diary at Telent Netowrks

One google search I wish I'd done a few days ago is for "dabs#

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 01:57:35 +0000

One google search I wish I'd done a few days ago is for "dabs returns". Now I have to attempt to get my refund or replacement item from a company that has (a) no customer service telephone number, (b) an average 1-2 day turnaround on email: I'm not expecting this to get resolved soon.

Off to Paris tomorrow (work trip). I was somewhat annoyed when this trip was arranged as it didn't involve a Friday away, hence no opportunity for Pari Roller. Every cloud etc etc though: but I tried my skates on yesterday and got about ten feet across the carpet before deciding that it was too painful still to be entirely a sane idea - so, maybe that's not so bad. Normal walking around is now pretty much fine, but the boot presses into my leg exactly where the sore spots are (this is probably not a coincidence) making any robust attempt at a sideways push into an exercise in ocular irrigation.

Araneida 0.9 released#

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:31:06 +0000

In particular the CLISP support is a bit of a hack; timeouts are still notably missing, and you must run (araneida:host-serve-events) after you're done running start-listener on all of your listeners.

(Brian Mastenbrook, Jochen Schmidt)

Back in the UK#

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:31:59 +0000

Back in the UK. Currently in Kent somewhere, I think.

Alan Cox on writing better software is a good read; even going so#

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:11:33 +0000

Alan Cox on writing better software is a good read; even going so far as to recommend the use of modern languages (GC, type safety, etc). Probably doesn't tell you anything you don't already know, but comes as a refreshing change after some of Linus's more widely quoted "you have to be a Real Programmer to hack on Linux" comments.

An example of this is, with locking, instead of having one function for taking a lock and another function for releasing the lock, which inevitably means that someone always has an error handling or an unusual case where they forget, you have a single function which calls another function locked; it takes the lock, calls the function, and drops the lock.

Unless the function performs some kind of non-local exit, at least. Makes you glad to have UNWIND-PROTECT (that's finally in Java, for any readers I have left that don't speak Lisp) - and of course WITH-LOCK-HELD. C++ has that whole resource-acquitision-is-initialization pattern thing instead, which probbaly does the job just as well.

(I'm so mellow today. I think I'm sickening for something)

Discuss: what relation does taint checking have to type checking/inferencing? Both are about carrying attributes of an object around with that object, and in operations involving that object, combining the object attributes in some way (some fairly trivial way, if it's just a single bit that says 'tainted') to get the attributes of the result. It might (though I'm not sure it's necessary) be desirable to `untain' an object in-place, whereas it's rare to want to change its type (although even then I can think of several systems I've used CHANGE-CLASS in).

Marilyn Manson's cover of "Personal Jesus" is such a missed#

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:50:28 +0000

Marilyn Manson's cover of "Personal Jesus" is such a missed opportunity. It sounds just like the original with guitars. Johnny Cash should have done it instead.

OK, I've said that before

(Yes, I know it's no longer possible for Cash to sing anything else he hasn't sung already. You needn't email me just to point that out)

Edit: OK, it turns out he has covered it. Many thanks to all the people who've corrected my appalling lack of knowledge. You can stop now ...

Replacement cpu is here#

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:36:12 +0000

Replacement cpu is here. After a short some inspection of the various bits of computer I'd managed to order, I realised that (a) no fan, and (b) motherboard too large to fit the case in which I was planning to install it. Rectified this situation with short trip down Tottenhan Court Road. Put everything together. Worked first time too, good grief.

After reading a little on the difficulty of installing debian amd64 with debootstrap (seems you need to be running a 64 bit kernel to do it successfully) I decided that if I was going to write an ISO I might as well take the opportunity to install Ubuntu.

