(No Lisp content in this one, move along.) I’ve started using Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my laptop, and I must say I rather like it. I was an ion user for a long time, and hadn’t thought I would so readily accept the gnome desktop. Well, it’s all working pretty smoothly, and with deskbar-applet bound to F4, it feels a bit like ion, except that by default, it doesn’t let you quickly open a terminal with a new ssh connection to a host.

Following Christophe’s suggestion, I have put up a binary of McCLIM 0.9.2, its demos, and the Inspector, Debugger and Listener applications. As stated on the mailing list, it’s based on a threaded SBCL 0.9.11 and requires Linux 2.6.x on an i386 machine. If you are on debian, it needs libfreetype6-dev installed, as well. Get it at http://boinkor.net/lisp/mcclim-listener-0.9.2.tar.bz2. To try out McCLIM’s applications, download the file (14MB), unpack it, and run the mcclim-listener-0.

McCLIM 0.9.2 was released today, just in (CEST) time to be called Laetare Sunday. (-: Lots and lots of things are new and cool in this release. See the release notes for details. Kudos go to the whole McCLIM crowd for making this release happen!

While several others are busy porting sbcl to platforms that God itself hates, I’ve been hacking on something much more trivial, but much more fun (and rewarding, in the short term): beirc. Some recent changes: Multi-server support! You can now be connected to more than one server at the same time, and be in many channels (with the same names, even) on every one of them, all in one beirc instance.

On baker, I’m running two lisp images: autobench’s web interface, and a chavatar instance for my girlfriend who is currently in St. Petersburg. Starting these lisp images manually using detachtty is somewhat tedious, so I wrote/modified two scripts to aid me with starting/attaching to/starting swank in/stopping these images. lisp-images is an init.d script that starts one or all lisp images that are defined in /etc/lisp-start.d/ and the other, start-stop-lisp-image does the actual work.

Xach on #lisp asked me why people would want to run autobench to repeatedly build & benchmark sbcl. That’s a good question, and I think I found a few answers: It gives you a build archive of previously built SBCL implementations, which you can use to run historical regression tests on. This is pretty nice to have: Autobench works using changesets, so you can often pinpoint exactly between which changes a feature that you want to use broke.

Finally! A life sign! And it’s a lisp post, too! I’ve been promising to do this for a long time now. So, without further ado, here’s the Setting up an SBCL benchmark host HOWTO You, too, can run regular SBCL benchmarks (a.k.a boinkmarks) with the “Autobench” software package. It’s similar in spirit to buildbot, but it is focused at benchmarking cl implementations, so the abstractions are a bit different. Getting the software Autobench requires a recent SBCL release.

I just moved this weblog over to baker.boinkor.net, my new and shiny machine in another co-location. It’s a nice AMD64 machine (HP DL145 g1) with a nice amount of RAM, but the best part of it is that there’s a management interface that allows me to power it up remotely. No more travelling to the colocation in order to powercycle it (which, I hope, won’t happen anyway since it’s new and shiny and it has actual warranty).

Right, so I accidentally deleted the movabletype database directory and discovered that the backups I kept were: too old broken. Damn it. Just spent 1 hour manually importing old entries from the HTML export. I'll set up an auto-export job now. (-:

There was a lot of progress in the development of Beirc since my last entry. We (splittist, mgr and I) fixed the three most annoying things so far: You no longer have to hit the “/” key to be able to click on presentations. It’s funny how before, everybody said that they don’t mind hitting “/” before reaching for the mouse; but now, I don’t think anybody would want to go back.