Advogato: Personal info for ingvar

ingvar is currently certified at Journeyer level.

Name: Ingvar Mattsson
Member since: 2000-03-15 10:32:47
Last Login: 2009-07-03 09:12:38

Homepage: http://www.hexapodia.net/~ingvar/

Notes: About me? I'm not that interesting.

I run and occasionally build networks for a living. Sometimes I poke servers and make them happy or build fail-over clusters spanning multiple timezones.

I sometimes write code. Mostly in Common Lisp or C. I find things like "work flow services" interesting. It's probably a perversion, I guess. In my other spare time I read. Lots. Mostly SF and fantasy, but the occasional mainstream fiction or protocol spec manages to sneak in.

I like to cook, too.

Projects

Lead Developer on Dribble
Lead Developer on dribble
Contributor on Portable Hemlock

Recent blog entries by ingvar

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23 Jun 2009 »

So, upgrades happened at home and, as occasionally happens, X stopped working. X stopping working varies from "trivial" to "annoyingly painful" to troubleshoot, especially as there was NOTHING in the xorg.N.log file to indicate what the issue was and it wedged the console to the point where "shutdown, reload" was the only way to get it back (thankfully, I could log on from another machine to do that).

In the end, it was a surprisingly simple fix, after "startx 2>&1 > trace-file" gave me the crucial bits of info. An expected symbol was not around in a dynamic linking stage and chasing that down gave a simple(ish) fix. All I had to do, in the end, was to uninstall the fglrx driver (something I installed in the first place to get working accelerated 3D primitives and direct rendering).

But, it did made me wonder, if the Xorg server can write to stderr, why can't it log the lack of a symbol to the og file? Maybe, I don't know, because that writing happens in a non-X library? I should probably have a poke at that, at some point.

18 Jun 2009 (updated 18 Jun 2009 at 08:51 UTC) »

As Pierre Mai so eloquently writes, the evaluation order corner case is explicitly covered as "it depends" by the Standard, so any code that depended on it is, well, relying on implementation-specific details.</a>

17 Jun 2009 (updated 17 Jun 2009 at 11:41 UTC) »

Intriguing. I have found an interesting corner case, where I believe the Common Lisp standard doesn't have an opinion. I don't think it's really any critical corner case, as I (right now) can't see any legitimate use of the difference, but...

Basically, in the case of the following:

(defun frob (x) (format t "Frob: ~a~%" x))
(frob (defun frob (x) (format t "New frob: ~a~%" x))

does the printed line say "Frob" or "New frob"?

It is, I believe, fully specified what will happen when you do either of (funcall #'frob ...) or (funcall 'frob ...), but out of the two implementations I have tried (SBCL and CLisp), I have two different behaviours. SBCL prints "New frob" and CLisp prints "Frob".

I shall have to ponder this, for a bit, I think.

12 Jun 2009 »

Been a while since the last post. Work has been hectic, what with having to battle through the amendments to my pre- takeover contract into my new post-takeover contract. Mostly it seemed to be down to the legal department just not getting FOSS and once the whole "he's doing this for fun?" clicked, they didn't seem to have a problem anymore.

Two papers finished off, both declined to Conference #1, but now submitted for the consideration of Conference #2.

Two essays, on data structures and time complexity and electronic fora finished off.

17 Mar 2009 »

OK, as an addendum to my previous post, I ended up screen- scraping what I needed, parsed the data I wanted out of it and generated SQL statements to (later) populate a database with. It would probably have been more elegant to connect to the database and insert the data directly, but a FORMAT call is quite convenient, as it were.

The screen-scraper was constructed by using DRAKMA to fetch the pages and then some substring functions to extract the data I needed. Estimated 30 minutes of coding lisp and testing, then a further "lots" of actual scraping.

But, my main musing for today is something I've noticed recently, in my Apache logs. It seems as if there's an active business in "referring page" spam. I haven't run the numbers, but from eyeballing the logs, I am seeing at least a couple of page fetches per day, where the "referring page" field is several URLs that trigger my wetware "this is spam" detection. I wonder what the reasoning behind it is? Maybe they're banking on sites publishing their stats publicly?

294 older entries...

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Simon certified ingvar as Journeyer
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