As I said in my last entry, I was in Amsterdam for ECLM 2011, once again smoothly organized by Edi Weitz and Arthur Lemmens, but this time under the aegis of the Stichting Common Lisp Foundation (of which more a bit later). After leaving the comfortable café, where Luke and Tobias (along with a backpack's worth of computing equipment on its way to visit St Petersburg) eventually turned up, it was time to go for the Saturday evening dinner, held at Brasserie Harkema. In the olden days, when I had time to do a certain amount of public-facing Lisp development, I got used to receiving the adulation of a grateful public – this time, at the dinner, I happened to sit next to someone called Lars from Netfonds. “Hmm,” said something at the back of my mind, ”that rings a bell.” Lars who? Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen. My inner fanboy went a bit squeee – even to the point of explaining what gmane was to a third party in his presence. Still, it was nice to be able to say a heartfelt “thank you” in person to someone whose software has saved me time and a certain amount of embarrassment. Other topics of conversation at the dinner included a discussion with R. Matthew Emerson (of Clozure) about the social aspects of Free Lisp development, a topic on which I have written before; contrasting the attitudes and experiences of contributors and users (small and large) of Clozure CL and SBCL was interesting. It was also nice to be able to talk about Lisp-based music analysis, synthesis and generation programs; reminding myself that I do still know about that landscape enough to fill people in.

The meeting itself, as others have observed over the years, is only partly about the talks: a substantial part of the goodness is in the chats over coffee and lunch. Edi and I reminisced about meeting in the venue, Hotel Arena, at a precursor to ECLM (in autumn 2004, I think... I certainly remember being approximately penniless, just after starting my first job); other people present then (as well as Arthur) included Nick Levine, Luke Gorrie, Peter van Eynde, Jim Newton, Pascal Costanza, Marc Battyani, Nicholas Neuss... many of whom were around for the rematch; a total of 95 people registered for the meeting, and the hall (part disco, part church) for the talks felt pleasantly full.

Of the talks, I was most interested in the material of Jack Harper's talk, concerning some of the constraints involved in building a product for (human) fingerprinting, and asserting that using Lisp in this product was not a problem. (Favourite quote: “batteries are complicated things”). I was a little bit disappointed that few of the speakers actually interacted with any code at all (Luke may claim that writing his slides in Squeak Smalltalk counts, but I beg to differ); in fact, Paul Miller of Xanalys was the only one of the speakers spending substantial time demonstrating anything related to the subject of the talk – and that only because the canned demo movie refused to display on the projector. Luke's talk appeared to go down well; the obvious first question came and went, and there were some more interesting questions from the floor. Star of the show was Zach Beane's talk about quicklisp; I spend a lot of time presenting or watching presentations in each of my capacities, and it's nice to have a refreshingly different (and deadpan) delivery, with good use of slides to complement the spoken content. I hope that he's right that his personal scalability will not be taxed, and that volunteers will find ways to assist in the project by taking ownership of particular tasks.

While Hans Hübner may have attempted to be controversial in his opinion slot about style guides for CL, the real controversy for me was Dave Cooper's announcement of the Stichting Common Lisp Foundation. Now, the Foundation has clearly done one thing that is helpful: provided legal and financial infrastructure so that the financial risk of hosting an ECLM is not borne entirely by two individuals; the corporate entity can potentially, after acquiring a buffer, provide the seed funding needed and, if necessary, absorb small ECLM losses (not that I believe there has been one, but hypothetically) through other fund-raising activities. On the other hand, when I asked the question as to how the Stichting CL Foundation would aim to distinguish itself from the ALU, the response from Dave Cooper was that the only difference would be that the foundation would focus on CL, where the ALU's remit extends to all members of the Lisp family. Such a narrowing of focus is, I think, potentially beneficial – indeed, when going through my email archives to look for the date of the 2004 meeting, I found a lucid rationale from Dan Barlow explaining that he had chosen to make CLiki's focus specifically DFSG-free Unix Lisp software in order to promote a sense of cohesion (rather than being motivated primarily by a strongly-held belief about the inherent superiority of DFSG-licensed software). But I don't think that the ALU's only weakness is that it spreads its Lisp net too wide: I think it has lost track of what it as an entity wants to do beyond perform a similar function for the ILC as Stichting has performed for the ECLM; Nick Levine, in his talk about how to find Lisp resources, observed that the ALU has a valuable piece of real estate – the lisp.org domain – which does not seem to be used to grow or meet the needs of the Lisp community, whether Common Lisp specifically or Lisp more generally. I found it a little sad that, Edi and Arthur aside, the overlap between the ALU board and Stichting CL Foundation directors is 100%.

After the longer talks came the lighting ones, and I took the opportunity to repeat my talk and demo about swankr, my implementation of the SLIME backend for R, from the European Lisp Symposium in April. Erik Huelsmann announced ABCL 1.0, a far better milestone to announce at the ECLM rather than my sneaky announcement of SBCL 0.9 (six years ago!? Doesn't time fly! Also, what ugly slides...). And after some more lightning (and less-lightning) talks, it was time to wrap up with drinks, dinner, and good conversation.

I'm in Amsterdam for the European Common Lisp Meeting, 2011 vintage. Still wearing my two hats, as academic and
“entrepreneur” – and, somewhat to my surprise, still enjoying it. Though I do have a fairly nasty cold, possibly a result of too many late nights (business), early mornings (children), and interaction with disease-ridden individuals (students).