First impressions, then: installs from a single CD. After a fairly non-taxing text-mode installation (involves one reboot) which automatically found my graphics card, mouse, network and audio, it boots straight up into some form of graphical login screen with a picture (taken from above) of two attractive women and a bloke with no chest hair and better abs than mine. Admittedly, as I have none to speak of that's not really a great description, but they're the kind that would naturally draw the eye if it weren't already being drawn down the tops of the two ladies. After logging in, you get some kind of Gnome desktop with Firefox as default browser. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it (I'll at least be finding the focus-follows-mouse option if it has one, and installing a real xterm toot sweet) but we'll see how it goes. Expect to see various comments on particularly good/bad aspects in forthcoming days, if it has any, but it does seem pretty slick so far.

I call that a successful weekend#

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:21:58 +0000

I call that a successful weekend. As previously reported, I have a working computer at home again. The ubuntu default desktop lasted about two hours before I reverted to my old sawfish/xterm ways: I have a real reason and a rationalisation for this, which are respectively (a) it was taking over a minute to start emacs at login and I couldn't see why; (b) I wanted to bind the key labelled 'Ctrl' to Super, instead of to Caps Lock, and couldn't see an option in the configuration doodads. Turns out the emacs problem was probably because I had localhost as 128.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts: I have no idea how that happened.

Still and all, I managed to dust off the sbcl amd64 port and start to page the details back into my brain. Assuming I'm hacking on the right version, I may even have something to commit (define-instruction forms for various sse instructions we need, albeit currently with slightly dodgy^W^Wmassively broken disassemblies) today or tomorrow.

In other news, I am mostly not lame any more. Spent an hour or so on Sunday skating in slow gentle circles around the shallow end of Serpentine Road: as long as I don't try doing anything complicated with the left leg, it's manageable.

Clé RIB validation#

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 12:59:23 +0000

Clé RIB validation

This may not be so interesting to most of my usual readers, but is added here in the hope that (a) Google will find it, (b) French Google users will be able to understand it. The French banking system has a thing called "Prélévement Automatique", which is essentially an authority for a third party to help themselves to your bank account at regular intervals. UK readers will recognise it as a Direct Debit; I'm sure other countried have similar things. To to set this up you need 23 characters of bank codes (5 char code banque, 5 char code guichet, 11 char numero de compte, 2 digits clé) , and it turns out that the last two of them are a checksum. I spent a while looking around web pages written in languages I have no particularly good grasp of (French, VB, PHP, some Clipper/Foxpro thing) looking for details on how to calculate it, and eventually transliterated a PHP example to arrive at the following:

create or replace function fr_calculate_cle(varchar,varchar,varchar) 
returns char(2) as '
declare
        code_banque ALIAS FOR $1;
        code_guichet ALIAS FOR $2;
        num_compte ALIAS FOR $3;
        instring TEXT;
        cle integer;
begin
        instring = translate(lower($1||$2||$3),
                             ''abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'',
                             ''12345678912345678912345678'');
        cle := 62*to_number(substr(instring,1,7),''9999999'');
        cle := cle+ 34*to_number(substr(instring,8,7),''9999999'');
        cle := cle+ 3*to_number(substr(instring,15,7),''9999999'');
        return substr(to_char(97-(cle % 97),''00''),2);
end
' language 'plpgsql';

If there's any better way to make postgres output a 2 digit zero-padded number without a leading space, I want to hear about it.

<lisppaste> dan_b pasted "will the madness please fuck off and die#

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 21:10:54 +0000

<lisppaste> dan_b pasted "will the madness please fuck off and die?" at
+http://paste.lisp.org/display/3262
<cliini> This is probably something we should show to people who ask if
+there's something like CPAN for lisp. Show them that and ask "like this?"

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp#

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:47:29 +0000

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: CMU CL or SBCL on (FreeBSD/)AMD64 any time soon?

Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> writes:

> But I don't want to find myself without a decent zippy
> Lisp implementation. Several different people seem to have
> done work on making SBCL run on AMD64 in the last N months
> (generally for Linux rather than FreeBSD); what's the
> current state of the world?

Since acquiring an amd64 machine of my own last weekend I've dusted off the SBCL work I was doing earlier in the year (many thanks to Kevin Rosenberg for ssh access to his machines, but it's a lot more comfortable developing locally than over the internet, not to mention that the appeal is so much greater now I own a machine that it'll run on ...)

