Oliver Steele has an interesting article about "language mavens" vs. "tool mavens".

I've also been reading Hugh Mcleod's blog, as well as the PDF version of his How To Be Creative book. And a lot of the other manifestos at ChangeThis.com are pretty good, also.

In other news, I've "finished" all the South Park work, and our bedroom redecoration is now completed. Both major milestones, as far as I'm concerned.

[interesting] # .

This Brian Marick essay is very good, if you dream about revolutionising the world of software development.

[interesting] # .

One Eugene Wallingford posts a marvellous summary of Alan Kay's OOPLSA talks. I'm sure there are truly great ideas out there waiting for someone to stretch their mind far enough to conceive them. (IM Smarter seems like a pretty good one, at least from a business standpoint.)

Eugene links to the Exploratorium, which also looks pretty cool. And the Hillside Group, and Brian Marick, and the J language.

And there's a new Paul Graham essay up.

[interesting] # .

• Notes on setting up the framebuffer, splash screen etc. here.
• To add to my Windows tweak, notes on swapping Control & Caps Lock in Linux.
• Random configuring X link.

[linux] # .

Well, it looks like one of my TwinMOS 512MB DIMMs is bad. Hey ho. Fortunately I can still limp along on the other two.

I'm configuring my kernel, and checking out the Linux drivers for various things, mainly the NForce2 chipset on my K7NCR18D-Pro motherboard. Notes to self:

• The PCI0680 is a CMD680.
• Notes on NForce2 & Linux, including WOL, here (Arjen Verweij).
• More NForce2 notes here (Johannes Deisenhofer).
• The nforcershq.com forum has a summary of useful links.
• If you want your /boot partition to be /dev/md0, you use LILO. If you want to use GRUB, you don't RAID /boot. [Update: Or not - see here.]

[linux] # .

A little bird informed me that P5 gloves are on sale for the slightly ludicrous price of $12.95. So I've bought a couple more. Now I can try to convert one to a "lefty". Thanks, Luke!

It looks like there's still a little life left in the forums, though. I don't know how much longer they'll be up for.

And there's more! The indefatigable roid has a page listing a surprising range of projects using the P5. A group called Simulus have a page with more useful links and info. And then there's the Yahoo P5 group. Who knew?

[p5] # .

• loadkeys dvorak works as well.
• Read the x86 Installation Tips & Tricks bit about installing onto software RAID1.
• Partition disks. With 1.5GB of RAM, swap is probably pointless, but it's traditional.
• Great. Now I'm getting random freezes & exceptions in things like bzip2. Seems to be a problem looking at /mnt/gentoo, i.e. /dev/md1.

[linux] # .

My notes from last time are here.

• Flash latest Leadtek K7NCR18D Pro BIOS.
• Move CD-ROM from PCI IDE controller to on-board controller, so the BIOS will boot from it.
• Boot from CD: "gentoo dokeymap". A couple of Oops's, but we get the shell prompt. Subsequent boots seem to be clean. Can't boot the smp (2.6) kernel, though.

[linux] # .

The 'Jasmine' release of Croquet is out, and it looks like people are getting into it already. There's a list of Croquet blogs, and someone has posted a link to their information space project that renders to Croquet.

I must start studying Smalltalk...

[cyberspaces] # .

William Gibson has started blogging again.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

[random] # .

It looks like the Gumbo code is still being updated by Jon Barrilleaux. In fact, there's a Gumbo2 in CVS.

So I sucked it down to have a look at it, and there's over five megabytes of Java source there. That's a lot of code to port to Lisp & C/C++/Maverik.

I guess the alternative would be to use the Gumbo2 code as-is, and build Ngake as a JVM application, written in Armed Bear Common Lisp or Jython or SISC or somesuch. Or even Lisp linked to Java.

Perhaps I should just port jfli to Corman Common Lisp. This would give me access to other good things, like, er, SWT, and could well be easier and more straightforward than reimplementing all that Gumbo code (which would then immediately start falling behind Jon's Java version). Of course, this is still a lot of work, that might not go anywhere. And I guess I'd end up using Java 3D instead of anything else.

Hmmm. Lots to think about. So, no change there.

[ngake] # .

I'm finally getting back around to looking at Ngake again. Reviewing this blog, it seems that I hadn't even posted anything about the latest results I had achieved.

After my last post, I mentioned my approach on the CCL forum, where Roger suggested that this probably wasn't the way to go.

So I switched to plan B, linking to the "stock" DLL and using the DirectCall interface. I ended up with a standalone EXE that could build, save and load its own Lisp image, and manage its own REPL. That is, a sort of "baseline" application.

Anyway, it's time to update the todo list.

• Apply this year's CCL patches.
• Apply Edi Weitz's patches that Roger doesn't seem interested in.
• Implement the Lisp backend for SLIME. Then I can use Emacs to hook into Ngake.
• I should probably ask on the mailing list first, although there's no mention of CCL in the archives.
• The alternative to SLIME+Emacs is Portable Hemlock.
• Install Allegro CL and see how that compares to CCL.
• See about hooking in the Quantum Framework HSM library. And/or porting it to Lisp.
• Brush up on the Barrilleaux book and source code.
• While we're at it, it'd be interesting to repeat the work that Bryan O'Connor has done with OpenMCL, running the ansi-test suite from GCL against CCL to see just how bad its ANSI compliance is.
• GBBopen could be worth having a good look at, also.

