I’ve spent some time lately hacking on beirc, the McCLIM-optimized CLIM IRC client by Gilbert Baumann. The version you find in the CVS repository at common-lisp.net comes with a neat channel selector that may remind you of xchat. Channels are shown red if there was activity on the channel that you didn’t see yet and blue if there were messages on the channel that contained your nickname. You can see it in action in this screenshot.

Yarrrgh (From uni Hamburg’s electronic library usage notes; other libraries in the area seem to have fallen for the same scam): Auf ca. 230 Titel, die gemeinsam mit anderen Hamburger Bibliotheken über das Hamburger Bibliotheken Konsortium nutzbar sind, ist ein Einzelzugriff möglich, d.h. jeweils ein Leser zur Zeit kann sich das eBook ansehen bzw. es für die Dauer von max. 8 Stunden ausleihen. their translation: As a new service for our readers we offer electronic books from NetLibrary together with several other libraries in Hamburg.

From the Lovecraft Country Comic (“Return to Arkham”) page: We also have a PDF that you can print, but /.ing is keeping us from making it available right now. Please bookmark this page and check back tomorrow. Reminds me of greylisting. So, do slashdot readers really behave like spambots?

Yesterday, I needed to reverse the characters of a file on my linux box. That is, print the last character in the file first, then the second-to-last, and so on. Luckily, there are two programs to do this: rev and tac. They do slightly different things, and I never can remember which of these does what, so I tried looking at the whatis(1) output for rev(1). $ whatis rev rev (1) - reverse lines of a file $ We are left to guess what this description really means.

Currently, I’m angry about: FreeBSD’s SMP support in combination with walrus.boinkor.net (the machine hosting this blog, lemonodor, sbcl boinkmarks and a few other things). The reason for this anger is that every now and then (e.g., yesterday and this morning), it stops working. This is very interesting to watch (for the first few times): the machine answers ICMP ECHO requests, and it is possible to open TCP connections. What doesn’t work is spawning new processes.

It might be worth mentioning that the book Xach pointed to (the Programmer’s Ultimate Security DeskRef) not only features hilariously bad Lisp programming advice, but also hilariously bad C programming advice. Impact: low. gets aims for the knees.

This is not a lisp-related entry, but a rant about open-source things that I discovered in the time at or around work. Spent a lot of time and engery at work in the last two months. This is due to my focusing on my bachelor’s degree in the next few semesters. This resulted in me being being angry at a few things. OpenLDAP 2.0, for letting users create objects that can never be found again, not to mention deleted.

Walrus crashed again the day before yesterday with the same symptoms as the last few times. What complicated matters is that I am on vacation about 60km away from the machine, without transport and with bad net connectivity (yeah, on purpose (-:). Finding somebody who could reboot it took quite a while, but a kind soul did just that, around 19:00 CEST yesterday. Sorry for the trouble this caused.

Time to write up how I experienced the Amsterdam Lisp meeting. Summary: had a great time. The combination of gorgeous weather, lots of interesting people, good food, and lisp content might have helped there, I guess. Friday was weird. Airports, planes, trains and a hotel that, despite having confirmed my reservation for a room, had to relocate me to another hotel because they were full. After the initial shock of suddenly having a 1/2 hour’s commute to the city center, I spent some time wandering around there and meeting up with a few people (Juho, Antonio Martinez, Tim Daly Jr.

I just rediscovered a pretty good Lisp tutorial - ELM-ART (german version, english version). My first contact was sometime early in 2003, when somebody else (could have been Rainer Joswig) gave me the link and I tried it out. The whole tutorial is very well presented, and it includes exercises which you can solve interactively. The system also gives you feedback on errors in your code. I found the whole ELM-ART (Episodic Learner Model / Adaptive Remote Tutor) concept pretty interesting, and found that the Uni Trier’s ELM group published a few papers on it.