End-of-day roundup#

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 23:56:54 +0000

End-of-day roundup

I'd not seen Easy Rider before last night, when Channel 4 showed it on TV.

• The bikes looked physically impossible to ride - that incredible fork rake? Actually, I remember reading a magazine article last year or so, which indicated that they more or less were impossible to ride. So fair enough.

• Great soundtrack. Nice photography.

• Clearly it was intended to be deep. I, however, am shallow (or at any rate lazy, which amounts to much the same thing), and therefore will not be tackling the complicated stuff in this diary. "If you want to send a message, call Western Union".

  Google has 10 pages of matches for "sam+goldwyn+message+western+union"; if you know the actual quotation, I'd be most interested

• The ending disturbed me. Actually, most of the last third disturbed me.

Today was driving lesson day, and I think probably the first time I actually got the car up to 70mph. There's not much else I want to say on that subject.

Started a thread on comp.lang.lisp about what happens to the language's ordering guarantees in the presence of multiple threads. Consensus seems to be that they don't apply (which is half of the answer I was hoping for) but no real useful information on what the application programmer can typically do about that. Disabling pre-emption for the critical section is not a particularly good answer in my mind. I remain convinced that CL can often be written to be close enough to the machine that programs can do most of what C programmers do - it doesn't end up as portable CL, but it's not portable C either - it's just that if the accumulated output of comp.lang.lisp describes the Common Lisp community, they really don't seem to be too too interested in that stuff. Which is a reasonable choice to make, of course, but not the only rational choice. Once upon a time there must have been lisp programmers who were interested in the low-level grunge, or we wouldn't have had OSes written in the language.

I see more name registration antics in the near future, as telent.net will be up for renewal early next month. register.com are incorrigible spammers to whom I'm not intending to give any more business than I can help. Let's see if I can transfer to Joker.

And so to bed.