diego's weblog

Recently I wanted to play around with LISP again (as a way to relax!) and naturally I started looking for IDEs. Java has contributed many things to computer science, but surely one of its most important side effects of it has been the insertion into the popular consciousness of advanced IDEs, IntelliJ IDEA being at the front of this, closely followed by Eclipse and Netbeans.

Interestingly enough, even though LISP has deep roots in the academic community and has been around for decades, the best-known IDEs for LISP out there are not only closed-source, but also commercial, with hefty price tags. Some of the best-known are Allegro Common Lisp and LispWorks. Some of them don't even offer versions that you can download without contacting sales reps! These companies are apparently living in 1994 or thereabouts. Most of them are Crippleware -- they work only for a limited amount of time, or expire, or even generate executables that exit after a while. The fact that their websites also look like something out of 1994 is another clue as to the cluelessness of these companies. It was pretty depressing, really. And no, I don't like Emacs. Sorry. (You may wonder how on earth I can like LISP but not Emacs... well, I guess the Universe is full of mysteries :)).

Then today I found CUSP, a LISP plugin for Eclipse. Awesome! It's free, maintained. It supports autocompletion and Macros, and works well. Highly recommended. I can now proceed with LISP hacking in peace. :)

PS: the reasons for playing with LISP (or even trying to do something serious with it) are many, but they are hard to understand if you've never used it before. At a minimum, it's a great way to exercise the brain. LISP, after FORTRAN, is the second-oldest high-level programming language (dating back to 1958--it will be 50 years old next year!), and there are good reasons for both having such staying power. If you've never programmed in LISP, you should give it a try -- it will blow you away. :)

PS: I forgot to mention it, but the LISP I use is Steel Bank Common Lisp which seems to be the best out there.

Update: Colm O Mahony just wrote over email to tell me that he tried SBCL 1.0.6 (the latest SBCL version) on top of the older version which comes bundled in CUSP. I tried it as well and it works fine. Thanks Colm!
it seems to work fine.

Oh boy. Exploiting the iPhone.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany is, according to Marc, so good that you should "Buy it, read it, keep it under your pillow and absorb it via osmosis." Enough said.

Leaflets. Cool stuff for your iPhone! [via Russ].

A few weeks ago I went down to my local Comcast office and returned my Motorola DVR/cable box. I had been planning on doing it for some time now and finally I found the brief window I needed to make the trip. :) No more cable for me!

Why did I take such a drastic step you ask? The answer is, largely, cost, along with incredibly annoying little things that degraded whatever was left of the "experience" down to continuous suffering. That, and an AppleTV finally providing a good alternative to cable, as I detail below...

A Reintroduction to Javascript. Nice refresher for a Sunday night. :)

How Gullible Are We? [via Erik].

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost after Internet Crash. LOL!

Study: Alligators Dangerous No Matter How Drunk You Are.

A new release of the Ning Social Network is out. This time it's all about Network Badges and new Widgets. Weee!

A book that came out a week or so ago was Managing Humans: Biting and Humurous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, written by Michael Lopp, aka Rands. Here's Rands' entry announcing on the book.

I've met Michael and read Rands, and they're both wonderful people :). I ordered the book as soon as it came out. I will confess that my schedule this week has prevented me from reading more than a couple of chapters but I know what's in there, and it's great (a lot of the book is based on entries from Rands in Repose). This one's a must-read, especially if you share with us that strange, high-speed, high-adrenaline, manic, fun space otherwise known as the internet/software industry.

One thing that is not in the book is the world renowned :) Rands Vegas System. So, that, you'll have to read on the weblog, and you should, because it's a riot.

Anyway, back to the book: go get it!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my macbook crashing (or rather, freezing) constantly. Sometimes it would freeze right after booting, sometimes later, sometimes when you left it alone for a while, sometimes when waking up from sleep.

At that point I reinstalled OS X from scratch and hoped that was it. Alas, it wasn't. Very soon afterwards the Mac started freezing again, with a vengeance. In fact, the next day after the fix (a Monday) my Mac Pro at the office also went out to lunch and the 10.4.8 update had to be reinstalled from scratch through SSH. I thought I was cursed!

Then the Mac Pro came to life and I continued with the Mac entertainment at home. The poor thing would lock up like there was no tomorrow. I started to be paranoid about saving files again, something I hadn't done since switching over from Windows a few months ago, and I was also getting more than annoyed.

Then it hit me: the Mac was only freezing at home. At the office, it had never frozen. Not once. It was only at home that this was happening.

I had already ruled out software: the Mac Pro had exactly the same config, and the freezes happened also on a different Macbook with the same disk. Disk checks showed the disk was fine.

So it had to be environmental.

And what was the only difference between home and the office? That's right the router. In February or so I got a Linksys WRT-350N to use 802.11n, which even if it's not "official" sounded (from reading the IEEE proceedings of meetings -- yeah, I do that sometimes, I'm that crazy) like it was not going to experience major changes and so was a relatively safe bet. I had been using 802.11n and all was well.

But that was the only difference with the office -- I've been using the same encryption, WPA-PSK, so that wasn't it. It had to be 802.11n.

But could a wireless protocol, however badly implemented or incompatible, irreparably hang the machine?

Apparently, yes.

To test the theory, last Sunday I changed the configuration of my router to 802.11g, and since then I've been running the Mac at home with no problems whatsoever, making it sleep, not sleep, disable the display after a while, and so on, with no problems at all.

