Swiss

Normally I keep this for on-topic Debian or lisp stuff, but I could not resist commenting on the swiss comment.
One word: Sabena. Most if no all Belgians are still bitter about the whole tragic story and I feel sad that Swiss will claim another nice airline as its (hopeful) last victim.

New common-lisp-controller version

We (I and René van Bevern) have been working on a new version of clc. This should add support for 'create a core from these files' implementations, like ecl. It also uses the UID of the user to create the cache directory, andcustomizationn of the systems loaded by default in the standard images.

It works for us, but we would be grateful if people could try it out and suggest improvements. Get it at:
http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-packages/common-lisp-controller/common-lisp-controller_5.10_all.deb

No ecl in debian yet, as I've run up against a strange compilation failure.

Baen books

Thanks to a hint on the Baen CD site I ordered the electronic versions of The Far Side of the Stars by David Drake and War of Honor by David Weber. Both these electronic versions contain a 'bonus CD' image, so I now got a copy of the Slammers CD and of the Baen's At All Costs CD.

I know it is possible to just download the iso's from several sources, but after spending many hours with "Lt. Leary", "Belisarius", "Honor Harrington", "Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock" and the always entertaining Posleen I felt that paying a few dollars was in order.

clisp 2.37 seems unable to append to files

I had already noted clisp bug 1399709 a few days ago. As nobody reacted I started to think something was wrong with my setup. Then I saw Gary King has the same problem on Mac OS-X. So I think maybe the problem does exist after all :-(.

Note to debian people: this problem is delaying the release of a new clisp version with a fix for the xlibs-dev transition.