Recent blog entries for dan

salmoni

I've never actually used Access, but I've seen it in the hands of other people being used to access (ha) real databases over SQL*Net (i.e. Oracle). I suspect therefore that it can actually be pointed at any kind of ODBC source, so you could easily enough store the data somewhere safe in Postgres and still give users the whizzy gui thing that they're used to.

This is still not my diary. This is.

dwmw2: http://www.angryflower.com/itsits.gif makes the point quite effectively. But no, I think it's always been like this and you're just noticing it more.

In a similar vein, see also http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

This is not my diary. This is my diary

Ever wondered what a hypertext shell/programming environment might look like?

Some of us know already. Some people were even using them twenty years ago. Rainer Joswig has Quicktime movies showing how development on a Symbolics lisp machine used to work.

(the shorter video was originally featured on lemonodor)

dyork: on the subject of Python vs Scheme, you may want to look at http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html as well. "Python can be seen as either a practical (better libraries) version of Scheme, or as a cleaned-up (no $@&%) version of Perl"

apenwarr: huh? Some of those items, I grant, you wouldn't care about unless you were really into DOMination, but popup blocking? password management? Don't tell me the average web user doesn't want these features. Maybe Aunt Tillie doesn't need them for her first hour on the web, but after the end of the first fortnight she'll be welcoming them with open arms.

[ This is not my diary - I just post responses to comments in recentlog here. This is my diary. ]

xach: look into SERVE-EVENT, if you haven't already. That lets you hook your own file descriptors into the event loop that the top level's already running.

And send me the bug report for db-sockets. I don't always test new versions in CMUCL (I mostly use SBCL) but usually if it doesn't work over there it's something that can be fixed quickly.

(with-plug "also try asking on irc.freenode.net/#lisp")

salmoni:

I had a look at the HCI2002 web site to see if I could find your paper. This is a HCI conference, right? Why don't they let you search the programme by presenter/topic/etc? If you hadn't given the day and date in your preceding diary entry I'd have had to read the whole damn thing ...

Anyway, I could only find a sumamry there. Are the papers public? Are they going to be?

cliki has a search engine with no summaries at all in the result pages, hence my interest ...

stevey: you need netcat, the "the network swiss army knife"

:; BANNER=`echo -e '\n'| nc localhost 22`
:; echo $BANNER
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.0.2p1 Debian 1:3.0.2p1-9 Protocol mismatch.

(Oh, um. There's a machine in need of an apt-get update or two ...)

Everybody needs netcat.

raph: yup, I'd concur with those other opinions - recentlog has to show everyone. It's not that difficult to get certification on a toy account these days anyway: which of rms, anarchy, Satan or God do you believe are real? All are certed as Master

chalst writes:

I think FFIs in the scheme world are better, on the whole, than in the Common LISP world,

Despite being a CL hacker, I tend to agree; at least on Unix. It's an implementation issue not a language issue - the situation may well be different on the Mac (MCL by all accounts integrates very nicely in to MacOS) - and it was pretty certainly different on LispMs, where the OS was Lisp. CL on Unix seems to have inherited that "Lisp is the world" view to the point that it's more difficult than it need be to talk nicely to Unix. This annoys some Lispers more than others, and me appreciably - hence cirCLe

Of course, Unix doesn't necessarily make it easy to write performant FFIs to it either; despite CMUCL/SBCL having what's actually a very nice API for calling from Lisp to C - it lets you call any C function you can link in, specify types including structures and unions, and do automatic coercion between lisp types and C types - you soon find out that there's enough preprocessor macrology in glibc (e.g. errno and stat) that you end up having to write C wrappers for everything anyway.