Octopodial Chrome

You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.

Not that Linux—or even Unix—is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS. The remaining midrange OSes like IBM i might not be a bad fit either.

The problem with Windows is not simply that it’s shoddy: all software has bugs, generally lots of them (Lord knows Linux has plenty). The problem is that it’s not resilient to those bugs, and that one has a great deal of difficult working around those bugs and flaws. Unix really isn’t that great in and of itself but one can extend it and massage it into shape; Windows isn’t that great (although the operating system itself—I don’t mean the user interface—might actually be better), but what you see is more or less what you’re going to get.

This list has been circulating for years, but it’s true by all accounts.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it grey and live in it for six months.
2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house, on the outside of the walls and label all the piping so you can identify what you just hit your head on.
3. Pump 10 inches of nasty crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean it up and paint the basement Terracotta.
4. Every couple of weeks dress up in your best clohtes and go to the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $20 per beer until you’re hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.
5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawn mower.
6. Raise your bed within six inches of your ceiling.
7. Have your neighbor come over at 5am and blow a whistle so loud the Helen Keller would hear, and shout Reveille, reveille,all hands heave out and trice up.
8. Have your mother in law write down everything she wants you to do that day, then you must stand in the backyard at 6am and have her read it to you.
9. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere, this is to ensure that your engine is properly lit off.
10. Repaint your house once a month.
11. Have your neighbor collect your mail for a month, randomly losing every 5th item.
12. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, only to watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
13. Have your 5 year old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.
14. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
15. Periodically, shut off power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting Fire, fire, fire! and restore power.
16. Purchase 50 cases of toilet paper, locl up all but two rolls, ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
17. Sleep on a shelf in the closet, replace the door with a curtain, have your wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you gp to sleep. She should then shine a bright flashlight directly into your eyes and then mumble Sorry, wrong rack.
18. Safety wire the lug nuts on your car.
19. Drive to the gas station, get permission from the service attendant to refuel your car, don rubber gloves, apron, and face shield, start pumping, then tell wife and kids in the car,We’ve commenced refueling.
20. Move in with all the guys you wouldn’t get caught dead hanging out with from high school for 6 months.
21. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. Jump and get dressed as fast as you can, making sure you button the top button on your shirt and your pants tucked in your socks, run outside and uncoil the garden hose.
22. Install a small florescent lamp under the coffee table, get under it and read books and/or sleep.
23. Raise the thresholds and lower the top seals of your doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
24. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan whlie it is in the oven, spread icing on real thick to level it off, serve at every meal.
25. Every so often throw the cat in the pool and shout man overboard, starboard side, then run into the kitchen and sweep all the pans and dishes off the counter, yell at the wife and kids for not securing for sea!
26. Put on the headphones from your stereo, hang a paper cup around your neck with a string. Go stand in front of the stove and say stove manned and ready. Stay there for 3-4 hours and say stove secured, going offline. Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box mounted on the wall.
27. Have your little sister yell We are in a training environment then have your dad frantically wave a red and black rag at you yelling Black smoke and fire while you wave an uncharged garden hose at him.
28. Stand in the doorway of your house and every time the dog comes through the doggie door, ring the doorbell twice and announce Peleliu arriving, then when he leaves, ring the bell twice and announce Peleliu departing.
29. Lock yourself in your home for six months, consuming only Snickers and Pepsi/Mountain Dew. At the end of the six months go to the high school track and try to run a mile and a half in 9 minutes and when you can’t, you must stand at attention whle your wife yells at you for not being Within Standards.
30. Go outside at midnight, open the fire hydrant full force, then try to hammer a piece of firewood in the hole.
31. Every hour for 4 hours walk about your house, checking the water level in the toilets and the refrigerator tempt, go over to the neighbors house. Ring the doorbell, when he answers, salute him and say All Secure.
32. Stand at the end of your walkway behind a podium with a stick, when your little sisters friends come over, ask to see their drivers licenses, those who can’t produce a valid ID, you must harass them about it but let them by anyway.
33. Have your mom sew your name on the back of all your pants.
34. At midnight, write on a legal pad which neighbors are home, what sinks, showers and ceiling fans are online, and whether or not your wife is at home.
35. Tag out all the power to your livingroom to change a lightbulb in an endtable lamp
36. Call your youngest kid Crank and make him do the dishes for 90 days.
37. Draw and test a daily lube oil sample from your car.
38. Yell Attention on Deck every time your wife enters the room you are in.
39. Paint a glow in the dark ring around every doorway leading outside your house. Then paint a glow in the dark box on every wall in the house. In the box write the name of the room and give it a useless nubmer and call that box a Bull’s Eye.
40. Put red lights in every light fixture leading outside the house and install a switch that turns this light off anyways when the door is opened.
41. Get the same phones used on stove watch, go the the backyard and say Aft Lookout Online and stay there all day.
42. Yell at your kids for wearing white socks.
43. Flip your kids’ mattress on the floor because the seam of their bedsheet was running the wrong way.
44. Install a 2 by 2 foot shower and try to wash your feet. (GOOD LUCK)
45. After a rainstorm, get a mop and get up all standing water from the porch and sidwalk, so the wife wont’ bitch, and don’t forget to sweep away all the standing water into the street.
46. Install a wooden box with a small slot in the top and a hole in the bottom that leads directly to the trashcan, and on the box in bold letters writte Suggestion Box.
47. Pay for the kids to go to small engine school. When the lawn moswer breaks call SEARS to come and fix it.
48. Serve dinner at 4pm. Give your fat son a generous serving because he looks hungry, and be sure to starve the skinny one who is actually very hungry, and secure dinner before everyone eats.

