difficulty with SATA-drives under Windows. The motherboard (Asus M3N78-VM) supports SATA-devices in three modes: SATA (only three accessible), RAID and AHCI. The latest is preferable for me, as I need more than three drives.

It was understandable when WinXP 64-bits (I didn't try any 32-bits systems, as I need more than 4 Gb of RAM) refused to work in AHCI-mode despite all my tricks with this and that, particlularly, manufacturer's drivers embedding with the nLite tool. But when Vista x64 with proper drivers could not load after switching m/b into AHCI, I decided that it's time to try Linux again. I prefer Gentoo, one of the most hardcore distributions available.

This blog will be devoted solely to my programming trials, in particularly with the Nemerle programming language and its integration subproject with Visual Studio. I have little time now for doing that, as I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Netherlands (mathematical physics), but I'm interested very much e.g. in implementing refactoring for Nemerle.

I already spent around a year (of leisurely work) for the Nemerle integration project and implemented for instance such features, as Find usages, Highlight symbol and a mini-framework for extensive testing of such stuff. Then I made a large break in playing with the integration (however, continuing with Nemerle itself) lasting up to now, and I'm planning to proceed with it, contributing from time to time.