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.

Play a CD, get a rootkit installed

If you play a Sony music CD it installs a rootkit on your windows machine. What a stunning idea.

clisp now builds on alpha and ia64

I used the more conservative flags of -D SAFETY=3 -D NO_MULTIMAP_SHM -D NO_MULTIMAP_FILE -D NO_SINGLEMAP -D NO_TRIVIALMAP for the more exotic architectures and it seems to work for alpha and itanium. The hppa buildd failed in a most strange way and I'm waiting with impatience for the results of the m68k and sparc jury :-).

telenet and proxy errors

My bother had severe problem with telenet (the local cable company) and he actually called the helpdesk while I was with him. I noticed the error they made and so could correct it. Normally they ask you to configure http://pac.telenet.be:8080 as pac file. The pack file is:

/* PAC FILE: VERSION MANAGEMENT WITH CVS
 * USE CVSWEB FOR UPDATING !!!
 *
 * Proxy autoconfig file
 *
 * $Revision: 1.29 $
 * $Date: 2004/04/01 06:58:30 $
 *
 */

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
       return "DIRECT";
}

Notice that there is no proxy configured. When this did not work they asked to configure proxy.telenet.be:8080 as a proxy without disabling the pac stuff. This also did not work. After the long call on the expensive helpdesk I tried configuring the proxy and disabling the pac. That worked.

Of course as he was using an inferior operating system as a first step he had reinstalled everything, and lost some data he had forgotten to backup.

I wonder when they will fix the pac file...

Gains and losses

I've removed the hoary and hoary24 sections of the CL package repository I host on p.d.o.
On the other hand I and David D. Smith will adopt the clisp and libsigsegv packages that Will Newton took good care off up until now. We will coordinate the work through the darcs archives on cl-debian.alioth.debian.org.

Heads up: clc security problem

There is a security problem with common-lisp-controller: please read DSA-811 and upgrade as soon as possible.

The irony is that this is caused by moving to a simpler architecture because of (among other problems) security concerns :-(.