Search Results: "Peter Van Eynde"

25 May 2006

Peter Van Eynde: s3cr3t blog message

Tonight we meet some others in front of the Santo Domingo church/museum at 22:00 in Oaxaca.

19 May 2006

Peter Van Eynde: The formal dinner

I talked about the dinner in my non Debian/lisp blog and put the pictures up on flickr but I think some things need to be said even if there should be no need to say the obvious.

(I'll try to use Enrico's guidelines here so I've deleted 2 pages or rant )

Being part of Debian is more then packaging and flamewars on Debian-devel, it is about working together with respect. In general Debian people (not only maintainers) are intelligent, strong willed people. This makes for some interesting (and strongly worded at times) debates, but we should never lose the respect for the other person and to act when the respect of others is violated.

18 May 2006

Peter Van Eynde: clc v6 and debconf6

I released common-lisp-controller 6 which has one major change: if you now compile a lisp file not under clc (or slime) control then the resulting fasl file will end up in /var/cache/common-lisp/<uid>/<implementation>/local/<full path of the source file> so that on upgrade of the implementation all cached fasl files will be removed. To give an example compiling /home/luser/cl-world-control/mind-beam.lisp will result (on sbcl) in /var/cache/common-lisp/1001/sbcl/home/luser/cl-world-control/mind-beam.fasl

The only problem with this is that is you remove the source-tree the cached fasl files will not get removed, but I guess people do upgrades with regularity (for sbcl every month or so) and sysadmins know that anything in /var/cache may be nuked at any moment.

For debconf6 I'm blogging about it on my non-debian and lisp blog (so that my non-debian friends read it) and uploading pictures to a special debconf6 flickr set.

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Four

Day trip. Six busses full of Debian developers, maintainers, and supporters toured the area around Oaxtepec today. We clambered over several Mexican pyramids and a ruined mountain-top city. Walking in the main entrance I immediately felt that it was very familiar. I identified the pool where they purified themselves before entering the complex, and several altars. Some of the things the archaelogists called "altars" looked more like bed platforms. I told the guide maybe they were both; ancient religions were known for their homosexual sex rites. Then we saw the palace of Cortes in the city of Morelos. It is a very swank city, fun to walk around and shop. We got back at 10pm, tired but satisfied. Bought a t-shirt that says "100% GUAPO". The Hispanic contingent at Debconf went wild. They may give me some photos to post soon. Lisp redux. Kevin Mark read my summary of Peter van Eyndes presentation yesterday, and sent in this email:
Hi Ted, you seem to be having fun at Debconf! Saw your post about a book by Peter Seibel. Strangely enough I attended a meeting at lispnyc with him this week. They shot video which hopefully you can see. Checkout http://www.lispnyc.org/home.clp cheers, Kev
Well, thanks Kev! At lunch yesterday, a fellow developer, whose name I forget, told me that OCAML is far superior to Haskell in terms of performance because it is "statically typed at compile time" or something. I thought that was a characteristic of Haskell as well. I mentioned the benchmarks that Haskell is currently winning, and he brushed this aside. Which may be appropriate; optimizing for benchmarks isn't the same as optimizing for the general case. Food. We had lunch yesterday at a restaurant. I hate zucchini, but their zuchini stuffed with quesa (cheese) was delicious. I haven't found birria (shredded goat meat) in the market here yet, but the restaurant had some. At the end of the meal a vendor came into the restaurant with some crisp, deep fried confection called "churros", coiled like a big hose. Its cross section looks like a five point star. For P10 the vendor broke off four pieces, 5 inches long. Knut shared his with me; it was like a donut, only crunchy. John Sokol. John Sokol, part of the original 386BSD team, arrived late Tuesday night. Carrying 80 pounds of luggage, he not only took the Metro, but he walked up the mile longer hill from the resort entrance to the conference. The Metro is nice, but it has a lot of stairs. I was tired after traversing it; I could not have walked up the hill if I tried afterward. He brought a VOIP phone with him, but it gives an error saying his account has been compromised. It is probably looking at his Mexican IP address and blocking it. So John and I have no way of phoning the outside world.

