A Rant

“Numbers” as in the spreadsheet software that comes with MacOS, not like “the concept of amounts of things”. Although that obviously is relevant here too. But I just wanted to lead off by saying that calling your spreadsheet program the most generic thing in the world was a horrible decision for search engine interaction purposes. There’s no way to word any search for help in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re looking for Excel help for number datatypes. Try it. “SUMIF function conditions numbers”. That’s only ever going to pull Excel tutorials. The saving grace is that 95% of the time Excel commands/syntax do work in Numbers, or point me in enough of the right direction to get me unblocked.

Introduction

It’s December, which means it is time for Advent of Code: a series of daily programming puzzles loosely tied together by a Christmas theme involving Santa’s elves. I’ve used a few different programming languages over the years, never quite finishing all of the puzzles in any given year, and it’s always fun. This time, however, it snuck up on me just as I was also discovering Live Coding, especially the work of Sam Aaron and Meta-eX. It instantly piqued my interest and at first I tried getting started with the same tools he and Meta-eX used, (namely Clojure and the Overtone bindings to the SuperCollider synthesis engine). I quickly stumbled across a reddit comment saying that at this point, in 2025, Overtone is pretty much dead and people are better off looking for more vibrant projects. So I discovered Iain Duncan and his project Scheme for Max, which provides a runtime for a dialect of Scheme Lisp inside the Max “patching environment”. I immediately had the idea, in order to get up to speed both with Scheme and with Max, to create my Advent of Code solutions within the Max environment using Scheme for Max.

I spent a lot of time this weekend updating my server, cleaning up services I don’t want or use anymore, and replacing nginx with caddy as the reverse proxy in front of the various services I’m hosting. I also decided to re-launch my blog. I am hoping to personally focus more on travel and experiences, and sharing pictures here will be a priority. Stay tuned for updates!