Zach's Journal

Yannick Gingras has released mini-fract 0.6, which you can use to make fractal movies.

Google it, as in:

“Doctors told us that this is rare, and that our child is the only child in The County with this condition,” Jamie Guerrette said Tuesday. “When she was born, we were basically told, ‘Your daughter has bilateral microtia with atresia. Google it.’”

— Community seeks to help girl get needed surgery

byron talmadge dixfield friends family november december, originally uploaded by Amity Beane.

He's HUGE!

Maciej Ceglowski gets into an interesting discussion about Paul Graham's views on art history. Maciej is "idlewords" and Paul Graham is "pg".

I've seen mistaken claims along the lines of "Common Lisp is easy to optimize, you just add type declarations and the compiler will make it super fast!" So it was nice to see jdz start his article about optimizing Brian's Brain with "optimizing without profiling first is a waste of time." He covers using SB-SPROF to find hotspots and Paul Khuong adds some footnotes about how to interpret SB-SPROF output.

Shaneal Manek writes about a new startup Postabon, which uses CL for its backend (for real):

I just wanted to talk about a few of the high level technical decisions that I’ve made – in the hopes that it could help other people starting new projects out (and that I can get some feedback and learn something myself). This post is going to be pretty tightly focused on the language I chose. I have a few other posts in mind on topics such as the database (BerkelyDB) and overall architecture that I’m planning to write up in the next week or two..

So keep an eye on the blog for updates.

David O'Toole put out version 1.0 of his roguelike puzzle game XONG yesterday.

When he asked me to try it out, I expected some headache when downloading it, compiling it, grabbing libraries, etc. Nope! I'm using Snow Leopard on an Intel MacBook. I grabbed the .dmg, double-clicked the xong icon, and it ran perfectly. It bundles an executable SBCL image together with the graphics, sounds, and libraries it needs, so it's completely self-contained and looks like any other Mac .app bundle. It's nice to see this kind of application delivery.

The local grocery store has a big bin of used books for $1. After seeing a 1983 computer dictionary's description of LISP, I knew I had to buy it:

It says:

LISP acronym for LIST PROCESSING a high-level programming language use primarily for list processing, symbol manipulation, and recursive operations: it can handle many different data types, treat programs as data, and provide for the self-modification of the program as it is executing: generally considered a difficult language to learn

(Emphasis mine.)

There has been a great response to my casual mention of the CL-USER map yesterday. Almost 50 new people have been added in the past 24 hours. I think it shows interesting patterns and I hope it can be used for Lispers to find each other for user group meetings, Lisp jobs, etc.

A few people have been confused about how to add themselves to the map. There are a few steps:

• Log in to your Google account
• Go to the map and click the "Edit" button:

  

• Find your location and click on the pin icon to drop a pin and enter your details:

  

I should also mention that I didn't create this map. Mirko Vukovic set it up initially and all the people who added their info to it have made it interesting. I just hope more people see it and get some value from it, so I've added it more prominently to Planet Lisp.

Enjoy!

In the past few days I've made a number of updates and changes to Planet Lisp. If you normally read the Planet via a feed, you will need to visit the site to see some of them.

• Added upcoming Lisp meetings in the sidebar; easily find Lisp meetings!
• Added embedded version of the CL-USER Google map in the sidebar; easily find Lisp users!
• Changed the appearance somewhat to get rid of big horizontal rectangles and lines
• Removed a number of feeds that had not updated in more than a year; that included some important past contributors like Juho Snellman (last updated in December of 2007) and Kevin Rosenberg.

As always, if you have a blog that's at least partly about Common Lisp, please send me a link so I can consider it for Planet Lisp.

I've been maintaining a Google Calendar for upcoming Lisp-related user meetings. In the past month, several people have said it helped them find meetings, so I'd like to make it a little more visible.

To that end, I've added a sidebar to Planet Lisp that shows a list of meetings scheduled in the next 30 days. It's updated daily.

I've also created a new twitter account, @lispmeetings, that will post a tweet about a meeting the day before it happens.

If you want to see an upcoming Lisp meeting on the calendar, please email me and I'll put it up.

Super Mario Brothers!, originally uploaded by shannabeane.

They got a lot of delighted compliments.

I've set up a system where screen gets up-to-date information about my forwarded ssh-agent connections. It works ok, but it's a little fragile in the face of multiple connections to the server.

My problem would be much easier to solve if screen had some notion of "run this command whenever reattaching", but I couldn't find something like that in the manual. Is there something I missed?

(I'd like not to resort to something like a screen-reattach shell script that calls screen, but I will if I have to...)

Here's a note Ernst van Waning wanted me to share with you:

Dear Lisper,

ALU, the Association of Lisp Users, has opened two mailing lists.

One mailing list, ALU-discuss@alu.org is intended for discussion amongst ALU members and interested parties. We hope that the contents of ALU-discuss will be of high quality. Spammers and flamers are not welcome and will be banned.

The other mailing list, ALU-announce@alu-org is intended for the ALU board to announce things that may be important to you. The ALU-announce list is intended to be of low traffic volume, usually only a few messages per year.

With these channels we hope to have more communication with the Lisp community and learn how to better serve you as Lispers.

To get announcements from ALU, join ALU-announce@alu.org at http://www.alu.org/mailman/listinfo/alu-announce and follow the instructions you will find there.

To take part in ALU discussions, join ALU-discuss@alu.org at http://www.alu.org/mailman/listinfo/alu-discuss and follow the instructions you will find there.

We sincerely hope these mailing lists will contribute to communication and cooperation within our community. Although we send this message to attendees of the last two ILCs, the lists are open so anyone can view and contribute. We hope you like it.

Kindest regards,

Ernst van Waning,

President, ALU

I visited Montreal for OOPSLA in 2007. They have a really neat parking meter system. Instead of a traditional mechanical meter at every parking spot, each spot has a label (e.g. "J 103") and there's a computerized kiosk on every block where you can pay for your spot for a certain amount of time.

All the kiosks are networked, too, so you can pay for your spot from any parking kiosk in the city, not just the one on the block where your car is parked. So if you park somewhere and walk across town, you can still easily pay for time on your spot.

There's a small-annoyance hack available with this system.

If you pay for three hours of parking at "J 103" at noon, the meter will expire at 3pm. If you pay for one hour at 1pm, the meter will expire at 2pm. The amount of time you can legally park is not cumulative, but takes effect at the moment you pay, for the exact amount of time you pay for.

So, if you wanted to put someone at risk of getting a parking ticket, wait until they park, then pay for 15 minutes of parking for their spot. After the 15 minutes are up, they are illegally parked, regardless of what they paid before.

(At least that's my understanding of what was explained to me by my host. Corrections welcome from Montrealers who know better than me.)

Erik: "Isaac!! Don't even think about it! Don't even think about it! Mooooom! Isaac's thinking about it!"

Shanna: "How can you tell?"

Erik (scowling): "Momma, don't be a tattletale."

I recently set up Time Machine on our MacBooks and it's been pretty sweet. I no longer worry about Mac backups, and it's cool that you can go back to particular points in time, and the storage requirements for incremental snapshots are proportional to the amount of changed data, not the total amount of data.

So now I want that for my Linux server backups.

My first thought was

• Back up with rsync nightly to some directory (I already do this)
• Take space-efficient snapshot of backup directory with smart filesystem

But from 5 minutes of googling, I don't see that any Linux filesystems actually support snapshotting without a bunch of hassle, and they aren't space-efficient.

Got any ideas?

AutoMotivator declared best.