My Common Lisp and Debian blog. For more off topic rants and stuff please see my livejournal blog.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

nugget of code

Suppose you have a feature debug that you use to turn on debugging, and that if debug is on *features* you want to araneida not to cache your responses for a day. Then you can use the following code:


(araneida:request-send-headers
request
:content-type "text/html"
;; cache this page for 24h
#-debug #-debug
:expires (+ (get-universal-time) (* 60 60 24)))


The #-debug #-debug will exclude both expressions that follow. Another neat trick I've learned from Erik Naggum.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

presentation is online

I've put the Benelux lisp meeting talk online, together with source here.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

common-lisp-controller problems

It seems some users tried to get help for clc via cliki. Too bad I didn't pay so much attention to that page lately.

So I published the clc package on alioth a bit more and created two mailing-lists for people to subscribe to. In 6 to 24 hours they should get created.

Most people complain of a lack of RPM's or the ease of adding local packages. The problem with the latter is that I don't have a rh system, nor do I wish to create one. And build farms don't seem to exist. The problem with the last issue is deeper. asdf-install doesn't define user specific system directories for any implementation that isn't sbcl. So to 'fix' clc we have to modify asdf-install or make the world more complex by dividing them in clc-enabled (with user packages) and non-clc-enabled (no user pacakges unless you run sbcl). Sigh.

Let's make it a point to chat about on sunday...

Actually users complaining means that I have users! Good >:-).

Friday, September 17, 2004

pg

Of course I notice a bug in pg's extended query support while writing the presentation about it. Sigh.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

4GB is not enough?

I have a 4GB vmware-ed XP partition that I tried to upgrade to SP2 today. In vain. After downloading it for the 3rd time it told me instead of "installation failed because there is not enough space on your harddisk" the slightly better "you need an additional 493MB of free space to install XP". Sorry? There is nothing installed except the base of XP on this partition and it is too small to even containt that.

That and the problems I've been having today to get a minimal install of RHAS 2.1 makes me believe nobody is interested in the maxim "small is beautiful". Or as I think "less code are fewer bugs".

Sunday, August 22, 2004

skynet pop3 servers don't like Linux anymore.

Since a week pop.skynet.be refuses to send me my email if /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling == 1. I opened a ticket for this, but the response was 'please visit www.google.be'. Yeah. Now I've heard from anyother geek who was wondering why he didn't get anymore email via his official mailbox.

So in the end I decided to dump those losers and got me a fastmail.fm account. They have https/imaps/smtps access, even through proxies on port 443, sieves, spamassassin etc. It is so much better then the skynet crap.

I wonder how long it will take them to realise something is wrong. Pretty long I guess, as most people seem to use their useless webmail interface...

Saturday, August 21, 2004

google me: postfix smtp sasl/tls problems

If you get errors like:

warning: SASL authentication failure: No worthy mechs found
send attr reason = Authentication failed: cannot SASL authenticate to server XXX[YYYY]: no mechanism available

Then the problem could be that the sasl modules are not installed. A quick 'apt-get libsasl2-modules' will solve that.