Posts
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Bawk Bawk Bawk Bakawwwwk!
I use Chicken every once in a while, particularly when fooling around with web stuff. They have some kick ass extensions : basic HTTP, more featurefull web server, XML query and generation. I first ran across it looking at some modal web programming samples and have continued to like it ever since. However I just ‘apt-get chicken’ installed the environment on my Ubuntu system only to find that the build was very very much out of date. Most of the extensions I installed failed to load into the interpreter cause names have changed or the extensions use new features. So I downloaded Chicken 2.2 source and installed from that in about 15 seconds. Just figured I would post in case anyone run across problems with Chicken on Ubuntu when trying to just use chicken-setup to install eggs. If you’re pointed at the same repositories I am you probably got a 1.6 build from 2004, that’s the problem.
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Lisp is Sin
While I don’t agree with the overall conclusion, this essay points to a number of great resources and ties together a line of discussion about Lisp and Scheme very well. I agree with trying to make programming accessable to a larger audience (especially after hearing Doug Egelbart speak the other day), but the flip side of that is that a lot of the people programming are not really “computer folk”. It would be great to have someone interested in creating their own wep application be able to do so without being a programmer in the traditional sense, but once that’s possible people probably won’t start calling themselves programmers once we start using sufficiently abstracted tools.
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I Still Love Ya Mike
I’ve been getting pinged on IM this morning about my reaction to Mike from TechCrunch ripping into Ning today. I’ve spoken to Mike a few times and always got the impression he’s the kind of person who honestly speaks his mind. So sometimes of course we’re going to be on the receiving end of some criticism, goes with the territory, and I don’t come even vaguely close to having a problem with it.
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Doug Engelbart at the Future Salon
Doug Engelbart is going to be at the Future Salon this Friday, January 20th:
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Ubuntu + Firefox + Flash(block)
I don’t use Flash normally, but I installed it (with the flashblock plugin for Firefox of course) so that I can fool around with Google Analytics, which renders views in little flash applets. Cool, as much as I don’t like Flash normally it’s a nice path to transition to richer functionality on the client side later on, so it makes sense in this context. The problem was that I wasn’t getting any text in Flash. I found the answer on the OpenLaszlo wiki quickly enough, the font that Flash uses is in the ghostscript package:
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There is No Open Source Community
Interesting article over at OnLamp called There Is No Open Source Community. Some excellent points in there, the central being that open source is not driven by ideological crusaders, but by the straightforward economic benefic of participants. I would disagree with the title of the article however. There is an open source community, definitely. It isn’t what companies should be focused on while evaluating open source, it isn’t the major driving contribution to the continued success of open source projects. But it is there and it does play a role in the environment. To say that it’s been giving too much attention isn’t probably right either, just that the time given it is out of line with the time spent looking at the basic economics of the environment. Given that, the article is an excellent attempt to start demystifying a subject that’s been clouded with way too much rhetoric on both sides of the argument.
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Small Small GPS
Aww yea, starting up the talk about implanted electronics is a sure way to get my attention. Although knowing GPS you could probably get the chip implanted subcutaneous but then need a large dish antenna grafted to your forehead in order to use it, and it would still only work outside under clear conditions. I wonder if maybe I could just plan to hook it up to the adamantium in the skeletal grafts I have planned and use that for reception? I wonder where I’ll have to store the maps to go along with it… I don’t want to think about it.
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Akismet Setup
One of the cooler features of Wordpress 2.0 is supposed to be the Akismet plugin for spam filtering. The last couple of days must have put me on all the spam target lists. I just cleared out about 150 spam comments over the last three hours, and don’t really feel like having to do that too often. So I turned on the Akismet plugin to see how that works out. I already had a Wordpress.com account (required for the API key), so setup was easy. Take that Cialis hawking freaks!!
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Failure!!
We failed in the quest for 100 cups of coffee in 48 hours. We both made it up to 75 however, which is a pretty respectable showing. I think 100 is possible, we just need to schedule it out better. Both of us stopped for a while yesterday, while we probably could have kept going if we didn’t have things to do. So next attempt (and yes! there will be another attempt) will be scheduled on something like vacation days, or a weekend at least. The espresso certainly helped out to keep the volume of liquid down, we’ll probably include more of that next time. Keeping meals simple but frequent made a huge difference for me. And antacid, lots and lots of antacid.
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The 100 Cup Challenge
I had to pause for a while last night so that I could get some work done. I just couldn’t concentrate after 36 cups in 24 hours. I’m back at it for a little while now though. Hopefully I’ll at least make 75 cups. I got no sleep last night, so this is as much of a survival technique as a continuation of the challenge. 20 cups over the next 6 hours.. that sounds doable. Someone yesterday suggested antacids, fantastic suggestion. So I’ve layed down a preemptive layer of those this morning. Those Tums chewables in assorted tropical fruit flavors are actually really good. I would eat them like candy if I had them around all the time. The white ones are my favorites, not sure what flavor it’s supposed to be but it’s damn good.
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