16 May 2006

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Three

Laundry day. New roommate Thaddeus Black is really on the ball; today is the first laundry day we've had at the conference, and he was prepared for it, and reminded the rest of us when we woke up. I think I'll wait until the Thursday laundry day. To get your laundry done here, you put it in a plastic bag, and mark it somehow. Then the bags go into a pile, and some company hired by the hotel comes and washes them, and returns the bags of clean clothes to you the same or next day. You can even choose between regular drying and sun drying the clothes. Debian. Yesterday someone filed a bug against my expect package; today Alec Berryman sent in a patch that fixed it. Thank you Alec! The fixed package is now uploaded and should be available to everyone tomorrow. Food. Ville Vuorela brought a big bag of candies from Finland for Simon Richter, who shared them with the table here in the hack lab. They were salty and sweet, with mild licorice flavor. They were quite good. My friend Jesus Monroy, a food columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a few comments on my food adventures yesterday, which I will quote here:
Pancita is Spanish for stomach. Most likely you had a type of menudo, or soup dish. This is a very common and popular dish. Usually used for hangovers. Check the chicken vendor's spices when you can. With some hope he did not use MSG. MSG, as you may know, can be toxic in large amounts. It's not unheard of in Mexico, but they don't know that MSG can be toxic. My mother has refused to eat at some friends houses because they use so much the chicken tastes extremely over-salted. MSG toxic effects are lathargy, nausea, headaches, all the way to death (very extreme). Then again too much salt, or just water, can be toxic. As for the church, they have not changed much in 500+ years in Mexico. Most likely what you saw was what was built.
Conference. Today I attended the one presentation that motivated me to attend Debconf; Peter van Eyndes Common Lisp presentation. Common Lisp, of course, is the best programming language ever, in terms of developer time. Haskell is similar, but is designed more for machines to run fast, than for developers to develop fast. The LISP community has almost universally switched to using darcs for their revision control system, which is not only the easiest to use I have ever found, but is also written in Haskell. Nine people attended Peters presentation. He showed us how to drive the Lisp compiler from inside emacs using slime, with its advanced auto-completion features. He demonstrated the common lisp controller which has advanced dramatically in the past five years. It is now simple and intuitive to load libraries into your Lisp program. He showed us how to package lisp libraries using asdf, which has long been an opaque mystery to me. Luca Capello fom Switzeland, the maintainer of the stumpwm window manager was present, and he promised to demonstrate stumpwm later tonight. stumpwm is not yet as advanced as ratpoison, but it could become far more advanced and whiz-bang than ratpoison could ever be. It has potential. I also met Erick Lopez of Mexico, who wants to package cl-wiki, but is looking for a sponsor. As a Lisp developer, he will be an asset to Debian. After the presentation Peter opened the floor, and every question I'd had about Lisp for the past few years was answered very satisfactorily. At the end, Peter showed us a book called Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel, which he praised highly for those who want to use Lisp for "real" things. Such as a streaming MP3 server. I'm sold! But if you are poor (povre), you can read it for free at Gigamonkeys.

5 May 2006

Peter Van Eynde: ECLM2006: better late then never

As others have already commented here, here, here, here and here ECLM 2006 was great. The level of the talks seems to be improving (not that I want to imply that previous talks were bad) and having companies asking for lispers was a novel experience. I must also agree that as an ex-physicist I found SigLab to be very impressive.

The bad points were the 6hour drive back and the 'reception' at work. I can only now start to catch up with non-emergency stuff. Such is life :-).

There is still a washlist of things to do before going to debconf6, not in the least getting medical coverage for .mx and power-plug adaptors. I've noticed that some other hackers are going with Iberia flight IB6403 (leaving on 13/5/2006 at 12:30). I'll try to dress 'debianista' to attract them.

11 April 2006

Peter Van Eynde: die fuzzy fonts die!

root@sharrow:/etc/fonts/conf.d# ln -s kill-anti.conf 10-antialias-die-die-die.conf
And still pterm looks like shit. Damn.

31 March 2006

Peter Van Eynde: a stunning crash

Slime tells me "Lisp connection closed unexpectedly: exited abnormally with code 256". I go and see: (sorry for the long line)
* Argh! gc_find_free_space failed (first_page), nbytes=8.
Gen StaPg UbSta LaSta LUbSt Boxed Unboxed LB LUB !move Alloc Waste Trig WP GCs Mem-age
0: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2000000 0 0,0000
1: 121288 15638 0 0 30022 1 0 0 0 122956040 18168 74632320 0 22771058045587471891756344047460264512912328495970408565885262128721370095226093339014016268704097497686156189724993758756525399616019155487351045354729920444619442123787213803893991126769353775124417090005956563018545473316412289883581293782691217408,0000
2: 131071 6160 0 0 34634 1 0 0 69 141822136 42824 21427888 18640 0,0000
3: 87088 6169 0 0 19167 1 0 0 23 78496608 15520 2000000 19144 0,0000
4: 83996 6219 0 0 30404 915 124 109 106 128215256 1021736 2000000 30427 -0,0000
5: 0 0 0 0 4267 3287 1461 552 283 38188928 997504 40188928 5250 0,0000
6: 0 0 0 0 6127 0 0 0 0 25096192 0 2000000 5774 0,0000
Total bytes allocated=534775160
fatal error encountered in SBCL pid 23015(tid 3076041632):


No, this sbcl session was not started before the big bang :-).