I sometimes think our old man might have been using some of these on us.

I added my recipe for sweet cornbread to my bachelor recipes.

I couldn’t put it any better myself.

Do you think that you know about Christianity? Why not get to know the original? It’s a pretty cool site with some nice high-level articles answering various questions and providing information folks might not know—like that the Bible came from us (yup: we’re not a Bible-based church, but rather the Bible is a Church-based book).

I’ve added more packages to my repository:

cl-vectors

An anti-aliased vector rasterization library

cl-zpb-ttf

A TrueType parser

cl-zpng

A library for creating PNG files

cl-vecto

A vector rasterization library which wraps CL-VECTORS

If you use Common Lisp to do graphics work, maybe these will be of some assistance.

Josh Kurz reports on why some people hate coriander so much. He calls it cilantro, which is of course not the proper English name for it, but it’s otherwise a good article.

Drie Fonteinen have lost 13,000 gallons (300 barrels) of beer to a thermostat failure. This is about a third of their annual revenue lost. The brewer is hoping to cut his losses a bit by distilling the spoilt beer.

Please go out an buy 3 Fonteinen wherever you can find it in order to help support the brewery.

A 10-year-old girl in Huntington Beach, Cali., was dying of cancer but wanted to stay alive long enough to see Up. By the time it came out, she was unable to leave her home—so Pixar sent a special DVD of the film to her, hand-carried by an employee with a bag of stuffed animals, a movie poster, a scrap book from the film and stories about the movie. She died a few hours after seeing it.

You may not recall it from high school, but Dracula is an epistolary novel—that is, it is composed of purported letters and diary entries. The modern format would be a blog novel, and now in the steps of the Pepys blog some has started the Dracula blog, with posts in real time. Pretty nifty idea!

A manicurist from Washington, DC sold her car and her home in order to build a school in her native village in Ethiopia. Not only that, she reserved a third of her salary and all of her tips for the project. Part of her inspiration came from the fact that a girl there was eaten by a hyena on the three-hour walk home from the then-nearest school.

This is an excellent example of the power of private charity. Bravo for her!

Announcing the Octopodial Chrome Yum Repository I have packaged many Common Lisp packages for Fedora 11. Furthermore, I have set up a Yum repository to make it very easy to install Common Lisp packages. All you need to do is grab the repository RPM and install it. If using Firefox then Package Kit should open automatically; if using a command line you can install with:

rpm -ivh octopodial-chrome-11-1.fc11.noarch.rpm

From then on you can install new software as normal, using yum on the command line, Add/Remove Software in the GUI or whatever your normal install method is.

The following software packages are currently available:

