KBM's Web Log

2007/06/19

Planning your future

It has been said before, but here is a great article by Erin Malone on thinking about your future:

The point is, in the big picture, no one is going to look after your career for you, but you.

Many good points and a nice outline. Also some great discussion in the comments. Read It All!(tm)

2007/05/27

Programmatic changing of documentation in CL

From yrk:

SETF can be used to modify documentation: (setf (documentation 'foo 'function) "Common Lisp documentation is malleable").

2007/05/21

Distributed Systems vs. SOA

Some interesting perspectives on SOA from Pat Helland (who seems to be getting lots of links since going back to MS):

So, the move from distributed systems (one transactional scope --> one notion of time) to SOA (independent transactional scopes --> time based on the perspective of the user) is like moving from Newton's Universe to Einstein's Universe

and

In SOA (again, how I think of it), we are acknowledging the existence of independent machines. This affects the transactional scope (we end up with different chunks of data which cannot be updated by the same transaction) and we end up with independently evolving schema and operations for the different systems. This is a seminally different concept than distributed systems (at least in the way I think of them).

So:

In the presence of imperfect availability of knowledge, a business is forced to choose between closing down service (reducing availability of the service), over-booking, or over-provisioning. Indeed, if multiple systems (or humans) are extending commitments independently, they must choose between over-booking, over-provisioning, or some unknown balance between them. If I have 10,000 widgets to sell and 100 salespeople, I could allocate 100 to each sales-person and know that I have not over-booked if they go out and independently sell the widgets. To do this, though, I am almost certain to need extra inventory for the sales-people that don't sell all 100 of their widgets. Indeed, for most businesses, this is a ridiculously expensive proposition. So, an analysis is done on the statistics, a cost of over-booking is calculated, and allocations are given based on the expectations of selling the 100,000 widgets.

That is my summary in 3 quotes! Read it all to a) check on my understanding, b) to get the full subtlety

Technorati Tags: SOA

DSL or API?

From chromatic on ONLamp:

Confusingly, every example of a DSL I saw looked like something I would have called an API before my sudden immersive enlightenment.
If I’m confused about what a DSL is, you must be too. I took copious notes through the sessions on Friday and have devised a simple, ten-question test to help you determine whether a wad of code represents a DSL or an API.

Fun! So what is a DSL?

2007/05/17

rich internet applications

This is what schmedley is all about

Note the OS X style "Mexican applications wave" at the bottom

2007/05/15

My name is on a software patent.

Mark Pilgrim:

Even our most seasoned patent writers argued against it, and we did it anyway. And for what?

2007/05/08

More Ubuntu - now on mobile phones?

Looks like more Ubuntu momentum according to the BBC:

A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices.

The Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project aims to create the open source platform for initial release in October 2007.

Good free(?) publicity.

No mention of apps that I can see - seems important in this space

2007/05/04

Common LISP: Code Coverage in SBCL

Juho reports:

SBCL 1.0.5.28 includes an experimental code coverage tool (sb-cover) as a new contrib module. Basically you just need to compile your code with a special optimize proclamation, load it, run some tests, and then run a reporting utility. The reporting utility will produce some html files.

Looks very cool.

2007/05/01

Dell to use Ubuntu on Linux PCs

Congratulation to Ubuntu

From the BBC article:

Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Dell, is himself an Ubuntu user. He has the operating system installed on a high-end Dell Precision M90 laptop he uses at home.

This refers to this link which refers to:

Software:

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
VMWare Workstation 6 Beta
OpenOffice.org 2.2
Automatix2
Firefox 2.0.0.3
Evolution Groupware 2.10

2007/04/17

Highlighting symbols in Emacs

M-x all-things-emacs

I ran across this package on gnu.emacs.sources recently. If you enable light-symbol-mode in a buffer and pause on a symbol, then Emacs will highlight all other occurrences of the symbol in the buffer. When you move point the highlighting goes away.

Neat

2007/03/31

Trying Clippings

Following my urge to try nearly all Web 2.0 applications, here is an entry from Clippings

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2007/03/29

I have had exciting day battling with Ubuntu.

