There is a new version of Ready Lisp for Mac OS X available. This version is based on SBCL 1.0.24 and Aquamacs Emacs 1.6, and requires OS X Leopard 10.5. The only changes in this version are upgrades of many of the dependent packages.
I’d been avoiding adding full Unicode support to Ledger for some time, since both times I tried it ended up in a veritable spaghetti of changes throughout the code, which it seemed would take forever to “prove”. One branch I started used libICU to handle Unicode strings throughout, while an earlier attempted using regular wide-string support in C++. Both were left on the cutting floor.
The other day I finally implemented a feature in Ledger which I’d avoided doing for a full half-year. The reason? Every time I thought about it, my brain kept shutting down. It seems my brain doesn’t care for math much, or for mathy problems, so it always seemed as if something better needed doing…
The blog has now fully moved over to Movable Type, including all past articles and their comments. It took a bit of Perl, Python and mucking with SQL, but now the transfer is complete.
The reason for the move is that the app I was using, RapidWeaver, was beginning to introduce a bit too much inertia to the blogging process. And one thing I know about myself: if something isn’t dead simple, even after months of being away from it, I’ll avoid it forever.
I write these blog posts using ecto now, which couldn’t be easier. There’s no separate publishing step, it’s like writing and sending an e-mail.
I actually liked the way WordPress looks a bit more, but Movable Type supports PostgreSQL, which is what ever other service on this server uses. And for some reason MT’s XML-RPC script doesn’t work with FastCGI and Apache, which is something I guess I can live with.
After tracking it down on a public domain mirror, and installing an emulator on my MacBook Pro, I was able to download and run the first full computer program I ever wrote: “Sector Inspector” for the Apple //e.
I wrote this program in 1989, and took eleven months to write it (seven to code, four to debug). At the time, it was one of the more complete disk editing utilities I’d seen.
It was released as Shareware (for $20), and I made a total of $60 over the course of eight years. This is the experience that turned me to freeware, actually; because I realized that coding for possible, yet unrealized profit was an unlikely aim. It’s better to know that little will come of it ahead of time, which makes it all about the coding.
I feel a need to blog about this today because it took several days to figure out, but the solution was trivial.
The scenario: my company has a Windows 2003 Domain Controller running DHCP, DNS and Active Directory services. We use an Untangle box as our gateway to the Internet. All of this works just great for Windows machines on the network, where everyone can use names like “host” to refer to each other’s machines.
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