Pratchgan - wonderful

Ramblings of a yarn junkie: The Pratchgan 2008 - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!!!

The Pratchgan was handed to Terry

This is just fantastic!

A good piece of philosophy and a reinforcement of GTD

Merlin Mann makes a learning point out of a minor crisis:Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts | 43 Folders

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

It reminds me that I am not diligent with my context labels; must do better, though even here contexts can be assigned when needed so there is no excuse not to know wht you can do at a particular point in time and space. For instance, I quite often scan my to-dos and can spot the context from the text - assigning contexts just makes this faster, and searchable if you use the right tool

Jython 2.5 Alpha Released!

Frank Wierzbicki's Weblog: Jython 2.5 Alpha Released!

On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that
Jython 2.5a1+ is available for download. See the installation instructions.

This is great news - I am so glad to see Jython coming back to life!

What do they know?

A new site to find Freedom of Information (FoI) requests:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

Another cool emacs utility

Life Is Too Short For Bad Code: Emacs Tip #21: pabbrev (predictive abbreviation expansion)

pabbrev is a yet another package for abbreviation expansion in Emacs. Unlike dabbrev, this one analyzes the contents of the buffers during idle time, and shows potential expansions based on word frequency. This package also shows potential expansions as you are typing. For example if you were typing 'pred', this is what you would see:


p[oint]
pr[ogn]
pre[-command-hook]
pred[ictive]

Affordable Tea

The Half-Dipper: Affordable Tea

Best April Fool by far!!

Damien Katz: CouchDB Language Change

So, after a lot of heated discussion internally, I'm somewhat sad to say that Erlang will not be used in future releases of CouchDB. We are switching the whole codebase to (...drumroll..) Java.

Saving Lisp applications as SBCL images

Nice article on saving and distributing Lisp applications from SBCL:

Freezing Lisp in Time | Mikael Jansson

So, when you're done with the heavy processing and finally want to distribute your work as an application, or maybe resume work later after that RAM upgrade, here's how!

Looks nice and simple. However the image is large! Hopefully someone will chip in with a way of improving this.

Emacs the dark side? huh?

Use Emacs with all your hatred.. « Keeping it Small and Simple

My path towards the dark side has already begun: I’m currently reading the Emacs tutorial (C-h t)

Conferences and sponsorship

reddit.com: Pycon 2008 disappointment

All of this is to say that it is possible to get sponsorship without selling the conference. Not only that, but our experience with PPW suggests that all parties - including sponsors - benefit when the conference remains focused on the attendees' interests.

I think this is important:

Surprisingly, we got lots of sponsorship. Moreover, our sponsors tended to be companies that "got" the programming community and that our attendees were more likely to be interested in. In the end, our sponsors were happy and our attendees were happy.(My emphasis)

The wisdom on conferences is obviously based on the more general case where the audiences can be very varied in interests and in experience - when manning a booth I have been quite shocked by the lack of research by some attendees, but more imprtantly their lack of focus on what they wanted from their visit.

ISO & ECMA : whither credibility

Michael Tiemann sums it up nicely:

What I see in the Geneva proceedings (that have been reported, surely not the whole story) is that ISO believed as I did that product was less important than process, and now ISO must decide whether to acknowledge that it failed, damaging its brand in the short term, or deny it was wrong and risk ruining it forever.

What do you use Common Lisp for?

Xach asked what people do with CL and got rather a lot of responses, most very interesting. None of the big CL apps get a mention yet.

Me? I am playing with it: I use SBCL, Emacs and SLIME. I think I need macros, but I'm not sure yet!

New Powerball

I bought a Powerball Pro about a week ago, as I have been having problems with my wrists (too much keyboard work).

An incredible little device which certainly seems to exercise the wrists and fore-arms. So far I am going fairly slowly (6000 rpm) as it quite quickly makes joints ache :-(

However, after a while I have found that the normal wrist and elbow aches are decreasing - so I am happy. Will post progress again after a few more weeks

Mail in the Emacs World == mew, with gmail

I got the above mail package working in emacs on Ubuntu, but more importantly I got i going with Google mail.

On Ubuntu I installed mew and mew-bin ( I used the latest beta)

To get it working with gmail, you also need stunnel. The real break-through was finding this site and updating it to my settings. Thanks to zhang.

Now I just need to find a copy of bbdb-mew.el and I can hook up with the Big Brother Database. The advertised link is not working for me today: server not found :-(

Once again Sacha Chua is doing something interesting in this space

Ubuntu Mobile

Ubuntu Mobile takes on Apple touch interface

This looks very interesting: good looks like the iPhone, but the possibility of getting lots of interesting extra packages running on it.

Apple has a few problems for me: 1) every time I think about geting a Mac or an iPhone I read something about Apple placing restrictions on what you can do - no personal ringtone loads, only stuff from ITunes store.... 2)restrictions on the software the iPhone can run.

I don't want those types of restrictions - I just feel like I am about to give money to a bunch of control freaks.

So, for people like me, let's hope the Ubuntu Mobile looks good, is open, and runs on decent hardware

Linux vs. Windows: Installation

It is a measure of how much Linux has improved , that now my latest new component was automatically picked up and used in Linux (Ubuntu) whilst I had to download new software to get Windows.

The particular component was a new nVidia graphics card - the end result was great on both systems, though again the Gnome eye-candy was better than Windows (XP).

So Linux, which used to be really bad at automatically coping with all but the most popular hardware seems to be overtaking Windows in my experience.

Is Windows Vista any better ? I won't know until i get new hardware - this box won't cope with it.

Getting the Gunk out

For GTD fans here is an excellent summary of how to get further with the system.

They are all great but the high ( or low) -lights for me were:

• No tusted place of reference. For me part of this is space - I need to get rid of clutter before getting better equipment. Part is also my hankering after everything being electronic, but life just won't conform!!
• Blocking out both doing and processing time: my new job gives me far less scope to define regular slots in my diary, so i end up with none at all. I need tro be more dynamic
• Of course the last point also applies to the weekly review!

Slime Cheat Sheet

Here is a nice summary of Slime commands.

* It includes all of the SLIME commands from the SLIME manual
* It includes all of the Emacs commands from the built in tutorial
* It includes the main Emacs help keys
* The commands are sorted and grouped by functional area
* It’s all fits on one page

Nirvana in beta - weblocks

Weblocks looks interesting:

This is one of the main reasons I started Weblocks framework - I never wanted to write a line of HTML again.

and:

with closures-based actions, continuations-based control flow, stateful widgets, and a shiny new CLSQL backend store1, it may very well be the web development nirvana

I found this amusing:

Weblocks is relatively young, so there still may be some issues that need to be ironed out. Proceed with caution!

Nirvana postponed perhaps?

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More on org-mode

Sacha's book draft continues.

I hadn't seen the filtering on tags feature before, nor the bonus code - of course!

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