In other news#

Tue Feb 15 00:24:56 2005

In other news...

• I got an author contract from Linux Journal for an article I wrote for them about eighteen months ago. Frankly, I'd given up on ever hearing from them a while ago (they didn't reply to my "ping" email), and I'm not sure what to do now. The article was about how to make your own live CD out of bits of Debian unstable: I'm not at all sure that the procedure described in it would still work, and I'd really find it hard to believe that nothing that's come along in the meantime is an improvement. Like, say, gnoppix-based-on-ubuntu.

• Got new wheels; need more. My skates use a rather lame "hi-lo" setup where the front two axles are nearer the ground than the back two, meaning that the wheels in the front set should be 4mm smaller. So on Sunday I got new 76s to replace the rather triangular-looking ones on the front, then on fitting them found that they were actually larger than the supposed 80s in the back. Some wheel swapping ensued and I now have 76 on the back and previously-80-now-probably-72 on the front. Tested with a few minutes tottering around the serpentine road, then the sunday stroll down to Battersea Park and back in the face of a strong headwind.

• I came very close to writing a Perl script on Saturday, then just in time came to my senses and realised that the machine it'll be installed on doesn't even have the DBI/DBD modules installed yet and why sully it? So, I'm fiddling on and off with database APIs until I find something I like.

  (with-query (q (istr::*database-handle* "select * from country"))
     (loop
      (let ((row (get-row istr::*database-handle*  q)))
        (unless row (return))
        (format t "hello ~S~%" row))))
  

  As previously discussed, I don't like O-R mapping much. But nor can I remember the pg.lisp interfaces, and when I do go to look them up I find that the efficient one (pg-for-each, uses cursors) not only wants to execute a callback function for each row, but doesn't pass the attribute names to that callback.

• Pthreaded AMD64 SBCL mostly works but doesn't yet have interrupt-thread, and gives wrong error messages when you ask it for backtraces. I don't know how much time I have for hacking it in the next two weeks, though; it's all looking a bit busy around here.