1 Jan 2007 02:19:23 +0100  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* onward: ASCII weblogs are /SO/ 2006. http://lukego.livejournal.com/

29 Oct 2006 02:34:35 +0200  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* databases: My mission this week has been to look at a pair of
	corrupted 25GB BerkeleyDB databases and figure out what happened,
	how to fix it, how to prevent it from happening again, and so on.
	
	Our Erlang interface to BDB is too high-level for nitty-gritty
	exploration so I fished around for a more direct binding and ended
	up writing my test program in Python:
	  http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/python/bets.py.txt
	I must say that Python is an extremely friendly language to a
	casual user like me. I've hardly used it at all but my
	questions were all neatly answered by the online documentation and
	I had no trouble making it do what I wanted. And the simple and
	direct 'bsddb' interface was just the ticket. Very good!
	
	To drive my BDB tests I used the PyUnit testing framework and this
	was also pleasant. I notice that PyUnit is written by the same
	Steve Purcell who I met up with for beers at Oktoberfest 2001 and
	who took my favourite "giant beer skulling" photo. He mentioned
	before that he was getting into photography and I see he has a
	website now: http://www.purcellimages.com/

	* computing: I've now migrated to Squeak for my desktop
	environment for the past week. The trick was fileIn'ing the
	PseudoTTY class to connect the excellent terminal emulator
	directly with shells and emacs. Squeak is cool!
	I do escape out of full-screen mode when I need to use Firefox.
	One step at a time..

	* euc2006: I mucked up my travel plans so I'll miss the Erlang
	User Conference for the first time in five years. Bugger!

11 Sep 2006 11:16:54 +0200  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* travel: I'll be spending a fair bit of time in Amman, Jordan in
	the remainder of this year. I'd be interested to meet up with some
	Lisp hackers in the region so please send me a mail if you exist :-)

5 Jun 2006 20:33:51 +0200  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* hobby: Today I left work early to unicycle home [1] but I had a
	complicated support call soon after I left. This lead me to the
	very happy discovery that it's no problem to talk on the phone
	while riding! which means that I can now sleep in for an extra
	hour each day and work from the unicycle on the way in. Ideal :-)
	[1]: http://flickr.com/photos/57838728@N00/sets/72057594141974760/
	(literature): I was tickeld by this fragment of a book review:
	
	  If you like your comedy to include priests bribing pre-pubescent
	  girls to urinate in front of them; pregnant women being rolled
	  down a slope in a barrel that has had nails hammered through it;
	  or early teenage girls being forced to eat excrement and having
	  their eyes poked out and their nipples cut off, then this is for
	  you. I suspect that for the vast majority of people it won't be
	  their cup of tea.

	(eclm): Klaus Harbo pointed me to a big set of ECLM 2006 photos:
	http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_ellefsen/sets/72057594131844361/

3 Jun 2006 22:27:00 +0200  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* summer: Summer has arrived and life is good! I almost think the
	whole Stockholm winter is worth it for one day on Söder like today.
	(work): Calm and orderly! We really needed a period like this :-)
	(eclm2006): Had fun at the European Common Lisp Meeting in Hamburg!
	I saw a lot of cameras there but few pictures on the internet,
	I hope people will share them soon (that means you, Danes!)
	Like most people at the conference my new hero is David McClain.
	Hip hip hurray for Edi & Arthur! Can't wait for Istanbul 2007 :-)
	(cl-muproc): I was pleased by the CL-MUPROC Erlang-alike-for-Lisp
	talk for two reasons. One is that it was developed by guys who
	hack Erlang and "get it". The other is that most people in the
	room were familiar with Erlang and raised the same kind of
	objections that I'd expect to hear from the Erlang crowd. e.g.
	Martin Simmons from LispWorks catching onto the lack of
	inter-process isolation.
	(laptop): I replaced my 12" Thinkpad X31 with its successor X60s.
	Pros: much smaller and lighter (!), brighter screen, faster
	wireless, dual core CPU and twice as much RAM capacity.
	Cons: Consumes battery 3x faster (watch movie for 1 hour on 4-cell
	battery), noisy/warm/vibrating harddisk under right palm, ,
	running suspiciously slow since I installed 2GB of 667mhz RAM.
	I would really love to hear any hints to fix these problems!
	(net): Telia sent a letter saying that my internet connection will
	be upgraded to 100Mbps symmetric for the same flat 25 euro/month.
	Sick! Now even at 54Mbps the wireless will still be my bottleneck
	both at home and in the office.
	(hacking): Lately I'm giving the computer a rest and hacking my
	living room with wood and a hammer. The damage so far:
	  http://flickr.com/photos/57838728@N00/sets/72157594151903019/
	(languages): I have a few ideas for programming languages that I'd
	like to experiment with but I'm having a hard time deciding what
	the best way to do that is nowadays!
	(travel): Have been making short trips without meeting up with
	Lispers lately. I would like to hear from Croatian Lispers between
	Split and Dubrovnik who'd fancy a beer in a week or so though!

