a missing piece

papa was a frozen stone

Nathan and I found our way to the Frozen Boulder on Sunday. We almost decided to skip it, but I really wanted Nathan to see it, if only to introduce a little meaningless fun into his universe. I’d venture that meaningless fun in life is more important than any seriousness I could teach him. Here is the first online video I’ve found of the event:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=LcpNT95ulNc]

Nathan felt like he wouldn’t be able to stand still for five whole minutes, being six and all, so he took my camera and shot video, which I haven’t reviewed but will put online sometime this week.

I’m told that the whole event came off quite well. It was very hard for me to tell, being so close to it. From my point of view the whole thing looked very contrived, but then I knew who was involved and what was going on. The reactions I could hear were pretty positive. I heard a couple of people say, “Wow! This is really neat!” I could also hear one middle-aged man grumbling while trying to navigate a giant baby stroller through the immobile crowd. It was hard not to look or laugh. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

sick, code, art

I’m sick. Bleh. No symptoms at all but for a little bit of a cough, aches, chills and a fever. Suck. Stayed home from work today and got some rest, so I’m hopeful for tomorrow. I can’t stay away too long with deadlines looming and more projects on the way.

Of course, I cannot stay away from a computer, even when I’m sick. I’ve been shifting some of my focus at home to getting my python chops back up, if only so I’m not completely immersed in Javascript. Today’s project took about an hour, and is a script for rotating the backgrounds on my Gnome desktop. I’ve seen similar apps on Mac and Windoze, and I’m not one to be left out. Naturally I’m not the first to do this, and I had some interesting scripts to refer to online. In particular I liked Davyd’s script, which I expanded upon. Rather than rummaging through a directory for images, I used the ~/.gnome2/backgrounds.xml file to pull the same images used by the Change Background dialog. There’s a module called gconf which makes it easy to set GConf parameters. Currently I’m rotating images every 15 minutes. I’ve found that the script works well when added to the Gnome Session Manager as a login item.

GBackground.py is available here.

This Sunday should prove interesting with a flash mob gathering on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. Word got my way this week and it sounded like a lot of fun for Nathan and I to check it out. I’ll likely take some pictures if I can get away with it.

ramblings

It is an interesting problem being under constant flux, constantly changing, constantly learning.  It is an interesting problem knowing what I don’t know, and knowing that I don’t know enough to do what I’m doing.  There’s a strange tension in figuring it all out as you go along, and knowing that’s exactly what you’re doing.

It’s clear that so much of human behavior is motivated by fear, pain and misunderstanding.  Being aware of this doesn’t seem to help much.  How fragile the images we cling to.

Tags: living

another lisp revival

Its once a year or so that I either run across a Paul Graham article or my eye falls upon a book or two that I have around the house, and my interest in Lisp is rekindled. To be perfectly honest, I seldom get very far. I tend to study Lisp, as ESR puts it, like one studies Latin. Though rarely spoken, learning the language helps us to better understand our own.

As one who spends most of his time writing JavaScript, I am certain that I owe much of my success to the study of Lisp and all things Lambda. Without closures, for example, JavaScript is largely useless. In fact, it is closures, as well as functions as first-level objects, that make object oriented JavaScript so powerful. This flexibility allows me write programs that essentially write themselves, rather than have to do all the work myself. That’s my kind of laziness!

So, like I said, I’ve been playing around with Lisp the last couple weeks. I’ve been using SBCL with SLIME and Emacs as my editor, and I’ve just started playing around with the SBCL extensions for interacting with Unix. Of course, I’m struggling to shift idiom away from the years of Perl programming I’ve done in just such and environment. No point in writing my Perl in Lisp. One particular shift is the fact that, in Lisp, strings are simply sequences (not unlike C, I suppose). As such, there isn’t the wealth of string functions one might expect, though there are many for sequences types. As I am interacting with Unix, I’m going to need at least a couple of string functions, so here’s one I wrote for splitting strings on a delimiter:

