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Category: Lisp

Somewhere between 8 and 11 years without boinkmarks

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!

Some more updates

So I’ve been moving stuff off my 6 year old server to a machine hosted in Germany lately. I hope to bring back Boinkmarks on it some day soon. (Not in the way I brought back the git repos, though - no outsourcing for benchmarks!) (-: There are a couple state changes in my projects that would not warrant a blog post on their own, but I think as a whole are still something to write home about:

Git lives again - somewhere else

I’ve revived the git repos affected by this outage the cvs->git conversion is now alive again, and the repos there are now kept on github.com. Turns out there are only two more CVS repos left that I was converting to git: McCLIM and SLIME. So, they’re online again, and I hope you still find them useful. If you are missing any repos that I forgot to move, please send me a note.

git.boinkor.net outage

I’m currently moving some of boinkor.net’s services off the creaky old machine that used to host it, over to another machine. This affects git.boinkor.net - it’s not going to be available for the next 2 days. (With a bit of luck, it may be back up a little sooner, though.) This probably affects you if you follow the slime and mcclim git repos hosted there. This was caused by a case of really bad planning on my part.

Accessing the Stripe API From Lisp

Stripe is a new payment processor on the Web, and they seem to be a lot less insane than Paypal. On a whim, I made a little (almost completely untested, toy) CL library for accessing their HTTP API from Lisp. Maybe you’ll find it useful: cl-stripe. This was pretty great fun! Thanks to their nice HTTP API, drakma, and alexandria, I have been able to write this with a minimum of horribly hacky code, in just 5 or 6 hours of working on it, on and off, this saturday afternoon.

A Weird Problem With ASDF on NFS (and a workaround)

Recently, we at Franz have been seeing weird failures when building a certain ASDF system on NFS: We were intermittently getting redefinition warnings when loading a system - not all the time, but more often when we compiled during certain timeslots. This was a weird one, and I think it would be nice to record what this is, and how we figured out what’s going on (and how we arrived at our work-around).

“Basic Lisp Techniques” for sale on Amazon

I just saw that David Cooper’s Basic Lisp Techniques is now available on Amazon, as a Kindle edition, for $9.95. Problem is, this book is freely available on the Franz web site, doesn’t seem like it is an authorized conversion, and judging from the free sample the Kindle edition it is a slightly crappy (footnotes didn’t convert properly, ToC is ugly) pdf->azw conversion of the PDF. I recommend using the free PDF (you can even convert it yourself using Calibre if you want the book on an e-reader, it’s not hard at all to get very readable results).