The Mandelbear's Musings

Went to a good party last night at the invitation of webmaven, who's on the program committee. Sold a CD to Julie Steele, a recent O'Reilly employee and Guy's daughter. Fun conversation. Several good conversations, but confirmed that I can only handle one or at most two people at a time.

The attendees at this conference, and cons in general, are getting younger and more decorative all the time. Especially the women; I'm greatly encouraged by the increasing number of women in open source.

The elevator music in the hotel was the stuff I was hearing in my teens. Scary.

 ;;; LISP using a distributed hash table.
 (defun cons (car cdr)
         (put (concat car "." cdr)))

(assuming hash returns a hex string and (put s) stores string s in a distributed hash table at a location given by its cryptographic hash, and returns the location. You don't have to take out the garbage for a long time. If the DHT implements a time-to-live, you can implement a mark-and-wait garbage collector by simply refreshing everything you can reach once in a while.

If I'd known ahead of time that Colleen was planning to take her walker, I'd have planned on renting a car and printed out maps and directions ahead of time. As it is, there's no real problem except that we'll be using the Mac instead of a printout.