Older blog entries for dan (starting at number 13)

Woo! Thanks very much to everyone who worked to organise GUADEC, and to all the people who turned up. "Max'mum respeck", as I understand the young people say these days. It was great to meet people and put names to faces.

Especial thanks to Helixcode for alcohol supplies on the Saturday night. If anyone can explain why I ache all over, and/or what I banged my knee on, please do. Um. Private email might be smart there.

Cool things I have seen recently: Guile Emacs, and CLG - Gtk bindings for CLISP and CMUCL. Haven't actually tried either yet, because my laptop battery is failing to power the thing for more than about an hour a time.

OK, I'm going to GUADEC. On Friday evening, because this is not a good time to take time off work. Eurostar booked, hotel probably booked (yes, of course I trust the web booking interface)

And I'm not even a GNOME developer ... shocking, isn't it?

So Sunday was OxLUG as predicted. Interesting talk about DVD on Linux from Jonathan Masters - summary seemed to be that by spending some obscenely large sum of money on CPU, you could have "acceptable" software-only DVD playback. Question about whether I'd be better off just buying a VHS video recorder received surprisingly well

Actually I have a perfectly good VCR already. I just don't have a TV card that works for more than ten minutes to watch it with. Something in my Hauppage card disagrees with something in my SX164, and I lack the affinity for kernel hacking and TV watching to find out what

When I got back I wrote a few paragraphs on why I was bothering to write another socket library. If you like, you can read it here

More sockets. Today was socket options: the general framework is macro-heavy, but fairly flexible. The only actual option that exists so far is so_reuseaddr, but that's good enough to be getting on with. We can write TCP clients. We can write TCP servers. Probably should implement suitable read() and write() stuff for datagram sockets next - I don't think they'd work well as Lisp streams.

Writing useful automated tests will be interesting. Either we require the presence of netcat or we depend on the CL threading working and test against ourself. The former is probably a more rigorous test

Tomorrow I jump on a coach up to Oxford for the OxLUG meeting. As it's now 3am and I need to be at the coach stop at ten, I confidently expect to be late. Ho hum.

So, I think there are enough people here with Lispish tendencies that we could set up the Advogato sexp-fiends webring.

If your idea of ideal syntax involves parens and prefix notation, send me mail, or make a note in your diary and certify me as something so that I actually bother to go and check your diary

Right now the ring is empty because I've only just had the idea

Hypothetically, if someone were to certify everybody who certified him at the same level, everybody would certify him as Master, to get the equivalent level themselves. As more people did this the value of his counter-certification would increase as he'd become very well-connected.

Hmm

Stayed at work late last night, got half the required amount of sleep, flaked aout at about 5pm and went home to sleep some more. Now awake again (it's about 1am)

More sockets. gethostbyname now works, and I feel a rant about type punning coming on (why do they pretend IP addresses are "network-endian integers" - wouldn't life be a zillion times easier if everyone just admitted it's an array of 4 bytes?)

Spent most of the day with emacs, jade and dia on this silly document. The tools are far more interesting than the content. dia is really neat, did I mention that already? All it needs is an embedded lisp with a prototype-based object system to create new objects with `behaviours'.

Not a lot got done. I was going to spend the day hacking more sockets, finishing the aforesaid docbook document (more day-job stuff) and installing Linux on a customer box: in fact, I stayed in bed until 4pm then groused around the flat in a lethargic kind of way. Sundays are often like that.

I got halfway through gethostbyname() support (which is not necessarily DNS, just "whatever the name service switch says to use") then went out for a walk to see what parts of London I might reasonably want to live in, what parts I could afford and whether there's any crossover. Clapham Junction is actually in Battersea, apparently. And only twenty minutes walk from the river, which would be kind of nice.

If anyone knows anyone with a large studio or 1br flat in Zone 2 available end March, send me mail. Professional n/s, deposit, refs, etc etc. Yeah, this is not the appropriate place to be advertising ;-)

How does gethostbyname() deal with DNS timeouts? It could get tedious if the caller is supposed to simulate them with alarm()

It wasn't a quiet week, it just looks like it. It was a day-job week

Short summary, no particular order:

• Learnt minimum acceptable amount of DocBook, wrote document.
• Wrestled with stylesheets to get it to print using >50% of the page area
• Installed dia. Learnt minimum acceptable amount of UML, started fiddling with UML-syntax class diagrams. Project for someone with more free time than I have: parse the dia save file and create classes in (your choice of programming language) from it. I still don't see how to illustrate a multiply-specialised method in UML. I wonder if the need has occurred to anyone
• Typed up my errno rant as an article here. Thus far nobody has replied, so I guess I should have talked about advogato instead
• Eventually got as far as some more socket code. Now I have a working client. Probably. I checked it in w/o writing test scripts, aren't I naughty?
• Came across more jwz docs, including one of two web pages about java that I've found worth reading. The other is Peter Norvig's

(It's still the 20th in my personal timezone. Dunno what zone this server thinks it's in though)

So apparently everyone else was bored today

I wasn't

Ner

More sockets; it's theoretically at the point now that you could write a TCP server with it. You wouldn't actually want to as there's not yet any way to setsockopt(SO_REUSEADDR)

And Paolo Amoroso (why does he not have an account here, hmm?) posted a pointer to Araneida on comp.lang.lisp yesterday. Then Rainer Joswig apparently saw that and forwarded it to the cl-http list. So far today it's had more hits as a result than at any time since I apachebenched the server. And I bet I've made a good impression on the cl-http developers ("Why? Because cl-http is not free"). Not that I care overly

I found the Keirsey thing again. I'm still IN[FT]P. Surprise