No Warranty Expressed Or Implied

Via Christophe Rhodes, Alistair Bridgewater's progress on porting SBCL to Windows. Impressive stuff, but still a fair way to go. Brian Mastenbrook has some interesting comments, referring to the projects on the CL-Gardeners list:

If there were one Common Lisp which I could run on every platform — one which provided portability for applications using threads and doodads and whatsits without requiring me to GPL my code because I use some internal interface of that implementation — I would probably use it, even if it provided less performance than my current lisp of choice. When it comes down to it, I rarely need performance. No such flower or weed exists yet. If I were to plant it, I would not plant it in the garden of Common Lisp. For as much as I love working in this language I would not take the opportunity to implement any of the obvious advances in language design in the past twenty years and pass it by just to implement ANSI Common Lisp.

And then I think: why don't I just buy a couple of LispWorks licenses for my application development needs, and then use Factor as the FOSS, cross-platform, natively-compiled, metaprogramming-capable, embeddable language for Ngake? At least until Arc is ready, although that could be many years away...

Meanwhile, the CL-Gardeners list continues to throw up links to useful Lisp projects, like Chris Riesbeck's Lisp Critic.

Updated 21/12/05: Alistair has posted more information to the CL-Gardeners list.

CLiki: Proposed ANSI Revisions and Clarifications (via Nikodemus Siivola on CL-Gardeners) — for when the question is "what should the ANSI standard say?"
Jeph Jaques's top 20 albums of 2005. Jeph is the creator of Questionable Content, one of my favourite web comics.
KMRCL — c.f. YTools, Metatilities/Moptilities etc. Collections of Lisp utilities & libraries, all worth investigating/studying and potentially adopting. Oh, and Drew McDermott has Lexiparse: A Lexicon-based Parser for Lisp Applications, also. I'd better check that out.
Chickenfoot — subtitled "Rewrite the Web", this is Greasemonkey on steroids. This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Not to mention massively useful.
As an alternative to the above, there's gawkinet — gawk does TCP/IP. I think AWK is a great language, and I use it frequently. I see a cron-job script to build an RSS feed for the Corman Lisp forums coming on...
The Haskell Programmer's Guide to the IO Monad — Don't Panic sounds good, judging from the LtU comments. I'm still looking for an introduction to monads that makes sense to my feeble mind; perhaps this is it...

Although I've been very busy with work, I have been thinking about the home studio I plan to put together next year (while trying to resist buying more old synths off TradeMe). It occurred to me that, as a guitar player with minimal keyboard chops, I should controlling my (six voice) synthesiser with one of my guitars, not trying to learn to play keyboards particularly. So I've collected a few links while reading about the current state of guitar-to-MIDI technology. On the way, I've met a few interesting people around Wellington, which has been nice; I'll say more about them in a later post.

RMC piezo pickups — these look like the ones to get. Available for Strat and Les Paul bridges. As used by Robert Godin, Ulrich Teuffel and others. I think a Pow'r Bridge 'G' (USD250) for my Les Paul would be the go, coupled with the Poly-Drive II module (USD350).
The VG-8 Wiki has a list of alternative hexaphonic pickups.
I came across Thomas Perry because he has Godin LGX-SA in his extensive collection, and one of the guys at the Wellington Rock Shop is trying to sell one; this is what got me started on the whole MIDI guitar thing. I met Thomas for lunch, and he's a thoroughly nice guy; he even offered to lend me his AXON AX-100 if I needed a guitar-to-MIDI converter to test!
The AX-100 looks like a good unit. Certainly if it's fast enough for John McLaughlin, that's good enough for me. It turns out that AXON have been bought by TerraTec, and the AX-100 mk II is on the way (and should cost about EUR499). When it arrives, it should show up here; currently the AX-100 (which you can't buy) is listed separately from the MkII upgrade (EUR149).
Apparently there's a video of the AX-100 from Musikmesse '05, but I haven't managed to view it yet.
While Googling for RMC pickups, I came across the website of Ulrich Teuffel; his birdfish guitar, pictured on the right, is (was) available with a MIDI option that used the RMC pickup and electronics. Googling him further, I found that he appears in volume one of the Gourmet Guitars 'The Best Luthiers' series. This DVD is available from Technical Video Rental; I've persuaded them to rent the DVD to me here in New Zealand, so I'll see what it's like. A trailer for the DVD is available.

I bought an electric hedge trimmer yesterday. Marvellous machine. I was able to rip through our hedge in no time (well, much less time than doing it by hand), and I also managed to get down the back of the hedge and deal a savage blow to the blackberry that has been trying to invade from the reserve next door.

Feeling inspired, I took my evil pruning saw and had a go at topping some of the trees that were impeding our view. With some success; the view is now much improved.

We (Bethany, Bernadette and I) also went to see The World's Fastest Indian at the Lighthouse Cinema in Petone. Bethany was very good, and made much less noise than some other members of the audience. I thoroughly enjoyed the film; in fact, I found it very moving. But then I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of thing; I went a bit teary while watching the climactic death scene in Finding Neverland, for example. But anyway, it was great to go and see a movie again (and at such a pleasant theatre). And I'll definitely be buying it on DVD, which will hopefully include some decent biographical documentary (like those found on The Hours DVD).

I would like to knock up a simple but customised timekeeping app to run on my semi-ancient Clié PDA (running PalmOS 4.1). Ideally I would've liked to use Python or Ruby or Tcl/Tk, that is, something that might've had a decent UI layer. But none of those seemed to be currently supported, so I went for LispMe, an R⁴RS Scheme compiler and runtime for PalmOS written by Fred Bayer. It looks quite nice, although I don't know whether editing source code via Graffiti is going to be much fun. Fred suggests pedit, so I've installed that as well. And TealMaster, and DateBk. Now I can have a go at working through The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer, before one day tackling The Wizard Book (with the aid of the videos I've been downloading).

I'm a bit late with this (apparently it's been out since September), but the Standalone Digidesign CoreAudio Driver 6.9.2cs2 for Mac OS 10.4 (phew!) is now available. This means that I can use Chris's Mbox on my Power Mac without having to shell out to upgrade Pro Tools, when I already have GarageBand.

Come January, I plan to stake out a corner of the upstairs room here to assemble my various bits of music gear into something I can use to actually start recording some music.

I've added myself to the waiting lists for the x0xb0x (a clone of the Roland TB-303) and the AvrX, a sort of Evolver-like synth from some guys in Sweden. When they arrive (some time early next year with any luck, by which time I might have some cash with which to pay for them) they can sit next to my FatMan kit, unless I've somehow managed to find time to construct that in the meantime. Which will in turn be after I've debugged my D-110. I could also start with something smaller (via Matrixsynth), or more traditional.

I've tagged some good FatMan links on del.icio.us.