[ngake] # .

Wow, I actually manage to link to something I've written myself, even if it is pretty trivial. cbop is a small Windows program to copy & paste text between the clipboard and a file. I wrote it because the Second Life/LSL toolchain has "copy the source from Notepad" as one of the steps, which seemed a little crude.

Hopefully people will find it useful.

[Update: Indeed, so useful that someone had already written it, and I was looking at an outdated message. The correct toolchain post is here. Oh well. I did receive a compliment on my code, though.]

[links] # .

I read part four of a conversation between Ward Cunningham and Bill Venners at artima.com. I found much of it to be extremely apposite to my own situation:

To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today. The place you leave in the code because you think you'll need it tomorrow, is actually a waste of time today - and a liability tomorrow. It does more harm than good.

That doesn't mean that you don't think. You'll find that you have a beautiful opportunity to think tomorrow, because everything is laid out. Tomorrow when you get to that point, where you really do need to use this experience that you have, you'll find that the particulars are right there in front of you. The codebase is ready to take what you're about to write. If a change is required anywhere, you have permission to make it. And at the end of the day you'll see the fruits of applying that knowledge.

The program will be much more receiving of your wisdom tomorrow than it is today, when you would need to tell the story without the aid of a computer. In other words, when I go to the whiteboard and say, "I think this is what we'll need, and this will be enough," I actually have less support in taking my experience and getting it into a design than if I just stay with the project and program it day in and day out. The programming language is a better language than the whiteboard for getting every valuable bit of my experience into a design.

Oh, and they mentioned UI Patterns and Techniques, which also looks good.

[interesting] # .

A few interesting snippets via Boing Boing and Slashdot.

• Making impossible Escher shapes using 3D printers.
• A campaign to ban Comic Sans (with links to some cool free fonts). (Via Clive Thompson.)
• An article by Tony Robinson (best known as Baldrick), with more swearing than you might expect (if you didn't know it was in The Online Sun).
• A new essay by Paul Graham.

[links] # .

Robert Scoble has some good advice on how to increase one's Googlejuice (actually he talks about blog readership, but I would imagine they'd be closely correlated). He also links to another good article on blogger.com.

[random] # .

Well, last night I signed up for Second Life. Luckily my aging GeForce2 GTS card and cheap-and-narrow cable modem connection seem to be up to the task. Although I might have to cron up some firewall rules to ban connections after midnight, since I was up 'til all hours fiddling with it.

I've re-read the basic scripting manual, and I think there's scope there for designing and implementing some interesting tools, and gaining some valuable practical experience.

The other major project looming on the horizon is the Croquet project. For this, I'm going to have to learn Squeak Smalltalk.

And finally, there's Ngake, which I'm writing in Common Lisp and C.

[cyberspaces] # .

Oh dear, oh dear... I'm never going to generate any GoogleJuice at this rate. I guess I just dropped out of the habit. Although I have been very busy, getting married, working on the house etc. However, the current plan for achieving the desired state of doing-what-I-like-and-getting-paid-for-it requires me to start promoting myself and my work via my website(s), so I'll be trying to update this weblog much more frequently (which is to say at all). Current random thoughts:

• I'm signing up for Second Life. I wish I'd bought the lifetime membership when the beta program ended. I hope we have enough bandwidth here.
• Tomorrow I fire up Chris's PowerBook and have a crack at recording something. Should be fun.
• This Microsoft wireless keyboard is good, bad & ugly: it feels nice, re-arranging the function & cursor keys again is evil, and having no way to make the "function lock" start up "on" is wrong. IMHO.

[random] # .

Consumer VR isn't going to take off until 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) trackers are reasonably cheap. To that end, more competition is good. I've come across Xsens Motion Technologies, a Dutch company with a MEMS-based tracker that looks pretty cool. They cost about 1,700 Euros each, and a set of two with the SDK and an "Xbus Master" to link them together looks to cost about 6,000 Euros, but at least it's a sign that the market is growing, and eventually the price has to come down... doesn't it?

Crap, I've just realised it's only 3DOF after all (i.e. orientation but not position). Oh well, back to looking for a second-hand Flock of Birds...

[ngake] # .

Markus Fix mentions E, and refers to a thread on the E-Lang mailing list about the perils of multithreading, including this bold statement:

Now, I agree with MarcS -- I believe that multithreading will go down in history next to manual memory management as one of the biggest sources of bugs ever, and as one of the biggest preventable wastes of programmer time and customer money ever.