25 Mar 2006 00:53:54 +0100  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* switch: Richard Hamming once observed that "What appears to be a
	fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the
	greatest assets you can have." This is profoundly true.

	Years ago I had a Thinkpad 600E that I loved and hacked on every
	day. Sadly, after a time, the machine developed a defect and the
	"nipple mouse" completely stopped working. I considered replacing
	the machine but it had been a loyal friend for many years, so
	instead I decided to take it as a challenge to hack my environment
	into working comfortably with my disabled companion.

	I was very surprised to find that by simply making use of existing
	Sawfish window-manager commands I was able to create a much more
	productive environment without missing the mouse at all (well,
	except for web browsing). The machine only lasted another six
	months but I still use the same window-management style today.
	
	I would like to share the tricks I learned with you.
	
	There are really only two tricks: one is to learn the most useful
	commands that Sawfish has to offer and the other is to find a way
	to make them very convenient to use. I experimented with lots of
	different keyboard layouts and ultimately decided that converting
	the right shift key into a Hyper modifier gave me the most
	comfortable way to add a lot of fast new bindings to my computer.
	(Hyper is like Control or Alt -- it's a key that X, Sawfish, and
	Emacs recognise but that's not mapped on most keyboards.)

	Next, the important Sawfish commands and my bindings are:
	
	move-viewport-{up,down,left,right} on H-{p,n,b,f} which are the
	keys used by Emacs for previous/next/backward/forward. I use
	virtual desktops in a 3x3 grid and typically have just one to four
	windows per desktop. On the middle desktop I have the dual Emacs
	frames that I'm typing in now, to the left a browser, down below
	my email, and so on.
	
	pack-window-{up,down,left,right} on C-H-{i,j,k,l} which are keys
	used for motion in some text-based computer games. These commands
	take the current window and "throw" it in a direction until it
	contacts another window or the edge of the screen. Since I have
	only a few windows on each desktop I can quickly arrange them to
	make full use of the display using these commands. This neatness
	makes a 12" display perfectly ample for programming.
	
	focus-window-{up,down,left,right} on H-{i,j,k,l}. These commands
	move focus to an adjacent window in a given direction. The
	commands do the same job as M-tab except that it is a pure reflex
	action when the windows are neatly laid out.
	
	maximize-window{,vertically,horizontally}-toggle on H-m, H-. H-,.
	For example when I open a file that has very long lines I just tap
	`H-,' and the window horizontally maximizes until I tap it again.

	H-q to close a window and C-H-q to "destroy" a window at X level
	(VERY satisfying to use on OpenOffice). H-x to open a new xterm so
	that I needn't bother finding an existing one for a quick command.
	H-[ and H-] for bring-to-front and push-to-back Z-ordering.
	
	And that's the lot!

	I dare say that you won't be rushing out to try this yourself, but
	it does feel good to have it off my chest. For years I've been
	silently pulling faces while I watch the way my friends struggle
	their windows around the huge screens that they usually utilize
	about 60% of. (Sorry friends if you are reading :-))
	
	The reason for this rant now? Well, I'd really meant to write about
	the exciting new 12" Powerbook that I got last weekend, but alas I
	found the window-management so frustrating that I've since put it
	aside and gone back to my Thinkpad X31 with renewed enthusiasm.
	
	Viva la Sawfish!
	
26 Feb 2006 20:27:16 +0100  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* time: One year since the first post and almost nothing in between!
	I've had a really eventful year but unusually most of the things
	I'm doing aren't related to internet-visible projects.
	