23 March 2006

Peter Van Eynde: Airport Passenger Screening

Another stunning article from Schneier: Airport Passenger Screening. It seems that the success-rate for smuggling things through airport security is 70% for knives and an incredible 100% for bomb-parts.
To print out when flying to Oaxtepec :-).

24 January 2006

Peter Van Eynde: Swiss

Normally I keep this for on-topic Debian or lisp stuff, but I could not resist commenting on the swiss comment.
One word: Sabena. Most if no all Belgians are still bitter about the whole tragic story and I feel sad that Swiss will claim another nice airline as its (hopeful) last victim.

19 January 2006

Peter Van Eynde: New common-lisp-controller version

We (I and Ren van Bevern) have been working on a new version of clc. This should add support for 'create a core from these files' implementations, like ecl. It also uses the UID of the user to create the cache directory, andcustomizationn of the systems loaded by default in the standard images.

It works for us, but we would be grateful if people could try it out and suggest improvements. Get it at:
http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-packages/common-lisp-controller/common-lisp-controller_5.10_all.deb

No ecl in debian yet, as I've run up against a strange compilation failure.

18 January 2006

Peter Van Eynde: Baen books

Thanks to a hint on the Baen CD site I ordered the electronic versions of The Far Side of the Stars by David Drake and War of Honor by David Weber. Both these electronic versions contain a 'bonus CD' image, so I now got a copy of the Slammers CD and of the Baen's At All Costs CD.

I know it is possible to just download the iso's from several sources, but after spending many hours with "Lt. Leary", "Belisarius", "Honor Harrington", "Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock" and the always entertaining Posleen I felt that paying a few dollars was in order.

12 January 2006

Peter Van Eynde: clisp 2.37 seems unable to append to files

I had already noted clisp bug 1399709 a few days ago. As nobody reacted I started to think something was wrong with my setup. Then I saw Gary King has the same problem on Mac OS-X. So I think maybe the problem does exist after all :-(.

Note to debian people: this problem is delaying the release of a new clisp version with a fix for the xlibs-dev transition.

2 November 2005

Peter Van Eynde: Play a CD, get a rootkit installed

If you play a Sony music CD it installs a rootkit on your windows machine. What a stunning idea.

26 October 2005

Peter Van Eynde: clisp now builds on alpha and ia64

I used the more conservative flags of -D SAFETY=3 -D NO_MULTIMAP_SHM -D NO_MULTIMAP_FILE -D NO_SINGLEMAP -D NO_TRIVIALMAP for the more exotic architectures and it seems to work for alpha and itanium. The hppa buildd failed in a most strange way and I'm waiting with impatience for the results of the m68k and sparc jury :-).

19 October 2005

Peter Van Eynde: telenet and proxy errors

My bother had severe problem with telenet (the local cable company) and he actually called the helpdesk while I was with him. I noticed the error they made and so could correct it. Normally they ask you to configure http://pac.telenet.be:8080 as pac file. The pack file is:


/* PAC FILE: VERSION MANAGEMENT WITH CVS
* USE CVSWEB FOR UPDATING !!!
*
* Proxy autoconfig file
*
* $Revision: 1.29 $
* $Date: 2004/04/01 06:58:30 $
*
*/

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
> <br><br/>
return "DIRECT";
> <br><br/>

Notice that there is no proxy configured. When this did not work they asked to configure proxy.telenet.be:8080 as a proxy without disabling the pac stuff. This also did not work. After the long call on the expensive helpdesk I tried configuring the proxy and disabling the pac. That worked.

Of course as he was using an inferior operating system as a first step he had reinstalled everything, and lost some data he had forgotten to backup.

I wonder when they will fix the pac file...

Peter Van Eynde: Gains and losses

I've removed the hoary and hoary24 sections of the CL package repository I host on p.d.o.
On the other hand I and David D. Smith will adopt the clisp and libsigsegv packages that Will Newton took good care off up until now. We will coordinate the work through the darcs archives on cl-debian.alioth.debian.org.

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