You asked about "current state" rather than "progress", which I like, becuase otherwise I'd have only have been able to say "it'll be done when it's done". So:

If you're familiar with the SBCL build process I can tell you that when I left off last it was generating plausible-looking cross-compiled core files that got maybe two thirds of the way through the cold-init process (at the end of which is a repl). After that all that remains is building PCL, which is allegedly portable, and the contrib modules, which are mostly actually portable if we limit ourselves to considering sbcl-on-different-architectures.

After picking it up again on Sunday, I broke it utterly by deciding to rewrite the floating point support to use sse2/sse3/xmm (faster, more predictable, less weird) instead of the legacy x87 instructions. That work is mostly complete at least in that it's now back to the point of generating plausible cross-compiled cores, but (whether due to new FP or to having simultaneously forward-ported the branch by several months) it dies at about the second function call. This could be considered a regression.

Feature checklist:

Big known issue between here and the goal: bignum support, which is still based on 32-bit words. Other than that it's mostly a question of seeing what crops up.

I don't know much about the FreeBSD amd64 port, but unless they've don something really weird I can't imagine it being much work to get SBCL up on once we have a working compiler and runtime.

As others have mentioned, the x86 port of SBCL (at least on Linux) runs fine[*] under a 64 bit kernel if furnished with appropriate shared libraries. On my machine it takes around 9-10 minutes to build itself including all contribs: I don't know objectively how zippy this is, but it's about a sevenfold improvement on the box it replaced, so I at least am content for the moment.

[*] Actually, fine except for threads. But if you're on freebsd you don't get them anyway, so I mention that mostly for completeness' sake

All's well that ends well#

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:03:18 +0000

All's well that ends well. And while this is not actually over yet, dabs can now at least tell me that they're intending to credit my card "within the next few working days".

Which is, um, only 7 full days after they picked the parcel up, or three weeks after I received the incorrect order. Next time I'll be buying from somewhere that still answers the phone - or at bare minimum, takes less than 24 hours to reply to email.

Announcing the TRIVIAL-SOCKETS interface for undemanding network clients#

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 02:25:13 +0000

Announcing the TRIVIAL-SOCKETS interface for undemanding network clients.

Having once already tried to define a flexible networking interface that would anticipate most of the weird stuff that people might want to do with an underlying BSD sockets interface, I'm now going to the other extreme: TRIVIAL-SOCKETS has one exported function, which takes a hostname and port to connect to and returns a stream.

FOO> (with-open-stream (s (trivial-sockets:open-stream "www.google.com" 80))
       (format s "HEAD / HTTP/1.0~%Host: www.google.com~%~%")
       (force-output s) 
       (read-line s))
"HTTP/1.0 200 OK
"

OK, you get the idea. Mostly unimplemented so far (it kind of works on SBCL, but not totally), but please see texinfo spec and so forth at http://cvs.telent.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trivial-sockets/. It's never going to be sb-bsd-sockets, but we could still aspire to write a spec in English that's a bit tighter than the CLOCC PORT stuff. And make it asdf-installable, of course.

trivial-sockets now#

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 19:42:17 +0000

trivial-sockets now has (some degree of) support for SBCL, CMUCL, CLISP and Allegro. I don't have a machine readily to hand on which I can run OpenMCL (actually I have an imac and two broken G3 powermacs, but none of them are plugged into anything) but its socket interface looks pretty similar to ACLs, so I'm sure it won't be hard to add that one. ABCL would be a nice addition, if anyone feels like it.

Subject: ROBOTS meta tag and transient information#

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 01:14:56 +0000

Subject: ROBOTS meta tag and transient information.
To: googlebot@google.com

I run a couple of Wiki sites which are regularly crawled by Google: ww.cliki.net and alu.cliki.net. They feature highly in relevant searches and overall I'm pretty happy with this state of affairs.

You're no doubt aware that the less ethical of the "search engine optimisation experts" spam their URLs onto pages of unrelated but high-PageRanked wiki sites in the hope that the Google bot will index and follow the links to their sites before the wiki's regular users spot and revert the changes. Some people think it's the next big thing after blog comment spam.

