Hacked on the SSH Plugin some more. Now it can do: Connections to hosts that are not in the index. Type . (the period character) to enter Text mode, enter a host name and select the “Open SSH Connection” action. Connections to hosts with non-default user names. Use the “Open SSH Connection as User…” action for that. Oh, and there’s some documentation! I’m declaring this feature-complete. If you installed the previous, pretest version, you will have to remove the “SSH Plugin” before installing the new one: Open Preferences, Plug-ins, select the SSH Plugin and use “Delete selected Plug-ins”.

Troels Henriksen has made available his modifications to McCLIM: He added an input editor (named “DREI”) that is based on climacs. The greater plan seems to be to make Climacs use that input editor for all its editing panes. Apart from less code duplication and embeddability of a really nice emacs in every clim application that uses a text-editor gadget, this adds a few cool things to the input editing in current clim applications.

In a recent entry, I compared deskbar-applet with Quicksilver and introduced a plugin I had written. Well, I now own a macintosh, and so I wanted Quicksilver to gracefully handle SSH connections, too. Of course, it’s possible to make a safari/mozilla/omniweb bookmark of the form ssh://some-host/ and have quicksilver add them to its index, but that gets old quickly. I want all hosts in my known_hosts file to be available, and I don’t want to type in all 23 of them - again.

I’ve announced the git repository a few weeks ago. Here’s something very nice you can do with it: Run a binary search on revisions to find out the version of SBCL that caused a bug. This helps enormously when searching for the cause of bugs. You can use the CVS repository for this, too, but it doesn’t include any of the nice functions I mention in this tutorial; you need a start time and an end time, and do month/day/hour/minute calculations yourself.

We released McCLIM 0.9.3, code-named “All Souls’ Day” today. Most prominently, this release: Plugs a horrible memory leak in incremental redisplay, along with a few optimizations. Has a new backend, gtkairo (uses GTK for gadgets, and Cairo for rendering) Includes lots and lots of bug fixes and new features. The “haha, this is embarrassing” department mentions that my brain misfired while sending the release announcement. I wrote “All Saints’ Day” instead of “All Souls’ Day”.

Two days ago, I announced the freeze of the current code base of mcclim. All in all, that doesn’t sound like it’s much different from the previous freeze (which failed), but this time: The freeze period is much shorter - projected release date is November 2nd; Both the test status as well as the release notes are on the mcclim cliki, and visible to all. I actually have the time and the energy to take care of these things.

This made me laugh: COBOL: Without me there wouldn’t be PCs. FORTRAN: Without me there wouldn’t be H-Bombs. Oh, and the lisp story in Pupeno’s comment is way better than the one in the original article.

As mentioned on the sbcl-devel mailing list, I have turned off syncing between the SBCL CVS repository and the SBCL Arch archive. The arch archive is still reachable, it just won’t show any new patches in future. If you would like to volunteer to continue the repository syncing service for the cvs->arch, I’ll happily turn over my hacked tla and cscvs source trees, database, and conversion scripts. If you still used the Arch archive and would like to continue using a patchset-ified full history of the SBCL repository, I suggest you try out the SBCL git repository (get it via git clone git://sbcl.

Busy busy! (This post contains references to at least three things related to lisp, so into this category it goes) It’s been several months since the last post. Since then, I was in Hamburg, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki. I hacked on a few lisp projects (an asdf dependency groveller of which I’m proud, and a new cl pathname system of which I’m planning to be proud), and rotated jobs. I am a consultant in lispy things now.