All ratings are relative to the hardest rated gym. EG, if the hardest rated gym (which has rating “0″) rates a route a 5.7, a gym rated “+2″ would likely call that same route a 5.9. Likewise, a 5.10b at the hardest gym would probably be a 5.10c at a gym rated “+1″.

With 40 people, the sitting-around-a-table-drinking-beer format is perhaps not the most effective. Sure, there is plenty of conversation to be a part of, but any single participant necessarily misses the majority of what’s going on. So, I apologize at the beginning that this can not be a comprehensive report, but rather an experiential summary of what I observed that fateful evening.

I showed up at 18:00, with probably over twenty people bulging from a single long table. Almost everyone who came after me ended up filling a second table. I took note of a few big names right off the bat (from #lisp and elsewhere): Rahul Jain (who traveled from New York) had come with me, and certainly Faré (our great organizer) was already there. Jeremy Jones (a founder of Clozure) and James Knight (foom) were also there before me. Alistair Bridgewater (aka, nyef) trekked down from New Hampshire, but I think Hans Hübner won the longest-distance award, having come all the way from Berlin. Ok, this list is getting crazy … there were also other well-known lispers in attendance. Gary King was supposed to have been there, but I didn’t see (or perhaps recognize) him. Both Zach Beane and dto had to miss because of transportation issues, which was quite disappointing.

I was afraid the group would be dominated by ITA employees, but I think they made up maybe a quarter of the entire group. None of the guys near me at the beginning were ITA employees, in fact, I think they were all Lisp hobbyists. As a result, there is always plenty of discussion about how to go about making Lisp your profession, which is a topic I do like to talk about. One of my favorite questions was “If you get to write Lisp at work all day, do you work in other languages when you get home?” The answer is pretty much “no” … at least, I don’t play with other languages any more than I did before I was writing Lisp professionally.

Later on in the night I moved around the table to see what was happening at Faré’s end. There seemed to be a lot of discussion about when meetings should be held, and how to organize them, etc., which is great to hear. We’ll be moving to a more presentation-oriented format, and I’m sure Faré will have all the details about future meetings sent around soon. There was an XO laptop that got passed around so everyone could enter in their contact information and how they would like to be involved with future mettings. So there ended up being a bit of discussion about the XOs, and who managed to get one (like me) and who didn’t.

Toward the end of the night, I got around the table to talk with Rahul and another of my co-workers, and had the chance to finally meet Alistair. Unfortunately, I had to leave shortly after we began talking … and he will be farther away than NH for the next few months because of various contracts he’s working on. Hopefully he’ll come to meetings when he’s back in the region.

I know … there’s not much Lisp content in this post. Honestly, it’s hard to remember exactly what was discussed. The meeting was great for getting to know more Lispers, and there was plenty of Lisp talk, but my focus at the time was more on having a good time (and some beers) with people that I have a lot in common with. There will be plenty of in-depth Lisp-hackery at future presentation-based meetings. For now I’m just excited about there being so many people here who are interested in it.

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/<os><arch>/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. Initially, I was a bit disappointed, but after only a couple minutes of hacking, I managed to improve the situation a bit.

¹ The existing code handled a defmethod followed by a defmethod with an incompatible lambda-list, but not a defmethod followed by a defgeneric with an incompatible lambda-list.

Initially (the black) we could claim superiority only to SBCL [Ed: just kidding, guys], but after my changes (in red) we’re now on par with Allegro. And Open Source. The squeaky wheel and all that. Thanks to Geoff for pointing out the issue.

Note: these changes currently exist only on my own box. I’ll get them into CCL 1.2, though.

Next Monday (3 March 2008), is the inaugural Boston Lisp Meeting. Judging by talk around the office and in the community at large, it sounds like it’ll be well-attended. If you know any lispers, send them along. If you want to get to know some, come along yourself.

I set up the auto-testing with darcs setpref test “chmod +x test/run-tests; test/run-tests". test/run-tests is the test script, but darcs doesn’t allow you to add executable files to the repository, so you have to run chmod on the script before it can actually be executed.

Here’s the test script itself:

#!/usr/bin/env sbcl --noinform

;;; This requires that you have SBCL installed and set up to run
;;; scripts, as defined in
;;; http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Unix_002dstyle-Command-Line-Protocol.html

(require 'asdf)

;; need this on the front to make sure we use the right copy
(push *default-pathname-defaults* asdf:*central-registry*)

(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op 'bordeaux-threads)
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op 'bordeaux-threads-test)

(let ((results (bordeaux-threads-test:run-tests)))
  (sb-ext:quit
   :unix-status (if (or (failures results) (errors results)) -1 0)))

What it should be doing is running the tests, and returning non-zero on failure. It runs the tests, but the failure bit isn’t exactly happening yet.

I figured I’d throw this out there and see if anyone else has a decent way of getting automated testing happening. The more I try to bridge between Lisp and Unix, the more I just want to live in a Lisp REPL.

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Libraries are particularly good for read-once books, like fiction. So I should be able to get rid of most of my fiction books no problem, right? I think they can be broken down into a few categories. I have books that

1. are valuable in-and-of themselves (first editions, etc.),
2. I actually refer back to often enough that it’s worth having a copy on-hand,
3. are involved enough to require study and commitment over longer-than-library-loan periods (like Finnegan’s Wake)
4. I keep around for nostalgia,
5. I keep as a record of what I’ve read, and
6. I keep as a list of things to read.

The first three groups are small and justifiable. The fourth and fifth can be replaced by some sort of “what I’ve read” list, like those available on Facebook or any number of other places. The sixth is just me looking for stuff to buy on Amazon, I guess. Things I’m interested enough in to queue up on a shelf.

I think the sixth group is actually detrimental. There’s no urgency in having to read them. They’ll always be on that shelf, and I can postpone them indefinitely. I think the three-week deadline of library books will keep me from postponing them as well as help me avoid the paradox of choice. It’ll be weird getting rid of books I haven’t read yet, but I think it’ll be the biggest help to make me actually read more.

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. Being a GTDer, I broke it down a bit. I have to ?

1. get all of my existing books organized;
2. delete books I no longer own from the database;
3. sell books that I’m not interested in;
4. sideline books that Diana also has a copy of;
5. find ebooks for as many books as possible;
6. sell books duplicated by ebooks.

If there are still too many books after this process, I’ll need to make some hard decisions about which ones get to stay.

Ebook readers are still far from perfect, but I’ve decided I need to stop waiting for them to catch up. eInk-based readers are on the market now, which is a big step forward, but there still fails to be any open halfway-between-HTML-and-PDF format that can be read on multiple readers. We’ve got Gutenberg’s plain text files on the one end of the spectrum (how was that even acceptable on day 1) and custom PDF formats on the other.

I’m just going to dive in now and pray that I’ll be able to read my ebooks after the Format Wars.

I’m going to try selling all of my books on Amazon Marketplace. I’ve heard it is much more satisfying to use than eBay.

The other change I’m less happy about. I turned off trackbacks for now. I’ll have to get those back on, but it’ll probably be a while. Basically, my site runs off of WordPress -2.0 or something. None of the modern spam removing stuff works on it. I should upgrade at some point, but meh.

Anyway, this means that comments will probably appear on the site in a more timely fashion. I’m still moderating them, but with the spam gone I won’t be ignoring them anymore. Also, if this actually turns out to work, I’ll get rid of the moderation.