cl-alexandria

Public domain utilities for Common Lisp

cl-babel

Charset encoding/decoding library for Common Lisp

cl-base64

RFC 1521 base64 library for Common Lisp

cl-bordeaux-threads

A portable multithreading library for Common Lisp

cl-cffi

Common Foreign Function Interface for Common Lisp

cl-chunga

Portable chunked streams for Common Lisp

cl-fad

Unification layer atop Common Lisp’s pathname functions

cl-flexi-streams

"Virtual" bivalent streams that can be layered atop real binary or

cl-flexichain

Common Lisp library for editable sequences

cl-hunchentoot

A web server written in Common Lisp

cl-ironclad

Cryptography library for Common Lisp supporting many cyphers,

cl-mcclim

Common Lisp Interface Manager, a protable GUI for Lisp

cl-md5

Simple MD5 library for Common Lisp

cl-parse-number

Simple library to parse numbers from strings

cl-ppcre

Portable Perl-compatible regular expressions for Common Lisp

cl-rfc2388

RFC 1521 rfc2388 library for Common Lisp

cl-spatial-trees

Common Lisp Interface Manager, a protable GUI for Lisp

cl-split-sequence

Simple library to split a sequence on some delimiter

cl-sql-backend-postgresql

PostgreSQL for CLSQL, a Common Lisp SQL interface

cl-sql-common

Common files for CLSQL, a Common Lisp SQL interface

cl-ssl

Common Lisp interface to OpenSSL

cl-swank

SLIME Lisp-side server

cl-trivial-features

Ensuring consistent FEATURES across Common Lisp implementations

cl-trivial-gray-streams

Extremely thin compatibility library for gray streams

cl-usocket

A portable TCP/IP (and later on maybe UDP) socket interface for

cl-who

Common Lisp HTML markup library

cl-x

X11 interface for Common Lisp

emacs-common-slime

Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs

emacs-slime

Compiled elisp files to run slime under GNU Emacs

emacs-slime-el

Elisp source files for slime under GNU Emacs

xemacs-slime

Compiled elisp files to run slime under XEmacs

xemacs-slime-el

Elisp source files for slime under XEmacs

Please pass this information on to anyone who uses Common Lisp on Fedora.

Iain Murray argues that systematic risk in financial governments exist because of the State. I think he may very well be right: absent the expectation of a bailout, would markets more accurately price risk? It’s a reasonable proposition.

A fundamental principle of the Internet is that all hosts are peers, that is, there is nothing fundamentally different about your laptop or Time magazine’s web serving computers: each is a computer; each can run the same software and communicate in the same way; neither is privileged over the other.

Net neutrality is an important implication of this principle. Basically, all hosts on the Internet have the same access to resources as any other host. That doesn’t mean that one can’t charge people for different types of access (e.g. online subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal), but it does mean that one can’t forbid some hosts from trying to talk to you while allowing others to do the same.

The big entertainment corporations hate the idea of net neutrality, as it means that they actually have to convince their customers to purchase their wares; they prefer a model like basic cable, where every subscriber pays for BET or Nickelodeon regardless of whether he wants it. They would like to form partnerships with ISPs, charging all of an ISP’s customer in order to provide content that only a few use.

Disney is the first to actually go ahead with this. It doesn’t matter whether or not I want to use their sports website (let’s put it this way: I have never watched a sports game on my computer, and I don’t expect to ever watch a sports game on my computer); my ISP is paying Disney no matter what—much as a shopkeeper might pay a mafioso—and thus I am paying Disney a little bit of money every month.

Note that this has nothing to do with sports. It could be a service I like—maybe something about homebrewing, or about politics, or whatever: it’s outright wrong to sell access at the ISP level rather than at the customer level.

Although it is rather neat that this involves Disney. Another online commentator noted that Disney is to culture what thyroid cancer is to metabolism. It’s appropriate that The Mouse be behind this latest instance of a monopolist abusing its position.

One of the truly wonderful things about programming in Common Lisp is that the system is complete interactive: the programmer can manipulate anything at run time, including the language itself. This is a really powerful technique—but how does one preserve the state of the system between reboots? And how does one get an image-based Lisp system to play nice with Linux’s system service model?

Well, John Wiegley published a great technique a few years which I’ve adapted for Tasting Notes. It’s remarkably simple: create a user to run the system as (just like other services like PostgreSQL or httpd); then create a standard init.d script to run the system. The really clever thing he does is start the system itself, a Swank listener and a kill port. Starting the system is self-explanatory, but what about the rest?

Swank provides a live connexion to a running Lisp system via which one can interact with the system’s internals. It’s pretty cool, and Wiegley’s method gets the job done. So far this is pretty standard stuff; I’ve used it in my own software.

The really clever bit is this bit of code here:

(sb-bsd-sockets:socket-bind socket #(127 0 0 1) *kill-port*)
(sb-bsd-sockets:socket-listen socket 1) (multiple-value-bind
(client-socket addr port) (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-accept socket) (let
((stream (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-make-stream client-socket :element-type
’character :input t :output t :buffering :none))) (princ "Saving
core and shutting down…" stream) (terpri stream))

  ;; Close up the sockets (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-close client-socket)
  (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-close socket))

What this does is wait until someone connects to *KILL-PORT*, then proceeds to shut down the system, kill all threads and cleanly exit. Smart and very simple: all the shutdown script has to do is telnet $KILL_PORT and the software shuts down.