First off, my root partition fille up so X11 wouldn't start.  All attempts to resize the partition (qtparted, DiskWorks) failed.  What the heck, I had a new disk rive to install, so I thought I would install the lovely new beta.

Hmm, kernel panic..... OEM install isk reveale more details - all around ACPI.  Turned that off in the BIOS, on we go.  Nice looking install using Ubiquity kept freezing at 88%.  Used the naff looking OEM version, but it worked!! Finally!!!

I am now up and running, having copied over /home, some apt configs etc.

The result is good - hopfully folks using the final install will have fewer problems ( though I suspect the ACPI will never be fixed - need new mother board!!)

2007/03/26

isearch Word Yank

A cool addition to incremenntal search; by issuing C-w whilst in incrmental search (C-s) you can add ther next word in the buffer being searched. The C-w searches for the new extended search string.

Technorati Tags: emacs

2007/03/19

More Lisp fandom

From Stephen Ramsay

My experience learning Lisp and coding a few serious programs in it was deeply profound. Afterward, most of the other languages I had been using regularly seemed silly and inane. I found myself saying things like, “I’ve spent an hour on this method, and I know I could knock it off in three lines of perfectly elegant Lisp!” And what I was lacking in those languages was a whole host of programming constructs I had either never heard of or only dimly understood before learning Lisp. Passing a function into a function? Why would you ever want to do that! You wouldn’t. Unless you got seriously into Lisp, in which case you find yourself (a) doing it all the time and (b) writing much more elegant, expressive code as a result. Same goes for closures, continuations, anonymous functions, and macros.

and

I’ve spent the last week or so writing in Ruby. It’s a wonderful language. It’s a joy to program in it, and I’m almost always trying to find ways to overcome the various reasons not to (”that’s not the language of the project,” “there aren’t enough libraries,” etc.). I know it like the back of my hand, and I teach the language every year. It even has a number of Lispy constructs (like closures, continuations, and anonymous functions). But it ain’t no Lisp.

BUT

But last week, I was writing proof-of-concept code. There was no one telling me what language to use, no “audience” for the code, and there were good, serviceable libraries available for Common Lisp, Ruby, Java, Python and Perl. I went with Ruby.

The question, of course, is why not write it in The Greatest Language Ever?

Well, that’s a separate rant, which I’ll save for another post.

Intriguing.... is Stephen in theatre or films? The suspense is building nicely, but timing is everything!

2007/03/17

Fridge efficiency

£25 fridge gadget that could slash greenhouse emissions:

It is made of wax, is barely three inches across and comes in any colour you like, as long as it's black. And it could save more greenhouse gas emissions than taxes on gas guzzling cars, low energy light bulbs and wind turbines on houses combined. It is the e-cube, and it is coming soon to a fridge near you.

2007/03/04

From Emacs via gblogger

Hi there

Hey, it worked !!

Not sure about the Post URL part, but ther is probably a way to set a default.....

Anyway, check it out....
Emacs Client for Google

Entry titles in Blogger

I discovered that, using Performancing, I could set the title of a Blog entry, which formatted very nicely (IMHO). However, if I posted from Blogger, I could not set the title ( and so used h2 headers instead), and if I editted a Performancing entry in Blogger I lsot the title!

However, just go to Bloggers Settings -> Formatting and show the title. Now I have no excuse not to make these 2 types of entry look the same.

Lack of posts

Well, I haven't posted much recently. Partly that is due to a new job, but also the fact that BlogThis! didn't work with the new version of Blogger. Well, now the Google Toolbar does the trick..... except that using Firefox on my Windows laptop, I can't login to Blogger. The login window goes into some sort of loop.

I have (somewhat reluctantly) got it all working in IE7, but it is not my environment of choice.....

I can use the Emacs client, mentioned earlier - but so far I have only installed that in Linux, where such things are very easy. The Ubuntu apt-get is just great!!

Google comes to Emacs

An Emacs Client For Blogger: "by T.V. Raman, Google Research Scientist" .

And you can do stuff with Calendar and Reader too - in fact I found the HTML provided for the list of current items is a really nice way to read outstanding items.

Note to self: Installs go better if you check you have the pre-reqs rather than (mis-)remembering.