Recently, I needed to debug a particularly nasty interaction between two programs, one of which was a go tool. To get further in understanding the issue, I had to compile a little test program with cgo, the dreaded (by go programmers) compilation mode that allows go programs to call C code. Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to find out what to concretely do in order to build a program with cgo.

About 8 years ago, I turned off and carted away the server running boinkmarks (aka autobench), the benchmarking and performance tracker for SBCL. It seems like its last planet.sbcl.org entry was around 2009-04-11.

At the time, it had run benchmarks on every revision¹ of SBCL since 2004 - I’d been running it for 8 years, as long as I now have not run it.

Time for a retrospective!

I recently did some minor file name munging in Rust, and was reminded that one of the hard parts about learning a new language is the differences in vocabulary. In UNIX, there are two command line tools, basename and dirname. They take a pathname as an argument and print a modified pathname to stdout, which is really handy for shell scripts. Several other languages copied that naming convention, and so I was really surprised to find that googling for rust dirname didn’t return anything useful1.

Recently, I started using Anki, a spaced repetition scheduler¹, a lot to learn French using the Fluent Forever method, and while there have been setbacks, it’s been a pretty great experience overall. It seems to be super useful for memorizing and retaining all sorts of information! Since I have to memorize all sorts of passwords (phone unlock code, laptop login password, gym locker combination), why not use 1Password to help me retain them?

Why not, indeed!

I’ve been writing a bunch of rust code lately, and it’s been a pretty great experience! The thing I enjoy most about it is that the documentation looks just so extremely good. Which brings me to my major point of frustration with my rust-writing setup: Writing doc comments in emacs’s otherwise excellent rust-mode is a pain. You always have to insert the doc comment character sequence de la ligne, and writing doctest examples was even worse: You write rust code, inside markdown, in rust comments.

This problem has been a mystery to me, and I figure to a bunch of other people, too: If you hit F4 in Mac OS X (or macOS) since Lion, it does not have any effect. What.

I’ve been pretty excited about the new features of EcmaScript 6 (ES6, or just “modern JavaScript”) for a while, but yesterday it really struck me how entirely different some of them make the experience of writing JS code!

I use a Mac as my main typing/character-displaying computer, and on macOS, iTerm2 is the best terminal emulator that I’ve found so far. In addition to iTerm2, I also use mosh, the mobile shell, to get a fast, interactive and disconnection-resistant SSH-like connection to hosts on which I need to use the commandline.

The first time had a painful RSI attack was in 2003. It was as if my world collapsed: I’d dealt with hand weirdness since the late 90s (twitches, tingles) but I didn’t recognize that as symptoms of RSI. When both my hands started hurting and even everyday chores like folding laundry turned painful, I started doubting whether I could continue my career in technology.

As it turns out, it is possible to deal with RSI, not be in pain and have a career that involves a lot of typing.

At my workplace, we use github pretty extensively, and with github, we use organization teams. They allow assigning permissions on different repos to groups of people, but, are a really great way of @-mentioning people. This is wonderful, but sadly, github doesn’t make it easy for gmail filters to tell the difference between an email notification that you got because it was interesting to you, or because somebody sent a heads-up @-mention to a team you’re on.

I thought that was impossible to solve, but I was so wrong!