Recent blog entries for abstrakt

I admit it. I am a LispOS dreamer. And I will get nothing significant accomplished until I can get back to coding, in LISP, and in a decent environment. My C days are through.

Does anyone on this earth have an old Symbolics machine in working order they are willing to part with? Probably not. Hey, I'm desperate. :)

Knowing not how to useth sed, I wrote the following:

#!/bin/sh
for i in *.wav; do
sox $i -w -s /tmp/tmp.wav
lame -b 32 /tmp/tmp.wav `echo $i | guile -c "(display (let ((tmp (read))) (substring tmp 0 (- (string-length tmp) 4))))"`.mp3
done

I have used Scheme in a shell script.
The sanctum has been violated.
Surely the apocalypse is at hand....

I picked up a copy of "Wavelets for Computer Graphics - Theory and Applications" a week or two ago, and have spent the last few days reading through it and implementing a simple 2D image compressor using wavelets. Wavelets are really cool. I did not realize they were useful for so many different things.

Once I'm done playing with my 2D compressor, I think I'll move on to either video compression, or subdivision surfaces. Either way, I should really study the theory in more depth first.

Why doesn't Advogato let you underline text in a diary entry?

Amazing. After digging through hundreds of web pages trying to figure out where I could get the software to boot my X terminal without paying hundreds of dollars to NCD (well probably, I didn't actually ask them), I finally found the image I needed on an NFS from a boot server somewhere in Australia, which I stumbled on by chance while reading a tech support document I found during a search. Now my X Terminal works. Thanks guys. :)

The terminal is a little slow, but I'm not complaining. I'll take an extra head at 1024x768 anyday. :)

I bought a used NCD X terminal from a guy at a computer show for $40 last weekend. It looks really cool, but it boots over the network and I don't have a boot image for it (its software was not in the box). I couldn't care less about the whole NCDware package, I just need the file "Xncdecx" to make it boot ...

The same bunch of people also sold me a copy of Alias-Wavefront Studio 8.0 (with about 16 inches of documentation) for $2.50 (!!!!) - too bad I don't have an SGI to run it on. :(

They said they had a working PDP-11 system. I would have loved to see that.