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.
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#
Thu Oct 24 20:59:31 2002
Topics:
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#
Sun Oct 27 01:08:07 2002
Topics:
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.
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.