Finally, it calls SB-EXT:SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE to save the current Lisp environment to a file; the next time it starts up it will run that image, so the software’s complete history is saved.

All in all, extremely nifty; I ported Tasting Notes to start using it this weekend.

I was reading an article about the digital television changeover and noticed something a bit disturbing: they set up a call centre for folks having problems; the average overall wait time at the call centre was 8.4 minutes but the average overall wait time for Spanish-speaking callers was 1.8 minutes. I’m having a little bit of difficulty figuring out why folks who speak our native tongue have to wait 4 2/3 times longer than those who don’t. Why didn’t the call centre more accurately predict the distribution of callers it would get and arrange so that all languages would get equal service? For that matter, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure better service for English-speakers, given that English is our language?

When I was in Germany, I expected to wait longer if I wanted English service; when I was in India, I expected the same. Why are we privileging people who can’t even speak our language?

Apple uses H.264 for a lot of its trailers; unfortunately Fedora doesn’t come with it out of the box. Fortunately it turns out that ffmpeg (available from RPM Fusion) does support it, so all you need to do is run sudo yum install ffmpeg-libs gstreamer-ffmpeg and life is good.

Last night I upgraded to Fedora 11. I have to say that I’m impressed! It’s the first Fedora upgrade in a long time which went in quickly and cleanly, without any problems that had me tearing my hair out, which was a problem with past releases (and I—a professional sysadmin and geek—had trouble then you know that normal people did). Overall, Fedora 11 looks more like a polishing release than a feature release: for the most part, things look & behave the same, but they do it better, with fewer bugs.

The latest GNOME desktop looks even nicer than before, with clean lines and subtly eye-pleasing colours. It’s an improvement on the last, which was itself an improvement over previous versions. Session state appears to be working again, which is good (it was broken in Fedora 10).

I was able to get SBCL, PostgreSQL and CLSQL easily installed and got my beer tasting notes site back up and running very easily.

Likewise for the rest of this website and for all the other programmes I have installed on this computer. All in all it’s been a remarkably pain-free—even enjoyable—upgrade experience.

I can recommend the upgrade whole-heartedly. For those of you stuck on broken, proprietary, freedom-hating OSes: now’s the time to switch over. It’s worth it, really.

Yup, everyone’s busily rediscovering the joy of lard. Unlike synthetic shortening, it has no trans-fats. Its saturated fats do not impact blood cholesterol. It’s superior to butter and olive oil for cooking and pastry making.

Just watch out for the supermarket lard: most of them are partially or wholly hydrogenated, which means that the lard does have trans-fats. Dumb dumb dumb.

Heinz has developed a ketchup cake in order to celebrate its Canadian centennial. Apparently it tastes a lot like carrot cake. I kinda want to try it…it’s just too crazy not to!

So I think we all know that bottled water is horrendously expensive and bad for the environment (which is in large part why it’s so horrendously expensive: you’re paying for all the energy wasted in getting that bottle of water to you). A company named uscanteen has updated the old M-1910 canteen and offers it with stylish purse-like carriers for women. Pretty sweet idea, and at $90 for a canteen and carrier together it pays for itself fairly after a month or two.

As most of my readers know, my day job is as a Unix system administrator for a large outsourcing company. What’s Unix, the non-technical among you might ask. Well, basically it’s just about the greatest computer operating system to achieve widespread use (there have been better or more interesting ones, but they never really took off). It turns 40 this year. Kinda funny that I work on something almost nine years older than I am.

Kinda sad that the computing world hasn’t adopted anything better in the intervening decades either.

Right after college I got involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a bunch of amateur mediæval recreationists (rather amusingly, their website is broken…). It was a lot of fun for awhile learning to fence, making Anglo-Saxon, Renaissance Italian & Elizabethan clothing and so forth, but I eventually fell out of it, mostly for time reasons but partly out of disappointment that so many folks were more interested in fantasy and not history. This great video from CBS does a good job of capturing a lot of what I loved and hated about the SCA. Makes me a bit nostalgic! Happy days…

Today is Oak Apple Day, marking the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the elimination of the abominable Puritan tyranny in 1660. That was, for those not keeping count, 53 years after the founding of my home state—and thus it’s as Virginian a holiday as Jackson Lee Day.