diary at Telent Netowrks

Choices: (a) fix end-of-month diary bug; (b) post more; (c) continue#

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:17:40 +0000

Choices: (a) fix end-of-month diary bug; (b) post more; (c) continue to add placeholders like this one.

The good news is that my leg works again#

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:42:20 +0000

The good news is that my leg works again. I tried it on the FNS last Friday and then marshalling the rollerstroll on Sunday, and it complained a bit but didn't actually collapse under me on either occasion, so although I'm definitely still aware it's there, that's a whole lot better than having it not be there. Which is good news and timely, as I'm taking it to Tignes next week.

And I realise this risks being pretty meaningless stuff to many readers (supposing for a minute that I have many readers), but I feel the need to babble about just How Much Fun it is to be wheel-capable again. It's probably the nearest we can get to seven-league boots with current consumer-grade technology.

Coming soon: cliki rss with diffs#

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 01:30:50 +0000

Coming soon: cliki rss with diffs. All the hard work has been done already by Nathan Froyd (whose diff package is asdf-installable, I hadn't realised) and Christophe Rhodes. In a CLiki near you (or, more probably, several at once) just as soon as I make it show the right diff instead of simply the most recent one.

This work would not have been possible without the generous support of the Planet Lisp CLiki Edition beta programme.

Obviously I don't already have too many projects I'm not keeping up#

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:20:16 +0000

Obviously I don't already have too many projects I'm not keeping up with. A couple of weeks ago I joined the ranks of Lispers with GPSs, with the intention of compiling free street maps of London - and learning how to use CLIM at the same time.

This is probably not an approved use of the McCLIM Listener, but it seems to be a low-effort way of getting dots on the screen. The dots come from the Friday Night Skate two weeks ago, via the GPX file here (if you don't have something like gpsman that'll read gpx files, there's also ps and pdf conversions in there which are right now prettier than my clim hackery anyway), courtesy of s-xml and some very bad (incomplete) glue.

And since I'm sort of in a blogging frame of mind, I'll mention why#

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:47:37 +0000

And since I'm sort of in a blogging frame of mind, I'll mention why there's been no update here for the past week and a bit: I was skiing. I spent a whole week in Tignes (French Alps) learning to ski and didn't break anything - obviously I was being over-cautious. I did however lose my glasses on the slope on the second day, so since then (up until about five minutes ago, when a replacement pair turned up from the optician) have been walking around wearing sunglasses all the time - my only spare pair are tinted.

I'd do a comparison between skiing and skating, but really it'd be like trying to compare CL with Scheme, and I just spent all day telling people on IRC not to do that. (Memo to employers: not all day, really. Just the idle bits during slow cvs operations). But I think it's fair to say that if you like one, the other might well also appeal.

Merry CLIMmas everybody#

Tue, 28 Dec 2004 21:41:24 +0000

Merry CLIMmas everybody. I'll readily concede that this doesn't look so different from the one in my earlier entry - except for being in colour (and not being upside down) - but it's got most of a clim app surrounding it now instead of just being a one-liner that co-opts the Listener. The argument you see in the interactor pane is me trying to find out why the scroll bars don't.

(The colour indicates speed, from red=stopped or very slow, though to violet=probably quite fast. I don't have a good conversion from lat:long to metres yet, so I don't know how fast. I find it interesting that all the little red dots show up where I stopped to block traffic as the skate went past - I wonder if we could find out more interesting stuff if it indicated the length of each stop somehow (progressively bigger red dots?)).

Planet Lisp readers will have seen the coverage four days ago when I started asking about which CLIM resources are worth reading: for reference, I got this far mostly just using the spec (which is in the Spec/ directory in mcclim cvs) and spare parts from my never-actually-happened (and no-longer-needed-now-i-have-a-real-job) bookkeeping app from last year. As compared to last year, it seems moderately snappy even on the same hardware that I had then, and isn't suffering the refresh/hanging problems I apparently was labouring with then either. Way to go, mcclim developers.

In passing, I just spent four days away from the Internet (Christmas with parents, who have a dialup which I was mostly avoiding using) and as a result no need/incentive to run a web browser. It's an odd but rather nice experience.

cvs.telent.net is down at least until I return to work and sweet-talk#

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 16:19:59 +0000

cvs.telent.net is down at least until I return to work and sweet-talk someone into kicking it hard - which I hope will be tomorrow, but depends on when I wake up and how I feel at that time. I'm certainly feeling better today than yesterday, but otoh I said the same on Monday wrt Sunday, so let's not make any hasty assumptions. Apologies to any CLX/cliki/araneida hackers with stuff queued.