	(work): These days there are over a hundred million people who
	will automatically receive MMS/WAP/email settings and service
	activation as soon as they put their SIM card into a new phone.
	That's because our Erlang systems are sitting in more than 20
	countries automatically SMS'ing settings and updating databases!
	Your phone company will soon have this too :-)
	(home): I bought an apartment at Mosebacke in Stockholm.
	This new world of debt and responsibility is surprisingly agreeable!
	I also joined the civilized world and got a 10Mbps symmetric
	internet connection for the going rate of about $25/month :-)
	(world): I've been travelling a lot with work (nearly used up a
	whole passport last year) to places that I might not otherwise
	have visited. Some surprisingly great places have been Jordan
	(Amman and Petra), Tunis, and Almaty in Kazakhstan.
	.. and hello to the Lisp hackers I've had the pleasure of drinking
	with in some of these places :-)
	(IBC): We inaugurated a computer science video night with hacker
	friends from Erlang companies in our neighbourhood (Synapse, tail-f,
	Corelatus). We watched an amazing Dan Ingalls demo of Squeak and
	then made a valiant attempt to get drunk on weak spanish beer :-)
	(lisp): I visited Christophe Rhodes at work and was much impressed
	at his demonstration of the current state of the McCLIM world.
	On his computer it all just works! :-)
	(eclm2006): See you in Hamburg! And remember that last time the
	drinking stretched from friday night to monday afternoon so book
	your tickets thoughtfully and watch for posts by Tony Martinez.
	(hacking): No hobby hacking! I've been finding my "real work" very
	challenging and haven't felt such an urge to hack Emacs etc.
	I also haven't read any computer books or papers in a long time.
	That said, I have recently felt a slight twingle of the
	hackstincts and I did pick up a copy of _Transactional Information
	Systems_ following an interesting dinner discussion with Arthur
	Lemmens. Hack-potential is on the rise at the very least :-)

1 May 2005 16:56:05 +0400  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* life: As I sit here extending a telecom system in the Middle
	East from the very good sushi restaurant of my very bad Moscow
	hotel it occurs to me that the world is an interesting place.

	* lisp: I was one of the 85 people who turned up at the informal
	European Common Lisp Meeting in Amsterdam last week. This was by
	far and away the most fun conference'ey thing I've been to so
	thanks very much to Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz for everything!
	And to all the fun people who I joined for three days of pleasant
	conversation and beer drinking. Let's do this again soon :-)

	The conference website has a link to the Elisp sources of my talk
	and to a "bootleg quality" video where you can witness the trouble
	I got into with 25 minutes of material for a 40 minute slot :-)
	(Thank you and congrats Brian Downing for your fuzzy-completion
	hack which drew a spontaneous round of applause during the 15
	ad-hoc minutes!)

26 Feb 2005 21:00:36 +0100  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* weblog: Time to tool up, or, a G'log is born!

	I made an RSS feed for this weblog:
	  http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/weblog/glog.rss
	which is generated by this program:
	  http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/weblog/glog2rss
	and to make these links clickable I had to convert this file to HTML:
	  http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/weblog/glog2html
	so instead of just a ChangeLog I now have all these files:
	  http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/weblog/

	That's a lot of feature-creep for day #1 :-)

26 Feb 2005 17:54:58 +0100  Luke Gorrie  <luke@member.fsf.org>

	* weblog: Today I start this makeshift weblog!
	
	My homepage is written in Latte and that's a problem. I like
	Latte, it's sortof a Scheme with TeX syntax for generating HTML.
	The trouble is that it's not maintained anymore, Debian have
	stopped carrying it, and it doesn't compile with my libstdc++.
	What to do? For now I will leave my homepage as it as and
	experiment with keeping this file instead.

	* work: I joined an Erlang company called Synapse back in august.
	This is a small non-venture-capital company started by some very
	good Erlang hackers. We're building big telecom systems that are
	being installed all over the world and it's really a lot of fun.

	A wise friend once told me that if you take a job in telecoms then
	all of your illusions about ultra-reliability and "five nines" and
	so on are shattered as soon as you start working with real telecom
	equipment in real phone companies. No comment.

	The lifestyle is different too. Now I'm travelling a lot more to
	actually install our systems and that is mostly fun. I'm also
	getting support calls on my mobile phone at all hours which is
	slightly less fun. :-) In between I'm hacking away as usual.

	Slogan: Real Men install and support their software personally!

	* programming: I'm now well into my 6th year of Erlang hacking and
	that's somewhat amazing to me. Over this time I've also gotten
	seriously into Common Lisp and I've grown very fond of Emacs Lisp.
	I'm about equally happy to program in each of these language
	nowadays, and I haven't really been excited by any others.

	I do plan to acquire a taste for Smalltalk but so far I haven't.
	Somewhere along the way I lost my affection for Scheme.

	* lisp: I'm really happy to see that McCLIM is becoming the focus
	of so much Lisp free software hacking activity. This is the only
	program that I see as a potential successor to Emacs as my general
	computing environment so I really hope it comes to fruition.

	This will be an interesting year for Lispers if Peter Seibel's
	forthcoming book _Practical Common Lisp_ becomes the big "on ramp"
	that we're hoping for.

	* erlang: Happy to hear that Erlang has made a big comeback within
	Ericsson and that they're making a new and very Nortel-like
	platform for Erlang/Linux-based products too. Good for them!

	* computer-science: Since last summer I've been in the habbit of
	strolling to work instead of catching the bus. One side-effect of
	this is that I don't read any computer science literature anymore
	because that's what I used to do on the bus. Too bad!