I'm sitting in the cafe de jaren, a haunt which I think is popular with students – but today looks just plain popular. They seem very accomodating, with newspapers to wade through (admittedly, I brought my own), free Wifi, and tasty soup and sandwiches. I've been here before; in fact, getting on for a decade ago, my wife and I mislaid a copy of Asterix and the Somethings (dunno which) in Dutch. It's a pleasure to sit here, waiting for my colleagues to show up so that I can inspect Luke's presentation for blatant falsehoods off-message content. Looking forward to this evening's brasserie outing and of course the talks tomorrow – it'll be particularly interesting to see how Jack Harper's presentation compares with our Teclo experience –
and of course it'll be good to catch up with old friends, some of them in the flesh for the first time...

Hey, what happened to that resolution to blog weekly about being entrepreneurial? Well, it's been a long few months: course mostly delivered; PhD student approximately completed (well done, Ben); plenty of extra time to actually be entrepreneurial. Before I sink back down into the mire of too much to do and not enough time, an update!

I went to the 4th European Lisp Symposium, held at the Technical University of Hanburg-Harburg. It was great. Compared with last year, when I was Programme Chair, and volcano eruptions closed most of European airspace, leading to scrambles to find alternative keynote speakers and general stress about whether there were going to be any attendees at all, this was a breeze. Sure, I participated by reviewing a few contributions, but the event itself snuck up on me – I found myself on the Monday remembering that straight after my teaching duties on Wednesday, I needed to dash to the airport to catch a plane. Very pleasant; thanks to Didier Verna and Ralf Möller for making things so smooth that I could just turn up and assume that the event would be running perfectly – I know how much work it takes to get to that point.

It was good to catch up there with some of the wider Lisp world; there were about 60 attendees, including a solid transatlantic contingent. I couldn't quite allow myself to relax completely, and so ended up giving a lightning talk about R – a useful warmup for my slightly more substantial talk (slides; audio recording appears to have failed) at the Zürich Stuff'n'Lisp User Group. The cuteness of adding two lattice objects together (in graphical presentation form) to get a new graph combining the two originals seems never to get old, though since it's in fact six months old I did take the time this morning to commit and push the accumulated fixes to my public swankr git repository.

Right. Back to work work work fun hacking.

What I got for Christmas: sufficiently advanced Intel graphics drivers for 855GM, in Linux 2.6.37-rc7. No more missing mouse cursor on boot (and, icing on the Christmas cake, working video playback!) Thank you to those who worked on this, particularly since I couldn't actually work out how or where to submit useful bug reports (and so resorted to my usual strategy when dealing with laptop-related issues, which is to contact mjg59 by whatever means available and follow his suggestions as precisely as possible).

As the train I'm on ambles its unheated way through the unseasonably Wintry English countryside, it's time for another “weekly” exciting entrepreneurial update. Actually I should be properly working, not just talking about working, but there's a file I need for that elsewhere, and three's mobile Internet coverage evaporates about 3 minutes outside Waterloo station – if only there were a company dedicated to bettering mobile data infrastructure... So, here I am, with means, motive and opportunity to write a diary entry.

Since I last wrote, I have fought with R's handling of categorical variables in linear models; the eventual outcome was a score draw. The notion of a contrast is a useful one; very often, when we have a heap of conditions under which we observe some value, what we're interested in is not so much the predicted value given some condition, but the difference between the value under some condition and the value under some other: the canonical example for this is probably the difference between the condition of some group receiving a trial treatment, and the group receiving a control or placebo: the default contrast for unordered categorical variables in R is called the treatment contrast (contr.treatmen t).

In my particular case, I wanted to know the difference between any particular contrast and the average response – none of the categories I had in my system should have been privileged over any of the others, and there wasn't anything like a “control” group, so comparing against the overall average is a reasonable thing to want to do, and indeed it is supported in R through the use of the sum contrast contr.sum. However, this reveals a slight technical problem: the overall average and differences for each categorical variable is one more variable than the (effective) number of values; just as in simultaneous equations, this is a Bad Thing. (Technically, the system becomes undetermined.) So, in solving the system, one of the differences is jettisoned; my problem was that I wanted to visualise that information for all the differences, whether or not the last one was technically redundant – particularly since I wanted to offer a guideline as to which differences were most strongly different from the average, and I would be out of luck if the most unusual one happened to be the one jettisoned. Obviously I could trivially compute the last difference, simply from the constraint that all the differences must sum to zero (and actually dummy. coef does that for me); but what about its standard error?

Enter se.co ntrast. This operator allows the user to construct an arbitrary contrast, expressed most simply as a vector of contributions to that contrast and ask an aov object for the standard error of that contrast. Some experimentation later, for a linear model m for len observations, and a particular factor variable f, and a function class.ind to construct a matrix of class indicator values (i.e. for a vector v_i of observations, construct a matrix x_ij where x_ij is 1 if observation i came from condition j, and zero otherwise), I think that:

  anova <- aov(m)
  ci <- class.ind(data[[f]])
  ci <- ci[,colSums(ci) != 0]
  contrasts <- ci %*% diag(1/colSums(ci)) %*% (diag(len)-
(1/len)*matrix(rep(1,len*len), nrow=len))
  ses <- se.contrast(anova, contrasts)

gives me a vector ses of the standard errors corresponding to the sum contrasts in my system, including the degenerate one. (As seems to be standard in this kind of endeavour, the effort per net line of code is huge; please do not think that I wrote these five lines of code off the top of my head. Thanks to denizens of the r-help mailing list and in particular to Greg Snow for his answer to my question about this).

So, this looks like total victory! Why have I described this as only a score draw? Well, because while the above recipe works for a single factor variable, in the case I am actually dealing with I have all sorts of interaction terms between factors, and between factors and numerical variables, and again I want to display and examine all the contrasts, not just some subset of them chosen so that the system of equations to solve is nondegenerate. This looked sufficiently challenging, and the analysis to be done looked sufficiently peripheral to the current business focus, that it's been shelved, maybe for a rematch in the new year.