Turn on Mixed mode in the router (802.11n+g) and the thing locks up again so fast it makes your head spin. Turn on pure 802.11n and OS X seems to whitstand it better, although I had one weird situation with it that I attribute to that as well.

OS X doesn't really let you choose the wireless protocol you're using, at least not in the base options that I've seen. So the Macbook must be going bananas when trying to decide what to do in Mixed Mode, as well as sometimes in pure 802.11n mode (perhaps, I have to confirm this fully).

Anyway, if you have a Macbook or Mac with 802.11n (and the software update for it installed) and you're experiencing weird lockups, take a look at your wireless router and see if it's on Mixed mode. That may be the source of the problems.

Phew!

What could you make from an iPhone? I'd like a double-shot latte, please.

Dare Obasanjo compares Google Base and Microsoft's Astoria. Interesting read.

It feels like a lifetime ago: how the web looked in 1994.

Ok, ok. So I was gushing in my previous post about the iPhone. Fine. I wasn't trying specifically to be a fanboy (although it ended up sounding like that) but the reality is that I don't have gripes about the phone.

Well, except for one.

If you connect it over Bluetooth to the Mac, it pairs, and they both see each other. But you can't do anything over BT. Nada. Not sync, not send files, not use it as a modem.

Which is funny if you think that the Mac syncs with a good amount of other phones with no problems.

So now I just carry around an iPod sync cable that I had floating out there to sync the phone with my Macbook a couple of times a day. No, it's not a huge deal, but it's cumbersome to have to whip out cables to get the latest calendar updates.

As usual, this has been discussed in various other places. The expectation is that this will work with Leopard. Along with Notes and .Mac sync. An iPhone software update will probably be necessary as well and may address some of these things on its own.

Anyway, there you have it. My one iPhone gripe.:)

PS: the lack of Copy/Paste, which I expected to be a problem, hasn't shown up once. I think it will, but who knows. The fact that the portrait mode doesn't yet work for emails is just slightly weird, but it hasn't gotten in the way so far.

A new thing I'm trying are what I'm calling miniposts. These are entries that generally don't even have title and are just a quick comment on something I see that is interesting but is not -- or hasn't yet -- developed into a full post. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and now that I am it is as liberating as I thought.

This is of course not new at all -- people have been doing it one way or another since the start of blogging itself, most recently in the form of Twitter and related things. MT, with its structure of title and big boxes that seem to beg for a lot of text creates a strong pull into creating long posts, at least for me. And that sometimes can cramp my style. :)

There are three feeds -- one for all entries+miniposts, one for entries, and one for miniposts only. Take your pick! We'll see where this goes. :)

Developers: time for e-coffee mugs! Looking forward to a new monopoly in coffee tables that can be rebooted.

What better way to restart the blog than to drool about a new piece of tech?

I didn't get an iPhone the first day. I didn't get it in the first week. But last Saturday iCaved and went down to the Palo Alto Apple store and got one.

As context, I've been using data services on Cingular (well, AT&T) for a while now, on Windows Mobile phones. I first switched to an HP 6915 last year from a RAZR. The RAZR, of course, is only good to make phone calls and do SMS. The 6915 was great, and it had built-in GPS. Tiny problem: the microphone died. Dead as in not working. No amount of reflashing the thing would fix it. So eventually I got an HTC TyTN which, though bulky, was pretty good. It had UMTS (3G) and when that was on it was great to use mobile IE. The problem was that email, my primary function for the thing, failed to do SMTP transactions while on UMTS, and I never had enough time to figure out why. So I used it mostly as a read-only email device, which is nutty. Additionally, I had to figure out how to sync stuff from the Mac. The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile on OS X solved that problem.

But then...

Then it turns out that the more I used it, the worse it was. Microsoft has crammed UIs basically designed for PCs into tiny screens and processors, and it's terrible. Almost painful to use regularly. And eventually, slow. Really slow.

Enter iPhone. When I got it, I synced it for the first time with my Mac, and it synced my calendars and email accounts from Mail.app. Activation took a few minutes (for me at least, lots of people had been having issues with that). Perfect! Then add some photos and songs, and video, and I was set.

I've gotta say, this last week I've been happy as a clam with the thing. It works well. It's fast. It's beautiful. I am using it all the time to check email, calendar, and listen to music. No need to carry around an iPod anymore. And Safari works like a charm as well.

Speaking of Safari -- check out Mowser's iPhone feeds. They're a must-bookmark! Here's Russ's post describing how he did it.

Anyway, the iPhone makes me smile. I gotta snap out of it! :)

In the meantime, kudos to Apple. They've done it again.

Anyone noticed how car crashes/action have started to feel waay more realistic in movies as of late? Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2. PS: that JJ Abrams movie has brilliant, brilliant marketing.

Only a few minutes old and already an inspiration! :-) Russ is blogging again. Yay!

And to start the miniposts... a little bit of back-referencing. You know, just for the symmetry of the thing.

I started blogging on July 11, 2002. Back then, I had two weblogs -- one for tech stuff (called "Abort, Retry, Fail?") and one for other stuff (called "no comment"). Eventually I decided that it was nuts to have two separate weblogs and I consolidated them into d2r.

Five years and over 2,000 posts later, I decided it was time to reboot. Reboots are good every once in a while, and not just for computers. :)

So now to dream it all up again.

From scratch.

Here.

We.

Go!