Author: Indigo Curnick
Date: 2025-06-15
What have I been up to since my last update?
In terms of GeoFox and Heloid, there isn't much to report. I'm still making my way through the wkt-crs parser. The difficulty and scope of that is much larger than I initially expected, and I haven't had as much time to work on it the last few weeks due to a combination of personal commitments (hanging out with friends) and being rather ill this last week.
One of the largest difficulties with the wkt-crs parser is the fact that it's quite an older format. This means it has a lot of inconsistencies or just generally less than optimal structure. Consider for example
CS[ellipsoidal,3],
AXIS["latitude",north,ORDER[1],ANGLEUNIT["degree",0.017]],
AXIS["longitude",east,ORDER[2],ANGLEUNIT["degree",0.017]],
AXIS["ellipsoidal height (h)",up,ORDER[3],LENGTHUNIT["metre",1.0]]
The annoying thing here is that each of these AXIS are children of the CS term. However, you might notice that structurally they're siblings rather than children. This is especially irritating given the wkt-crs language has hierarchy, but sometimes that just isn't utilised. Getting around this has been a bit of a pain, and the complexity of the parser continually balloons to keep up with all the edge cases. Maybe in future I can find some simpler way to represent it all.
Nevertheless, progress is happening. I'm working through literally section by section and ticking them off as I complete examples. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can finally complete the parser, which will I think be the largest part of this project.
In terms of other stuff, as I say I haven't had as much time recently but one thing which is quite exciting is I spent a little bit of time sketching out a course on the Trivium and Quadrivium. I've always had a strong interest in classical education and I've written a few articles around the subject, but I think it might be time to really seriously study and produce materials on it.
On the Quadrivium though, I was thinking of a kind of modern reboot. I won't say too much now, but certainly computer science should be a part of a modern Quadrivium!