Month of June 2005

There are many reasons to keep a blog, and most of them are in conflict with each other. Today the conflict is between writing something so I will remember next year what I was doing this year, and writing nothing so that everyone else doesn't have to wade through my rambling. Guess who won?

• Listening to music on the tube doesn't make the tube journey pass any faster in the way that reading a book does (when I can find a book interesting enough to read but not yet so interesting that I don't just finish it when I get home). But the headphones do keep the screeching noise down.

• I'm missing not having a spare computer on the internet. I don't know why, as I barely used the one I did have. £150 buys me a year's worth of 64Mb UML, or £200 (plus delivery) buys me a Celeron from the Dell "factory outlet" with really rather a lot more memory and disk than that, which my employers will host for me => free bandwidth. But then I'm still stuck with real hardware.

• To confirm what everyone already knew really, I am Officially Not Hacking SBCL (or much else) right now - really don't have the time or the enthusiasm. If you were waiting for me to finish or merge something that's interesting to you, ask on the appropriate mailing list and I'll work out what state I left it in and post any WIP I have lying around that's not publically available already.

• The full extent of my Lisping lately is - would you believe it - tools for dealing with HTML forms and databases and stuff without (a) going mad, or (b) involving much more of a framework than Araneida already imposes.

I think I probably won't be at LSM after all.

Obviously I should be charging it with the power off ...

It has been reported by some of our customers that they have experienced reduced battery life after charging their Zen Micro. Our product development team has researched these reports and determined that the users may have experienced this after they plugged their Zen Micro into the AC adapter that was already inserted into a wall socket with the AC power on.

While this is not the conventional way to plug in a player for charging, we wanted to ensure that our customers did not experience this problem, so we have developed a solution to address this, which simply involves upgrading the Zen Micro's firmware.

Enotomotomy, Trivial Sockets and Bordeaux-MP added to telent darcs. I think this is probably all of the code from telent cvs that anyone might be interested in: please holler if there's anything else you're missing.

In non-Lisp news, yesterday I fulfilled my New Year's Resolution no. 6 and perhaps also number 7. Two hours doesn't sound like a great time, but the winner got 1:35 and I think his usual marathon time is more like 1:15-1:20, so my excuse will be (a) vicious headwind, (b) lack of people to draft. I did most of the second half without benefit of a paceline. In short, I'm secretly quite pleased, but I'm not telling anybody that.

Actually, since we're now halfway through 2005, I may as well update on the status of the other resolutions

1. zilch
2. also nothing (though the PPC issue looks like it will go away of its own accord longterm)
3. the texinfo translator got stolen with my last laptop and I haven't thought about it since
4. well, this one has no measurable targets and is therefore easy
5. done. although I'm moving soon anyway, so just in time to put all the books back in boxes....

   I'm thinking about selling or otherwise disposing of a whole bunch of said books; presently any fiction book that I've read but haven't reread since last time I moved is up for the chop.

6. Yup!
7. I suppose so, yes. Though I have another next week (which is on the Lee Valley Cycle Circuit and probably just as slow by virtue of its hills as Goodwood was due to headwind) and then Berlin in September, which is allegedly much faster.
8. no
9. likewise no

Looks like a busy autumn ahead.

NOT MORE CONSUMERISM

Latest in the ongoing Zen Micro story:

Update

Oops! After people began installing the firmware update, they began experiencing problems, like the battery dying when the headphones are left plugged in. Creative pulled the update from their Web site, saying that you should re-install the older 1.02.05 if you experience problems.

So, in fixing the bug that made it not charge when plugged into a charger which was already turned on, they managed to add a bug that makes it discharge when the headphones are plugged in. Fucking genius.

Needless to say I find this extremely amusing. That said, I might appreciate the joke even more if I hadn't already done the upgrade (or had or could still find a copy of the previous firmware version).

Still no closer to Resolution 7, I'm afraid. Sunday afternoon was stupidly hot, and having managed to lose count of the number of laps I'd done, get suntan lotion in my eyes, and wear my back wheel down to the plastic core, I decided I had reasonable excuse for stopping when I thought I was about half way through. Turned out I was nearer 2/3 of the way through, but still. Better luck in Berlin.

I've been playing a little with climacs lately. Haven't got much further with it than what you see there, though.

In gadget news, the Zen Micro seems quite happy now it's on firmware 1.02.05. The phone is dead, or at least practially useless: I broke the screen on Saturday when I fell on it (borrowed some 4x100 skates to see what they were like, and tried to crossover turn without paying enough attention to how long the frames were), so I've returned to the Ericsson fold with a T630. It has OBEX, which inclines me favourably towards it already.

Random notes on the CLIM layout protocol, as implemented in McCLIM.

• attempting to override the size of a stream pane (by calling change-space-requirements on it) is probably a bad idea: at any rate, it doesn't work. Let the internal clim magic work out the sizes of these things based on the stuff that you've printed to them, and if you need to constrain them to a given size, drop them in a scroller or (possibly, haven't tried) a restraining-pane.

• setting the :scroll-bars option on a stream pane is not the same as putting it in a scroller. Indeed, I can't see from the spec how the :scroll-bars stuff is even supposed to work - do the :height/:width/etc keywords apply to the visible area or to the inner stream pane?

As you may have guessed from the preceding, largely undirected climacs hacking continues.

I'm not going to say much about the LispNYC Summer of Code stuff, except to note that the final project list is significantly less dumb than some of the proposed projects were, and to congratulate Dirk on getting one for Erlisp. After writing the SBCL socket stuff and trivial sockets, I feel required to have an opinion on "Lisp Sockets", though.