Technomadic

Frustrated with Climbing Ratings

So, as everyone says, it’s hard to transpose ratings from one climbing area to another. I’m working on a solution to that, but in the meantime I figured it’d be good to jot down some relative weightings. There aren’t too many places I’ve climbed regularly, but here’s a simple chart ...

In case you thought Lisp was dead …

Two days ago I went to the largest usergroup meeting of any kind I have ever seen. It was the Boston Lisp Meeting (although it should be called the Cambridge Lisp Meeting, IMO). There were about 40 people in attendance, and when I left (at 22:00, four hours after my ...

Continuing about restarts

Update: these changes (along with an additional one for unbound slots) are now available in the CCL repo: http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/trunk//ccl When I read Geoff Wozniak’s post (I know, I’m a week behind) I was disappointed to see Clozure CL wasn’t even taken into account. I decided to check it out for myself. ...

Boston Lisp Meeting

It’s been about four months since I last posted, which is really unacceptable. I feel like I have to jump on the bandwagon with this announcement, though, and maybe it’ll get me back on track. Next Monday (3 March 2008), is the inaugural Boston Lisp Meeting. Judging by talk around the ...

automated testing with CL & darcs

I spent a good chunk of today trying to get darcs to run my unit tests automatically. I haven’t actually gotten it right yet, but at least I have it running the tests before each commit (even if the commit happens regardless). I set up the auto-testing with darcs setpref test ...

Riding for a Cure

This Sunday (Oct 14), I’m going to be riding in the MS Bike Tour through New York. If you know someone with multiple sclerosis, you know what a horrible process it can be. The symptoms are random and often each is seriously debilitating on its own. There are also “good ...

Excuse our mess

I just mostly-finished moving my blog to a new hosting company. There are still plenty of broken bits, but at least we’re up-and-running. Hopefully I’ll get the rest ironed out over the next few days.

Remote Book Storage

Thanks to Casey, I’ve rediscovered the library. While it would be great to have a Netflix-like hold system, I’m already pretty happy with how far libraries have come since I was in elementary school (the last time I really used them). There’s a library two blocks away from me. I ...

Getting rid of books

I have way too many books. This picture is about half what I had before I moved. I managed to get rid of a bunch. However, that was more of an emergency culling. Now I have to go through the tough process of parting with books I actually care about. ...

Say “No” to Comment Spam

I think I got rid of comment spam. We’ll see. I had hundreds of thousands of them just sitting in the database. I made two simple changes. The first was adding a simple required checkbox in the comment form. This might not be enough, I don’t know. If it’s not, ...