So, I would like to minimise use of my wikis as unwitting link farms for spammers. One approach I'm considering is to insert a

 <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOFOLLOW">

html head element when I serve new versions of pages. In 24 hours it's pretty much a given that someone will have noticed and reverted the spam: result, the google karma does not spread to these undeserving cases. Once a page has lasted 24 hours without subsequent edits, I'll stop sending out the meta tag and Google can index the page as normal thereafter.

The downside: this will be less than ideal if the google bot caches meta tags between one run and the next; i.e. if having once seen that it shouldn't follow links from www.cliki.net/index, it remembers that and never follows them again despite that on its next visit the header is no longer there.

So, at last, my question: does your bot cache robots meta tags between runs, and if so for how long and is there any way that a web site can ask it not to? If it doesn't, it seems that this would be a reasonable approach for a lot of wiki engines to help reduce one source of pagerank spam - and when spammers realise this is happening, they'll (eventually, maybe) stop spamming the said wikis. With luck and a following wind, everyone wins.

Let's see if we get a reply ...

googlebot@google.com writes:#

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:56:34 +0000

googlebot@google.com writes:
> Thank you for your note. While we appreciate your efforts to help maintain
> the quality of our index, we don't personally review individual sites, nor
> do we comment on webmaster techniques or the details of our search
> technology beyond what appears on our site.

which ranks right up there with Dabs in the less-than-stunningly-helpful department. They did recommend that I look at their "newsgroup discussion forum for passionate Google users", but frankly I don't have it in me to get especially passionate about someone else's search engine, and I tend to be disturbed by the company of those who are. Nigritude ultramarine my ass.

In the spirit of JFDI for which Lispers everywhere are known[*], please#

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 02:09:40 +0000

In the spirit of JFDI for which Lispers everywhere are known[*], please find included-by-reference an asdf-installable trivial socket interface

[*] For the avoidance of doubt: yes, this is sarcasm.

Since we're talking about SBCL 1.0, my 2p#

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:17:13 +0000

Since we're talking about SBCL 1.0, my 2p. This is my personal wishlist for things I want to make happen between now and 1.0 - or at least, for interfaces I am unsatisfied with and would not like to have to retain forever.

  1. extensible streams and stackable stream translations
  2. a socket layer (replacing and/or based on sb-bsd-sockets) in which a stream can be a socket.
  3. hide the sb-threads interface, recommending instead something that deals in the same kinds of objects as bordeaux-mp

I'm also thinking about (or anyway, idly toying with the idea of) writing an extensible texinfo -> foo translator, so that we can easily do things like hyperspec.el for all texinfo documentation. That could be done at any time really, though, and I'm not short on other stuff to do first.

MORE TRIVIAL#

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:17:04 +0000

MORE TRIVIAL!

(with-server (s (:port 8913 :reuse-address t))
   (loop
    (with-open-stream (c (accept-connection s)) 
        (read-line c)
        (format c "This is a compliant though pointless implementation 
of the finger protocol~%"))))

Presently only implemented for SBCL, and doesn't handle errors yet. I'm going to sleep now, so please feel free to grab it from CVS and fix either or both of these omissions before I next get a chance.

The first sentence of this entry is in the nature of a #lisp in-joke. If you're not a channel regular, I apologise.

Charles Stewart has CLRFI Snippets#

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 10:53:36 +0000

Charles Stewart has CLRFI Snippets. I think it's good that the CLRFI process has visibility (i.e. that people are saying "this should be a CLRFI" instead of "this should be in the next revision of the standard"), but writing a decent proposal is a lot more work than simply suggesting one should be written, and even getting constructive feedback has been a battle. My previous experience has been - to paraphrase Ghandhi's oft-quoted saying - that first they argue with you about the package name, then they take your text and use it without attribution. If stage 3 is "then you win", we haven't reached that just yet.

