Month of October 2002

From the BBC's Ogg Vorbis pages:

Update (2002-09-24): Yay, the legal issues have been resolved. We now have rights to all the of the BBC's radio output. Hopefully we should start kicking off these streams soon.

Yay indeed.

• The other week I talked to an Oracle support guy on the phone. He was smart. We agreed that the configuration we're using is unsupported by Oracle (third-party Apache modules in their web server), but that it probably should work anyway, and he gave us a reasonable workaround. Then we spent a few minutes talking about the suboptimality involved in trying to force-fit a strictly hierarchical model of the world onto a real world which is not even vaguely hierarchical, which is a subject on which I have fairly strong opinions.

• Today I get this error message.

  An error was encountered while loading page. Failed to initialize configuration parameter ApacheMainServer.. Error in the input config file. Attribute KeepAlive is a single value attribute.

How can the same company have smart tech support people like that and apparently moronic programmers? Which input config file? There are only about eight of the things - and in all cases where the word KeepAlive is used in any of them, it is indeed followed by a single value.

My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn't my fault!

Well, no. Actually I was in Greece, without computers or network access. And it was fun, and it was relaxing, and it was warm (I got slightly sunburnt; not seriously) and it's kind of nice to be back, in a way, but the weather in England is not that way. So anyway, that's why no diary entries for the past week and a bit (sure, you cared) nor likely to be much retrospective writing. Oh, if you insist

Lay on beach.

Repeat as necessary.

Now I have the local food directory, entomotomy, a new araneida/cliki release to package, some domain name registration stuff to sort out, an ILC talk to do slides for, and a stack of washing, all by Friday. And grand ideas for an annotating server thingy based on cliki, which will probably end up being an example in the ILC talk.

ILISP is working again (maybe)

Trying to use detachtty as an inferior lisp in ilisp. Superficially it works, but had trouble deciding what state the lisp process is in until I told it to "repair connection", after which I got the message above. Seems better, anyway

Of course, running ilisp on a machine with no access to the sources I actually want to edit is probably not such a really great idea anyway. Oh well.

Favourite recently-bought CD: Supergrass, Life On Other Planets. I never really got into their previous stuff, perhaps because I didn't have the albums, and saturation play of 'Alright' was never really going to give me a balanced view. This one reminds me of the Super Furry Animals - although less Welsh, obviously.

Least favourite recently-bought CD: Gary Moore, Blues and Ballads (or something. A greatest hits collection of some kind). I bought it in Athens airport on the strength of a vague 15-year-old recollection of "Still Got The Blue" as having blues guitar of some kind on it, and assumption that Mr Moore was therefore a blues player. Oops. It's MOR, and it's derivative MOR with the most painfully embarrassingly tedious lyrics I have ever seen an artist have the temerity to print on the sleeve. Actually, to be strictly honest I've only managed to listen to a track and a half so far; there's always the possibility it gets better.

Most recently-bought CD: Rolling Stones, Forty Licks. There is something extraordinarily powerful about the intro to `Gimme Shelter': I don't know how much of it is intrinsic in the music and how much is the anticipation from having heard it before and recognising what happens next, but it really does rock.

I don't wear a watch (the strap fell off it about five years agon, and i never got around to getting it fixed). Instead I use my cellphone to tell the time - I carry it basically everywhere and it's turned on pretty much all the time, so really I'm only inconvenienced on planes and in churches. Anyway, It's 2:09am according to said phone. Confusingly, it's still light outside - local time is 18:09. Double confusingly, it's 1:08am according to emacs, which obviously knows more about the BST->GMT shift (that's the UK equivalent of daylight savings time) than my cellphone does.

I can't believe that there's no UTC time signal on the GSM network that cellphones could set themselves to. I suspect there is, and my phone's inability to use it is just typical consumer electronics design lossage.

So I'm in Starbucks. I wouldn't usually, but dim recollection suggested that they had wireless access in most or all branches, and indeed they do. For the knockdown rate of only $2.99/15 minutes - not only is this about double what internet cafes cost in 1996, but back then the cafes actually had to provide the hardware too. Do I feel ripped off? Yes, but only for $2.99, as I now have some useful AP detection tools installed which I am sure I can use to find a more friendly service provider. On the standard friendliness scale that has, say, "your dog" at one end and "your bank manager" at the other, Starbucks is on current showing somewhere out in "loan shark collection agent" territory, so this really should be Not Too Hard.

users.actrix.gen.nz/mycroft/cl.html

``I've now bound my aardvark to the result of this select''

Nick Levine on CommonSQL

If you're reading this at about the time I wrote it, some of the preceding (lexically following) diary entries are really rather short. Apologies for that. I might go back and fill them in later, but in the meantime: the URL was written down during Duane Rettig's simple-streams tutorial, and should point to Paul Foley's simple-streams implementation for CMUCL. The aardvark was an example in Nick Levine's CommonSQL tutorial.

The conference (I'm at the ILC, if I'd forgotten to mention it before) is now about 80% done. Noteworthy points

• McCLIM rocks

• I met Gary Byers, who tells me that there's a perfectly good reason for the trick with lowtag punning that CMUCL/ppc was doing. I'm going to have to reread it before I understand his point well enough to explain it to anyone, but it's related to (avoiding the pain of) interior pointers into objects

• Roger Corman talked about native threads and how he added them to Corman Lisp. The good news is that we've already been doing some of what he's had to do; the bad news is that without having native threads as a driver to make sure we get it right, we probably haven't been doing it particularly uniformly.

• Open Source vs Not: Kent Pitman gave a short talk in which he managed to assocate the concepts `college students', `don't have to work for a living', and `dumping' with authors of open source software, but without actually at any time directly stating that said authors are or are doing any of the above.

• Metadata: lots of stuff about the semantic web, with exciting pointy-bracket-acronyms (RDF, DAML+OIL, OWL, etc). My opinion continues to be that
  • metadata is just data, and if you don't trust the actal data to be true (we're talking about web pages here, so you certainly shouldn't) why would you want to trust the metadata either, given that it's probably been provided by the same people. I choose to interpret remarks by Peter Norvig (talking about people trying to stuff up Google) as supporting this position

  • highly structured data (all this angle bracket soup) tends to lead to brittle and unadaptable systems, and this doesn't scale. The virtue of the Web is that it works despite being essentially mob-driven. RPG, I think, would agree with that. In fact, RPG said exactly that, just not in the context of metadata.
• Lisp is in decline, because people in the various US Government departments using it are agitating for its removal. Um. This is a different belief than "because of the AI Winter", but holding it still precludes you from adding yourself to the CLiki YoungLispers page. People were saying the same thing about Unix in 1994, I'm sure.

• Lisp is unsuitable for Google because implementations don't cope with their scary scaling requirements. More generally, of the ten or so pretty-much-unique advantages of Lisp ten years ago (GC, interactive development, native support for collections, etc etc) only about two are still unique. Norvig considers the syntax to be one of them (if you're doing macros, it is).

  My comment on this is that you can't yet get all of the other eight advantages in the same language.

• MCL 5.0 got announced

• I appear to have volunteered to help with the ALU web site, and with any luck we might have some progress forthcoming soon (like, next week). The plan is to turn it from a perfectly preserved museum piece into a living site that people actually want to visit more than once.
• Next year's conference (the plan is that there will be one, yes) is probably at about the same time of year, in New York.