May 2008 Archives

Git has sometimes been described as a versioning file-system which happens to support the underlying notions of version control. And while most people do simply use Git as a version control system, it remains true that it can be used for other tasks as well.

For example, if you ever need to store mutating data in a series of snapshots, Git may be just what you need. It’s fast, efficient, and offers a large array of command-line tools for examining and mutating the resulting data store.

To support this kind of usage – for the upcoming purpose of maintaining issue tracking data in a Git repository – I’ve created a Python class that wraps Git as a basic shelve object.

Emacs Chess is a fully featured chess client written entirely in Emacs Lisp. You can use it to play against other people on freechess.org, or against popular chess engines like gnuchess and crafty. It supports graphical rendering of chess boards within Emacs (in 2D), ASCII displays, and even electronic chess boards, or producing output appropriate braille for readers. Adding a new back-end is trivial. It also comes with a library for inspecting and reasoning about chess positions.

There is a new version of Ready Lisp for Mac OS X available. This version is based on SBCL 1.0.16, and requires OS X Leopard 10.5. The most notable change from the previous version is that 64-bit mode and experimental threading are no longer supported, since both have been known to have issues on OS X, while the purpose of Ready Lisp is to smoothly introduce Common Lisp to new users.