I've not been writing much lately, because I haven't had much (a) to#
Tue Sep 3 13:11:42 2002
I've not been writing much lately, because I haven't had much (a) to
write about, (b) time to write it in. More (b) than (a), in fact.
Oracle error messages, n in a series of
most-positive-fixnum:
:; owm
Exiting
java.lang.NullPointerException
at oracle.ewt.lwAWT.BufferedApplet.<init>(Compiled Code)
at oracle.sysman.emSDK.client.appContainer.WebApplication.<init>(Compiled Code)
at oracle.security.admin.wltmgr.owma.OwmaApp.<init>(Compiled Code)
at oracle.sysman.emSDK.client.appContainer.WebApplication.main(Compiled Code)
Done.
The error message actually means "cannot connect to X server".
Isn't it obvious? It also means "we don't accept any of the
standard toolkit options", of course.
It turns out that we actually want to be using the Oracle
Enterprise Login Assistant for this instead anyway. It has basically
the same deficiency but doesn't insist on displaying a splash screen,
so can actually map its window and get on with answering requests
without user input.
Paid projects calming down a little, so today was housekeeping day for#
Wed Sep 11 01:35:00 2002
Paid projects calming down a little, so today was housekeeping day for
some more of the free stuff.
- At last, the lucky members of the general public have CVS access again for telent projects
- New release of db-sockets with
all known bug fixes (this is not another day of saying "all known bugs
fixed"). This will be 0.55 when it appears on vn-cclan and the
notable change is a fix for unix-domain sockets
- First Entomotomy checkin:
code I hacked out before and during the LSM and haven't really looked
at since. I'm pretty sure it did something, or at any rate
that I believed at the time that it did something. Which may not be
the same thing entirely
Immediate priorities for, say, tomorrow, are to understand what
entomotomy does or doesn't do, and hopefully to get it into a state
where it does something useful.
I'd write something amusing here, but the truth is I'm tired and
would rather get some sleep. I briefly also considered writing
something bitter and cynical about the darker parts of ANSI CL, or
this afternoon's fight with cvs error messages, or even Oracle (a rich
seam of source material which I don't think will ever really run out),
but the truth is I'm just too happy (for, it must be admitted,
substantially unrelated reasons) to summon the necessary bile. So,
nyer.
Some day I will learn how to release new versions of stuff into#
Wed Sep 11 15:54:40 2002
Some day I will learn how to release new versions of stuff into
vn-cclan. Today's trick (repeatedly) has been to forget to do the cvs
commit before making the tar file. And to upload the wrong tar file
at least once, I suspect. Not sure how that happened
Still, today's db-sockets 0.57 fixes a bug in yesterday's 0.55 (and
all previous versions, in fact) when used with SBCL 0.7.7 or any other
compiler that actually checks the syntax of defgeneric forms
Went to the Consume meeting#
Sun Sep 15 21:47:45 2002
Topics:
Went to the Consume meeting. Consume is the not-entirely-local local
community 802.11b wireless group (it's in London; even line-of-sight I
doubt I could get a 50 mile point-to-point link).
Consume Live is a lot like you'd expect it to be from the flavour
of the mailing list discusions: that is, it's a loose coalition with
almost as many reasons to participate in a wireless network as there
are people who want to, and it meanders gracefully towards nothing in
particular, occasionally falling into the tar pits of legal arguments
or needless techy fugues. Blood fugues, almost.
But we got in a couple of discussions about the aspects I find
genuinely interesting: (a) it has a Wiki
which needs some fairly active love and attention (I have a thing for
Wikis, as regular readers know) and (b) service discovery.
It appears that I wrote half of and then forgot about a September 15th#
Fri Sep 27 17:14:47 2002
It appears that I wrote half of and then forgot about a September 15th
entry, which subsequently posted itself when I rsynced the htdocs
directory for some other reason. Oh well. I'll fix it up at some point
I guess from context that "The Bourne Identity" is a film. Given that
every time I read the title my first instinct is to assume it's an
sh function that returns its argument, there is probably no
hope for me. Um.
At last I have wireless at home (and in the back yard, and in the
street behind that about as far back as the corner of the block). The
PLX thing that I'd wasted
so
much
time
trying to get working on and off over the past year is now in the bin,
after I happened into PC World yesterday and saw they were selling
real PCI-PCMCIA adaptors for £25 (compares with £21.74 mailorder from
dabs.com, so not an unreasonable instant-gratification-tax)
(All indications are that the PLX stuff does work for other people;
the most likely explanation for why mine doesn't is that the hardware
itself was b0rked)
Stuff happening lately:
- Stargreen Box Office
visual makeover: now substantially less ugly
- Entomotomy
(temporary URL, wrong side of cable modem, unreliable) initial site,
running. Further hacking, ongoing.
TODO list,
shortening slowly.
- It's required remarkably little hacking of asdf to get the Debian Common Lisp Controller to work with it. It's required, as far as
I can tell from Kevin's commit
messages, substantially more work to CLC itself, none of which I did.
My involvement is mostly to sit on IRC and
say "it already does that", or sometimes "no, I won't make it do that"
- The Local Food Directory (placeholder page at http://www.buyitlocally.org.uk/) is substantially finished except
for not working at all in a few key respects. It turned out to be
most conveniently implemented as another CLiki application.
- That's all I can remember right now.
I got email from a friend asking about book recommendations for
Knowledge-Based Systems. It's not exactly my area of expertise (OK,
so I'm a Lisp programmer. That doesn't have to mean I know
anything much about AI) so I spent a few minutes with Google and found
(among other, more relevant things) this interview with Ask Jeeves