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Archive for October, 2008

Clash: Common Lisp as Shell

October 23rd, 2008
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I often feel a little sad that – being a child of the 80s – I will never have the chance to operate a Lisp Machine.  They were popular around the time that AI was the big buzzword in Computer Science, then they died out when that bubble burst.  Today the buzzwords are ‘Cloud Computing‘, ‘Virtualisation‘, ‘Agile Development‘ and all kinds of terms related to abstraction of services, infrastructure and development.  (The very things that Lisp offered.

As an homage to these archaic list processing behemoths, I have followed the instructions on clisp.cons.org for setting up Common Lisp as a login shell.  So far it’s looking surprisingly good.  It has the features of bash – for the most part – infused with the ability to directly evaluate lisp expressions and save the definitions out as you work.

The instructions on clisp.cons.org call for a lot of package compilation and dependency walking but if you are running a fairly recent debian or ubuntu system then you should be able to get up and running by installing the following packages through apt-get:  clisp clisp-dev cl-ffi libreadline5.

So – that’s the shell now running through Lisp.  Next step is to have a separate processor performing symbol tagging and type checking, hardware implementations of primitive lisp procedures, … etc! :-)

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My Push GMail Adventure

October 14th, 2008
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Like many other people who have long standing GMail accounts and now use an iPhone (or possibly other smartphone) I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of push notification service.  Here I offer my solution- It’s not perfect and hopefully at some point GMail will support push notification.

Requirements

  • Mobile Me account
  • Gmail Account
  • iPhone
The Steps I took:
  1. I take advantage of a gmail feature detailed here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12096.  I always subscribe to mailing lists using myemailaddress+<nameoflist>@gmail.com so that I can filter on mail sent specifically to me.
  2. Set up a rule that will forward all mail sent to myemailaddress@gmail.com to my mobile me address (In other words, everything that isn’t a mailing list).  In the same rule also apply a label “FW_me.com” so I can later filter out these messages to mark as read etc (I know, it’s not perfect!)
  3. On the iPhone, having previously set up ‘Push’ I just add my mobile me account and disable GMail IMAP.
  4. In the mobile me mail settings disable the me.com smtp server and enable the GMail smtp server.  Now when I reply to mail it still comes from GMail.
Results:
Yay, I now have push email on my iPhone without having to move to a new email address.  I believe similar results can be achieved by fowarding through YMail! and some other Push supporting services, but I may as well use my mobile me account.
Grievances:
  • Changes are not pushed back – you must manually mark mail as read later.
  • messages are stored on device – Ideally messages stay on the server
  • Messages are duplicated through services – clogging the intertubes

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Obsolete

October 14th, 2008
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So, I was in Tesco yesterday getting a tape converter for my car stereo… (I know, finally!!) and the girl at the counter asked me: “What are these audio cassette converters for?”

I answered. “Oh, you can put them into a car tape player and listen to a CD or MP3 player in the car.” 

She nodded but I still remained unsure that she understood.  As I left the store the sudden realisation hit me.  She wasn’t really asking “What is an audio cassette converter?”  She was asking “What is an Audio Cassette?”

 

Those darn kids better get off my lawn!

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