Advogato blog for mdanish

11 Jun 2003

Wed, 11 Jun 2003 07:32:29 GMT

Uploaded a quick bugfix for the newer SDL 1.2 debs, which have a number of useful patches, just before I ran out to attend a meeting of Lisp-NYC. Lisp-NYC is a fairly recent phenomenon (6 months or so): the Lisp User Group. There were about 25-30 people gathered at a bar uptown and it was interesting to meet some of the people who I had conversed with online. Maybe I should take some roadtrips this summer to other nearby cities and meet with other groups. If nothing else, I'd get some decent bar-hopping in.

18 Jan 2003

Sat, 18 Jan 2003 09:58:02 GMT

11 Dec 2002

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 17:13:34 GMT

2 finals done... 2 to go. Argh.

I procrastinate by working on CL-SDL, which has undergone 2 revisions (and another one soon, it seems). What this is doing to my exam grades, I try not to think about =). OpenGL in Lisp is just too much fun.

19 Nov 2002

Tue, 19 Nov 2002 09:55:10 GMT

Rule of course scheduling #1:

The courses you need/want to take are not available this upcoming semester.

Rule of course scheduling #2:

Any courses that you might want to take are all in the same time-slot.

Rule of course scheduling #3:

Online registration and scheduling tools will fail mysteriously at key times.

14 Nov 2002

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 12:30:33 GMT

Added yet another CL package to Debian.

Spent 10 hours working on a homework. That was pretty bad. After a while a resistance builds up and it becomes harder and harder to slog through problems; this doesn't help one bit.

Now I am looking forward to wasting many an hour watching Kenshin. It's long.

xach: See the CL package system if you haven't already. Of course, making a proper interface to your code is not necessarily easy. It usually fairly simple to load files from your implementation's init-scripts, if you want to do that as well.

shlomif: Debian has a filesystem hierarchy standard, so there is method to our madness. And Mandrake lacks APT (afaik) so they do not have the same tools ;-)

11 Nov 2002

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 07:54:50 GMT

I got nothing done that I wanted to this weekend.

But I did sleep a lot more than I usually do.

9 Nov 2002

Sat, 9 Nov 2002 02:11:50 GMT

Wow, 4 new Debian packages in 24 hours: cl-ftp, cl-regex, cl-awk, and cl-lexer. Lots of CL packaging issues are resolving themselves nicely, these days it's quite a bit easier to deal with.

I created CL-FTP two days ago, now it's time to play with CL-GTK. I wrote ``Clicky'': yet another calculator program. While CL-GTK talks down a pipe to a server program, this is probably the only reasonable way to get around the rougher FFI problems in a portable fashion.

What else? It was a nice day today, too bad I didn't realize that until the afternoon.

2 Jul 2002

Tue, 2 Jul 2002 18:54:06 GMT

Whoops, sprained my ankle really badly playing ultimate frisbee. Looks like I'll be stuck in front of a computer even more now. Too bad I have to route the DSL connection through a Win2k computer--it's behavior has become increasingly erratic. Fortunately, we are getting a router today, hopefully. Until then, it's dial-up.

I've managed to get my IGS client up and playing games, now all it needs is a front-end. Also wrote a Snakey-type game for CL-SDL just for a test. Still a lot of work left to clean up the interfaces, though.

Carmack speaks of high-level graphics languages such as Cg. I should look into these for examples of a higher-level interface for CL-SDL/GL. It's hard deciding what is and what isn't important, and how the settings should be tweakable. And this isn't even at the OO level yet! He also mentions there are many such languages similar to Cg, all with little C-like syntax quibbles. Well, fortunately, CL has powerful syntax abstraction capabilities, so we'll leave the C-like syntax quibbles to the people who don't know better.

26 Jun 2002

Wed, 26 Jun 2002 04:46:16 GMT

Still getting settled in new apartment. Lots of stuff to sort out. Need an air conditioner, Pittsburgh is too hot. At least I now have DSL, so I can waste more time on the Internet. Began hacking on CL-LDAP in response to a query about the existence of such bindings; now it looks like it's going to become an actual project. My LDAP experience is fairly limited, but UFFI is so easy...

My Go playing today was atrocious. I really need to get back to IGS more often. I also need to work on igs.lisp more, but that takes away from playing time. I still can't decide which is more interesting, sometimes.