diary at Telent Netowrks

I swapped a few of the links in this page's header around#

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 16:11:38 +0000

I swapped a few of the links in this page's header around. No major changes, but I wanted to include Planet Lisp and remove some of the blogs that I read through that aggregator anyway, so don't feel unloved if you're no longer linked. Temporarily fixed my RSS feed, too - it'll last until I restart that process, by which time I hope I will have working CVS again and therefore have fixed it permanently.

Latest news on cvs.telent.net: returns in full effect next week, we hope. I'm not going to blog about work on principle (self-preservation principle, mostly) but we've been moving offices, so this has been a busy week. It's also been a pretty stunning week weather-wise, so I've been attempting to make the most of that by getting outside: now I have a skin deficit on both elbows, my knees creak alarmingly until I've warmed them up by skating a couple of miles, and my leg hurts. Oh, yeah, and my shoulder is better but still not actually well. Truly I am on peak form for the marathon.

cvs.telent.net: no news#

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:52:50 +0000

cvs.telent.net: no news. If I get a moment tomorrow I'm going to get a tarball of the cvs repo off the machine and at least stick it on an ftp site for the time being.

cvs.telent.net repository archive is now at http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~dan/telent-cvs.tar.gz#

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:21:30 +0000

cvs.telent.net repository archive is now at http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~dan/telent-cvs.tar.gz. Latest news on the return of the machine itself is that next Friday is most likely; this is a temporary measure for people desperate to get stuff before then. Sorry for the delay.

Extending (or, mostly, just implementing) CL streams#

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:50:50 +0000

Extending (or, mostly, just implementing) CL streams. Motivations: (a) Araneida's serve-event model doesn't work in a threaded SBCL with threaded SLIME attached (workaround is to (setf swank:communication-style :fd-handler) in .swank.lisp); (b) people doing Unicode in SBCL are also having interesting experiences with fd-streams; (c) the streams-standard-discuss/ list has been empty since it was set up.

In other news, very very cheesed off. In a fit of transient stupidity I stacked on the LondonStake last night and managed to knock someone else over so that she fell on my leg. Very sore: today I've mostly been unable to walk, let alone strap wheels to my feet. Which is mostly just really really annoying coming as it does about two days before the inline marathon. Unless a miracle has happened by tomorrow I probably won't be able to take part.

cvs.telent.net#

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:01:44 +0000

cvs.telent.net returns. You read it here first, or possibly second.

Anyone know whether a Toshiba Portege 3440CT will work with PC133 RAM#

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 13:58:16 +0000

Anyone know whether a Toshiba Portege 3440CT will work with PC133 RAM? I just ordered a SO-DIMM of that particular hue as it's half the price of the PC100 RAM I'm supposed to use in this machine, and web sites seemed to indicate I had at least a 50% chance of it working ("it's supposed to, but sometimes it doesn't", seems to be the summary). I guess I'll find out when it arrives.

A month or so ago I remapped my#

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:41:55 +0000

A month or so ago I remapped my keyboard to swap control and caps lock, in the hope of reducing the unpleasant sensation I was getting in my wrist when chording control key sequences. Shortly after mentioning this to my boss, my work machine suddenly acquired a so-called "Natural Keyboard", so it's hard to tell exactly what difference which change made. Of course, that evening I went out and stacked skating which didn't really help any effort to determine cause and effect either. But anyway.

Having rather more recently got my desktop machine at home working again (needed new hard disk, and some furniture shuffling to create a space to use it) I find that the split keyboard really does make a difference to my typing comfort, and have had to order one. Sigh. So, if anyone's keeping track, please cons another on the "I hate all Microsoft software but they do make (or OEM, whatever) some nice hardware" list.

Good news, bad news: no bones broken - soft tissue damage only#

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 14:48:06 +0000

Good news, bad news: no bones broken - soft tissue damage only. "May take weeks", though. By looking crestfallen I elicited the additional information "sometimes it takes weeks and weeks".