The thread goes on to discuss coroutines and continuation-passing style (CPS) stuff. After reading some quotes from Paul Graham's book Hackers & Painters (which I'm about to buy) about "thinking the unthinkable", I'm quite interested in this sort of thing. E looks to have some pretty clever minds behind it. And the site has some well-written expositions of the thinking behind it, such as:

Hayek's explanation of the primary virtue of property rights for organizing large scale economic activity parallels the rationale for encapsulation in object-oriented systems: to provide a domain (an object's encapsulation boundary) in which an agent (the object) can execute plans (the object's methods) that use resources (an object's private state), where the proper functioning of these plans depends on these resources not being used simultaneously by conflicting plans. By dividing up the resources of society (the state of a computational system) into separately owned chunks (private object states), we enable a massive number of plans to make use of a massive number of resources without needing to resolve a massive number of conflicting assumptions.

[interesting] # .

I received a little pamphlet from Unity Books, promoting Montana Poetry Day on Friday. Inside, along with five short poems, it explicitly says,

Don't let Montana Poetry Day 2004 go past without sharing a poem with someone you love!

So I thought I'd stick it up here for anyone to read. Is that wrong?

Gold by Cliff Fell appears in The Adulterer's Bible, a finalist in the poetry category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. Victoria University Press, ISBN 0-86473-460-3

Industrial action by Bill Sewell appears in The Ballad of Fifty-one, a finalist in the poetry category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. Headworx, ISBN 0-47309-254-9

Document by Anne Kennedy appears in Sing-song, a finalist in the poetry category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. Auckland University Press, ISBN 1-86940-295-2

(This one is laid out in a fully-justified block; dunno whether I can easily duplicate that... curses, can't get the justification right.)

Visual acuity by Glenn Colquhoun appears in Playing God, winner of the poetry category and the Readers' Choice Award of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003. Steele Roberts, ISBN 1-877228-75-3

Reign again by Hone Tuwhare appears in Piggy-back Moon, winner of the poetry category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2002. Godwit, ISBN 1-86962-077-1

[random] # .

[Updated 10 July: weblogs.com went away, and LtU found a new home. So I've updated this list.]

• Video lectures on SICP (LtU link)
• Berkeley Visionaries Prognosticate About the Future (LtU link)
• A Prolog Introduction for Hackers (LtU link)
• Monads in Scheme (LtU link)
• The Next Move in Programming (Livschitz interview) (LtU link)
• Packrat Parsing (LtU link)
• OCaml, an Introduction (LtU link)
• GraphPath (LtU link)
• Sina Language and Composition Filters (LtU link)
• The Art of Unix Programming (LtU link)
• Why Events Are a Bad Idea (LtU link)
• Lisp Machines (LtU link)
• Eidola Language (LtU link)

The problem is, of course, that I can't find the time to read/watch all this stuff, however interesting, useful etc. it might be...

[links] # .

I've come across a new Linux mirror site, so I thought I'd compile the ones I know of into a list.

• ftp.wicks.co.nz: Fedora, Mandrake, Red Hat 9, White Box
• ftp.citylink.co.nz (also known as ftp.nz.debian.org): Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD and Linux kernels
• debian.paradise.net.nz: Debian

There's another, fairly up-to-date-looking list on the WLUG Wiki, and also one here.

Apparently there were FreeBSD ISO images available, but the server seems to be down at the moment.

[linux] # .

JWZ links to some cool images from the surface of Venus.

The NYT has an article about an interesting map of the universe.

Also, an interesting article about postmodern lit-crit. Not related to space, of course.

[cool] # .

Bernadette and I went out on Sunday to start looking at open homes. We liked the first one, put an offer in, and it was accepted that day. So now we're buying a house. It's lovely. It's in Khandallah. It has masses of "potential" (ka-ching!).

[cool] # .

I played with the beta of Second Life, an "open-ended" online virtual world, but declined to join the release version when the time came. There was a discount; there was even a special "lifetime membership" deal for beta testers, but the thing used scary amounts of bandwidth, and I couldn't afford it.

It looked very promising though, and I liked its scripting language and apparently well-thought-out physics model. Now that we're on a better Paradise.net plan with 1.5GB/month (or 1.5GiB/28 days, which is more like 1.75x10⁹B/month), I might be able to give it another look. The Kiwi dollar being as strong as it is, it would only cost $108 for a year's access, which isn't bad. I could definitely justify it as "field research" into virtual environments, but the challenge would be finding some regular time for it one the one hand, and not getting massively sucked into it on the other...

[cool] # .

A few good links I've found while putting off tidying up the place (sorry, I can't be bothered linking to sources, but they're mostly via lemonodor, Chris Double or bOING bOING):

• A Ted Nelson rant
• Mozilla Thunderbird ('cause Eudora isn't quite satisfying enough)
• The Debian boot CD image I'm using (linked just for reference) [Update: I'm considering trying Gentoo again]
• The wiki I'm going to use [Update: I'm now trying to install CLiki]]
• Lython
• Disinformation
• LinkMachineGo
• Belle de jour
• Robert Anton Wilson books
• Jerry Pournelle gets kicked off ARPANET
• Linj
• The Guardian's Best British Blogs

[links] # .

Well, we had a great holiday down the south of the South Island. Milford Sound, Stewart Island, the Catlins, all lovely. And I even managed to get some useful work done while I was away.

It's good to see Chris Double posting to his blog again.

Bernadette and I are getting married in fifteen weeks time. We both hope to have lost a bit of weight by then. ;)

[bits] # .