to fully appreciate wwdc next week, i started learning as much cocoa as i can. i played around briefly a year ago when i wrote a menubar biff. that was before i switched from ssh/mutt to imap/mail.app.

i'm reading one book, "building cocoa applications", through o'reilly's safari online library. it's not bad since it doesn't gratuitously hand-hold (or maybe i just skim very well). after that i have a dead-tree copy of "cocoa programming".

not sure how much cocoa programming i'll do in the future, but i've got a subsidized ticket to wwdc and nothing better to do.

anyone else going? let's meet up some night -- drinks are on me.

i'm not quite ready to give up on lisp. python was a nice diversion but it just lacks something. i played around with some lisp macros the other day and it all just made sense.

what's missing? i need to figure out the allegro socket implementation in openmcl. i think i was just missing (finish-output ...) last time. then, once openmcl-0.14 is finished, i need to start playing with processes.

it's all coming together... kinda.

i miss your elegance. my new love python may be more practical, but it could never approach your beauty.

it's the little things i miss -- the return of a function being the value of the last expression, the non-destructive functional-style paradigm, and most importantly the predictable syntax.

will i ever be satisfied?

it's not you. it's me. i still love you. i'll never forget you. maybe someday i'll come back. but for now, i found another. her name is... python

one more post about my bookmarks app. i've mentioned it so much, you'd think it was something more important than it actually is.

i rewrote it, one last time, as an exercise to learn python. the big advantage python has over lisp (for me) was available libraries and documentation. please don't flame me -- i know lisp's many advantages! you have to admit though, that there is a great need for a standard set of APIs for sockets, regex, etc across ALL the various lisps.

maybe arc will be the answer to my lisp frustrations?

i switched to safari from chimera/camino. i hacked the binary to send the google search box to my bookmarks/keyword server. unless the google box is a sponsored deal, i imagine they'll add keyword features to it in future versions.

lisp

my love affair with lisp continues. i rewrote my bookmark parsing code from chimera format to safari. at first the safari plist seemed overly verbose, but it maps well to lisp lists and hashs.

it's nice to iteratively develop code. come up with a theory, code it quickly, revise theory, recode it, etc. much faster than it would have taken me to figure out my first malloc() in c.

music

over the last couple of months, i bought .5Tb of disk space and ripped my entire cd collection (1200+) to raw aiff files. then wrote a script that will keep that in sync with an mp3 (320kbps currently) version of that tree. then i sync 90% of that to my 120G empeg player using rsync.

hopefully i'll never have to rip those cds again. once i figure out enough applescript to automate encoding to AAC using quicktime, i'll do that. then use those files for my ipod.

i plan to write scripts that will automate playlist->cdr creation using itunes. instead of burning the mp3, it'll find the original aiff file and use that.