Today I finally got so annoyed with the bizarre behaviour of Linux#

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 15:51:35 +0000

Today I finally got so annoyed with the bizarre behaviour of Linux printing (especial culprits: error reporting in every print spooler I have tried, transparency of operation in printer filters when attempting to debug them ditto, paucity of useful and well-arranged documentation for ghostscript drivers which answers questions like "if this works with the stc driver, why does the exact same command with the uniprint driver give an incomprehensible error message") that I bought what professes to be a real PostScript&tm; (well, real HP PostScript&tm; emulation) printer. Random Googling suggests that the scanner part of it can be persuaded to work with Linux too, so perhaps in future I'll be able to sign and send faxes without having to walk up the road to the video shop. Should arrive Monday, with luck, so we'll see what it does.

Today was also the massive new-version-of-CLiki rollout, where at last I got around to relocating it in its own domain. By bizarre coincidence, exactly 12 months and one day after I registered the domain, too. Anyway, the well-known URLs for CLiki and sbcl-internals both redirect to the new URLs, so apart from doubling the number of tcp connections your browser makes, you probably shouldn't notice much. As part of this process I also (at last) moved Entomotomy from the imac on my cable modem to the colo box. New cclan packages for db-sockets, araneida, cliki, and entomotomy to follow in the next week or so.

URLs for your reference, Mr Google:

Eric Marsden has been doing some cool stuff lately with Araneida as an annotation server. Gilbert Baumann has been doing some other cool stuff lately to produce an annotatable CLIM specification (as far as I know, without Araneida). I'm not sure I'm supposed to link to either effort yet, so I won't, but we hope the two will converge somehow.

Last night was the followup "hands-on Lisp" session to the talk I gave two weeks ago for the OU Computer Society. Kudos to the Debian packaging guys (who more usually get complaints than accolades from me on IRC) - it was a lot easier to tell the compsoc sysadmins "apt-get install cmucl cmucl-normal ilisp hyperspec" than it would have been to direct them through installing cmucl 18d from tarchives, defsystem frpom sourceforge, dump a core, install ilisp (which version?) ... The actual session was pretty unstructured (I had been advised previously that they tended to be fairly unstructured so hadn't prepared anything specific), but people found entertainment in mucking around with loops and suchlike, and one guy produced a Mandelbrot generator using CLX which I thought was pretty cool.