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.

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).

As of today, there are two new Lisp tips blogs on the web: Common Lisp tips by Xach and SLIME tips by Stas. Both already have some nice stuff that I didn’t know about, so I hope they keep the tips coming!

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).

I’ve just made the jump from a creaky, old, badly-styled and annoying Movable Type installation to Octopress. It looks pretty nice, and as of now works better than MT has ever worked here, although I hope I didn’t break too many things with the switch over. If you find any 404s where they shouldn’t be, please contact me.

Almost exactly four years after I announced the availability of the first iteration of the SBCL cvs->git mirror (and a few more years after the cvs->arch mirror even!), we now have an official SBCL repository! Many thanks to Nikodemus for doing all the heavy lifting! (-: I’ve stopped the (now defuct) cvs->git mirror. In its place, there is a new repository that mirrors the official git repo. To get the old, now static repo, see sbcl-cvs-import.

I love the l1sp.org documentation redirection service. It is quick and easy to look stuff up there if you know the name, and it has a pretty good search if you don’t. However, the search results are not presented very nicely: They’re very close together, and the ones I’m looking for most often (mostly CLHS pages) are buried somewhere in the middle. So I wrote a userscript (for Firefox through greasemonkey or Google Chrome/Chromium) to improve things a bit: It enables keyboard navigation (j/k or cursor-down/up select the next/previous result, enter opens the page, and / focuses the input field), and searches for the closest match from the results (ranks them by section and then selects the shortest matching entry).

Lately, I’ve been wondering what we could use the ~110k Hyperlinks in the CLHS for, other than click through the spec in a web browser. For example, given a glossary entry, how do you find out which functions refer to it? So I wrote a little program that crawls (a local copy of) the HyperSpec, and creates an RDF graph of its link structure. This graph can be used to answer these questions, or it could be the basis of a useful research overlay on top of the HyperSpec, who knows.

In October, I will be moving to California to work for a hugely awesome lisp company there. Exciting and excellent times ahead, I’m sure!