Xach nudges, I comply. To summarize the text that is to come, the conference was great. Hooray for Nick Levine, whose conference organization talents are deeply awesome. The setup I had chosen the worst possible time to fly: a 23:45 (local time) arrival on Saturday guaranteed that I would have to wait 1 hour for the last bus to Cambridge, then arrive there at around 2:00. One bus broke down before that journey started, and a longer-than-expected walk across Cambridge later (which was packed full with drunk english teenagers – one of them was trying to beat up buildings!

Still in Cambridge, “sharing” connectivity on a wireless access point kindly provided by security-unaware residents, so just a short update on the boinkmarks thing: something on this machine is making the linux OOM killer go mad (both in linux 2.6.16 and 2.6.18, running on amd64). It will kill perfectly well-behaved processes although there seem to always be hundreds of megabytes of real RAM (not to mention swap) available. Then, some time later, it will start complaining on the console about running out of memory while oomkilling, in an endless loop.

I did a preview demo of the text search visualizer (see) today and achieved understanding in one other person. Yay! Here is the source (with git repository) of the updated text search visualization tool, now featuring Michael’s Knuth-Morris-Pratt search implementation and actually helpful help text.

I recently discovered that several of my (programming) friends know no string search algorithms other than the naïve left-to-right, one character at a time scan. There are much better algorithms out there, among them the one by Boyer-Moore. When I first heard about Boyer-Moore, it made me realize how easy it is to overlook opportunities for optimization – I hadn’t thought it feasible to speed up string search, either. In order to allow others to see the beauty of it, I made a little CLIM visualizer app for string search algorithms, to use in a little intro session to good string matching code.

It’s a great tradition on the channel #lisp to watch the Eurovision Song contest live transmission, make fun of participants, and get drunk in the process. From today’s news, it sounds like 2007 is going to be a good year for this kind of thing: Unfortunately, Europe took the wrong lessons from Lordi: they’re now inserting monster references into their bovine love ballads. Sweden’s entry to Eurovision 2007 is this monstrosity, ‘Vampires Are Alive’ by DJ Bobo.

This entry is a reminder to myself more than a contribution to any ongoing or dead discussions about this topic. (Thanks to Stoffi for the initial explanation.) baker (the machine that’s acting as a mail and web server) has had an IPv6 address and AAAA entry for a few weeks now. Unfortunately, some E-Mail servers don’t handle this well. They see this in my zone: @ IN MX 10 baker.boinkor.net baker IN AAAA [ipv6 address] baker IN A [ipv4 address] and go “I know!

Yay memes! I’ve been tagged, and not in the comfortably delicious way. I hoped for a long time to somehow avoid compulsory military service. When I no longer cared about it, they let me go because I had flat feet. I like caffeine, but I hate coffee. In 2000, I wrote a several-kilobyte big two-dimensional bin-packing program in Scheme. The whole program is a good candidate for a Daily WTF front-page post.

Some people asked me why asdf-dependency-grovel (abbreviated adg, to save my fingers) merges systems. Since I wrote it, a few more questions came up, and so I’ll try to answer them. Why does adg merge systems? ASDF has a useful dependency-tracking mechanism: if a component changes, it automatically rebuilds that component and all components that depend on it. But what happens to dependencies between systems? They are problematic for ASDF, as it doesn’t track the need to recompile components across system boundaries.