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.

Only worked on one track this evening, but it was a fun one: "Vampire Megabyte". You see, it has this line: "...and the modem beeped and twittered as the mainframe lost its mind..." -- and it really wanted a suitable sound effect.

Turns out Audacity plugins are written in this Lisp-based language called Nyquist. "Aha!", says I to myself, says I. "I can play that game..."

It's been a while since I wrote any serious Lisp beyond the occasional Emacs tweak. But it all comes back.

In other album-related news, I spent some time consolidating my customer data someplace where it can be backed up safely, in an encrypted form, offsite. I hope to finally get around to sending emails sometime early this week. (\me grovels contritely) I am now very close to having something I can send to Oasis, though it's probably going to be the week after Westercon at the rate I'm going.

Spent some time this morning filling in the remaining holes in my Java git blob classes -- specifically the part that conses up a header into a byte array. I didn't need it for the stream code, since it was more efficient to write it into the stream piecewise.

Spent most of the afternoon hacking Emacs lisp to finally solve a problem with gnus automatic mail-foldering that's been bothering me for a long time. You see, gnus (the Emacs mail/news reader) lets you match a series of regular expressions against your mail headers in order to decide what folder it belongs in. A lot of mail from mailing lists contains strings like "[mumble]" -- a tag in square brackets. Turns out our new spam-filtering appliance does that, too. Trouble is, gnus insists that the thing you match look like a word, meaning it has to begin and end with an alphanumeric.