(The preceding refers to the leg injury I wrote about last week, if you hadn't guessed)

I hate hardware#

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 23:22:46 +0000

I hate hardware. Anyonme who's ever had to share an IRC channel or an office with me will know this is not news. My new keyboard works; this is good. On the other hand, my new laptop memory is actually the wrong physical size to fit in the laptop - not sure how I managed to screw that up - and my old desktop has decided that previously manageable tasks such as e.g. running gcc or building SBCL are now too complicated to manage in one go, presumably hoping that I'll pander to its laziness and just restart after the first random signal 11.

Although I would of course like to replace this boxful of flakitude with something that doesn't involve hardware in any way shape or form, I reluctantly have to accept that this is not going to be possible. So, am making the best of a bad job: arriving next week is an Athlon 64 and allegedly compatible motherboard and memory for it. In the unlikely event that it works, this may even provide the impetus I need to finish the SBCL AMD64 port.

Leg still mending. Better than it was, not as good as it ought to be be: with luck, should be skateable again sometime next week.

s-expressions for SQL#

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:00:25 +0000

s-expressions for SQL.

(This text also appeared on the Clump mailing list; if you read it here you can skip it there, or vice versa)

Did you know that 

SELECT foo,bar 
   from table1 
   join (select * from table2 where some_criterion limit 10) table2
   on table1.table2id=table2.id
is (according to the postgres manual, at least) valid SQL? After finding a need for such a query on Saturday, and that my existing fairly ad-hoc sexpr-to-sql translator wouldn't cope with having entire 'select' statements where it was expecting table names, I set out to design something that would. And that doesn't use custom reader macros, which I dislike (they confuse my editor, and there always seems to be something else that wants to redefine them incompatibly)

By working through the Postgres documentation and constructing nested forms based on the order it claimed pgsql does things in, I arrived at a syntax which is probably not completely unlike the parse tree that a SQL processor would generate. Thus

(select (foo bar) 
        (join table1 
              (alias (limit (select (*) (where table2 some-criterion))
                            :end 10) table2)
              :on (= table1.table2id table2.id)))
will translate to the sql form above. The immediate objective is to make it much easier to programmatically compose queries.

I have provisionally called this beast SEXQL, because the name SQL has been taken already and SEXPQL is awkward to pronounce. The implementation is still work-in-progress and I haven't been through the whole sql language thoroughly; I've just added the tokens I have a need for as I go along.

You can see it, such as it is, at http://cvs.telent.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/sexql/sexql.lisp?view=markup. Feedback welcome, preferably on clump

I should have written about "Fast User-extensible Streams" before#

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:06:25 +0000

I should have written about "Fast User-extensible Streams" before. This is currently all just handwaving, and its intended goal is as a stream substrate for SBCL (replacing fd-streams) rather than to become a standard. There's an sbcl-internals cliki page where you can find a pointer to wherever the latest draft is living, and comment on it.

To save myself the trouble of writing a third entry - and you the trouble of reading it - I may as well add here that my leg though not actually right again is sufficiently better that I can walk at normal speeds with only a slight ache, and descend stairs in merely moderate discomfort. I have a newfound admiration for anyone who loses the use of one or more legs more seriously than I did, and add that unless you've had an injury of that kind and know this experience, you have no idea how much enjoyment I'm getting from the pursuit of such simple pleasures as being able to walk around again without being overtaken by grannies all the time. Crippled-no-more.

Two out of three leaves ample room for improvement#

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:48:30 +0000

Two out of three leaves ample room for improvement. My order from Dabs arrived today; 512MB RAM as ordered, Asus K8V-SE mobo ditto, and an Athlon XP with a sticker which incorrectly claimed it was an Athlon 64. Bunch of muppets.

For the people who know as much about current PC hardware as I did last week, know that the Athlon XP and Athlon 64 are entirely different beasts in most practical respects. They run different code, fit different motherboards and are different physical shapes. They also, for what it's worth, come in different packaging: the clearly visible printing on the box that said "Athlon XP" was my first clue that something was not supplied As Described.

⟪Aug 2004 Oct 2004⟫