Why trivial socketry: the motivation#

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:22:40 +0000

Why trivial socketry: the motivation

Essentially, it's part of a plan to make a CL-based system that is good for interactive use in a Unixy setting. There are more than a few other things that I expect will also be necessary: this entry talks mostly about the repl

  1. the unix shell uses short command names ("wc", "nc", "ls") to minimise typing. Minimising typing is good, but I still have the typical Lisper's attitude to abbreviations that says there are many ways to abbrev. a word and only 1 2 spell it out in full, so guessable i/fs shld nt use abbrvs. So I propose instead, given also that we have buckets of cpu these days that Thompson and Ritchie weren't blessed with, that the repl has smart symbol completion bound to the Space key. This needs to be sufficiently smart that it can expand ``dpd Space'' to default-pathname-defaults.

  2. the general effect of the preceding will be to make for some very long command lines, and navigating through them using only cursor left/right will take ages. It may make sense to have cursor up/down move within the current command instead of recalling history entries, but at any rate there needs to be some attention paid to this aspect.

  3. a magic bracket key to close all open parens and submit the form. Probably C-Return or similar.

  4. this one may be mildly controversial if you're a Lisper, but: how often have you mistyped something and realised after you hit return but still long before the error message comes back? Sometimes when using a unix shell (especially on a slow link), I can typo, hit return, hit cursor up, fix the problem and press return again before I've read the error message, and in such circumstances I really don't want a debugger to spring up and disrupt my flow. On the other hand, the debugger is invaluable for real errors, so I'm not sure what the right answer here is. Perhaps pressing Return again (i.e. entering an empty line) should exit the debugger; it wouldn't be hard to adapt my muscle memory to pressing RET a second time before editing the command

  5. one or both of the following: previous expression results to be automatically named (like gdb's $1, $2, ...) so that they can be referred to in later commands, or a simple way to create and assign them by hand. In either case, the variables need to be visible in the repl but not in functions called by it, and to stay around until the repl exits.

  6. More to follow as it occurs to me, I'm sure. A good idiom for doing what unix pipes do, for one thing.

trivial-sockets 0.2#

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 22:14:53 +0000

trivial-sockets 0.2 is out now. Available on your preferred cCLan mirror if and when said mirror next updates from ftp.linux.org.uk (must do something about that one day: if you recognise a site in the list at the cCLan redirector that's under your nominal control and it doesn't have trivial-sockets 0.2, please either rectify that or mail me and ask to be removed from the list), it includes client and server socket support for Allegro CL, CLISP, CMUCL, LispWorks, OpenMCL and SBCL, as well as client-only support for ABCL.

Some time in the near future I will compile a table containing all the options involved in the opening-a-socket-stream task that a user might reasonably want to frob, and all the various common lisp implementations in which they might want to frob them, and find some way to beat each of the various vendors around the head until their particular column is not full of "unimplemented in this lisp". in the meantime, the last section of the manual should give you a pretty good idea of what I'm getting at.

0.3 will have timeouts.

I don't know whether linking to interseo.com#

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 12:54:37 +0000

I don't know whether linking to interseo.com and transwell.net with the link text "wiki spamming bastards" will tag them appropriately in the eyes of Google or whether they'll just be glad of the extra pagerank. So, I haven't. But nevertheless, they or someone attempting to promote their services are indeed wiki spamming bastards, and though I obviously don't condone vigilante violence in any circumstances, I should probably advise any prospective customers of interseo.com or transwell.net who may have arrived here for whatever reason that the said interseo.com and transwell.net are risky people to do business with as sooner or later some more precipitate net citizen is going to e.g. firebomb their offices. And then what will happen to your "top ten google hit, guaranteed"? My advice is that instead of using interseo.com or transwell.net you find some company that's not associated with such disreputable practices as wiki spam.

Oh, that goes for navisolutions.com as well.

P.S. If you've had problems with these names turning up in inappropriate places on a wiki you read too, feel free to link to this article. The permanent URL is https://ww.telent.net/diary/2004/10/#31.46477

⟪Sep 2004 Nov 2004⟫