(defun split-string (delimiter string)
  (labels ((get-first (s)
	     (and (position delimiter s)
		  (subseq s 0 (position delimiter s))))
	   (get-rest (s)
	     (and (position delimiter s)
		  (subseq s (1+ (position delimiter s)))))
	   (get-list (s)
	     (if (null (get-first s))
		 (list s)
		 (cons (get-first s) (get-list (get-rest s))))))
    (get-list string)))

I’m sure that this is over complicated, and I have to admit that I bounced off of this problem all morning. I’m not that familiar with Common Lisp’s built-in looping forms, so I tend to lean on recursion. My intention here was to use labels to define three functions as closures around the delimiter argument, and to wrap up the recursive function get-list. The functions get-first and get-rest are basically modeled after car and cdr (more or less, let’s not dig too deep on this one, fellas), making the definition of get-list a familiar idiom. This function will allow me to build up functions for processing the output from sb-ext:posix-getenv and hopefully provide me some familiar territory from which to proceed.

I’ll just keep plugging. More later.

Tags: lispjavascript programming lambda

Beer Dog

Forgive me, blogosphere, for I have sinned. It has been 9 months since my last blog post.Some things change, and some things don’t. The better part of the last nine months has seen regular brewing sessions at the Broomfield house. What better excuse for a bunch of guys to stand in the garage drinking beer for an entire day? Better yet, huddled around the steaming kettle when it’s 25 degrees outside?

And of course, the ever-present Abby is in the mix. Good dog.

Photo credit to Paul Kraus

real american heroes

At nearly 32 years of age, I have finally played a team sport. This is an historical first, the significance of which is not to be underestimated. The sport: Kickball, the time: Now, the place: Boulder Parks and Recreation, Boulder, Colorado.I got to bat once, out on the catch. Not bad. The game was a lot of fun, with much trash talking from the stands and the dugout. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.

torches and pitchforks ready

I was behind Grey Tuesday, and I’m behind this. A group of folks over at Bum Rush The Charts are working to take an independent artist to the #1 slot on iTunes store on Thursday, March 22, 2007. I think this is a brilliant move, and I’m interested in seeing the outcome.

If Black Lab even makes it to the top ten, then my hope for the internet community as a grass-roots movements will be that much stronger. That’s one-up for the niche market. One-up for independent media.

settling in

I haven’t been doing much with this site.

What little I have been doing has been pretty easy, and I’m again impressed with the WordPress package. I mentioned in my previous post that I’ve been working on porting the theme from my old, home-grown blog over to WordPress with remarkable ease. Template Tags are remarkably straighforward and well documented.

That is not to say that I don’t have some minor complaints. I just added this sidebar to the site this evening. This is a feature which my old site does not have, but since folks tend to expect that kind of information in the sidebar, I thought I’d add one. All in all, the design WordPress uses is pretty good, but I’m not that excited about nested lists. Though I could easily leave the extra styling off of Category listing, Bookmarks listing requires more hoop-jumping to escape the nested-lists paradigm.

Next up is to add some custom pages to the site. My old site has my old Sparc Linux articles that still bring traffic, so it would be nice to haul them over. I’d also like to incorporate my handy-dandy del.icio.us page as well.

Does WordPress work well with Flickr? Maybe I’ll have to look into that, too. Maybe then, I can start doing actual blogging, rather than this, “Hey, I’ve got a blog” kind of blogging.

the new digs

New house. (Fairly) new job. New website.

I had written my own blog package, which I’d been using for some years. After awhile, though, I realized that I didn’t want to maintain a blogging package anymore. Maybe it was because I wasn’t doing as much blogging. Maybe it was because of the relentless efforts of those damned spammers.

In any case, I’ve moved over to this shiny new Wordpress blog. I’m pleased with the result. For now, I’ve created a theme which looks nearly identical to my old site (still living at http://iratepublik.com for those who are interested). We’ll see how things pan out as I start messing with things.