ECLM2006: better late then never

As others have already commented here, here, here, here and here ECLM 2006 was great. The level of the talks seems to be improving (not that I want to imply that previous talks were bad) and having companies asking for lispers was a novel experience. I must also agree that as an ex-physicist I found SigLab to be very impressive.

The bad points were the 6hour drive back and the 'reception' at work. I can only now start to catch up with non-emergency stuff. Such is life :-).

There is still a washlist of things to do before going to debconf6, not in the least getting medical coverage for .mx and power-plug adaptors. I've noticed that some other hackers are going with Iberia flight IB6403 (leaving on 13/5/2006 at 12:30). I'll try to dress 'debianista' to attract them.

die fuzzy fonts die!

root@sharrow:/etc/fonts/conf.d# ln -s kill-anti.conf 10-antialias-die-die-die.conf
And still pterm looks like shit. Damn.

a stunning crash

Slime tells me "Lisp connection closed unexpectedly: exited abnormally with code 256". I go and see: (sorry for the long line)

* Argh! gc_find_free_space failed (first_page), nbytes=8.
 Gen StaPg UbSta LaSta LUbSt Boxed Unboxed LB   LUB  !move  Alloc  Waste   Trig    WP  GCs Mem-age
   0:     0     0     0     0     0     0     0     0        0     0        0 2000000   0  0,0000
   1: 121288 15638     0     0 30022     1     0     0        0 122956040    18168 74632320   0 22771058045587471891756344047460264512912328495970408565885262128721370095226093339014016268704097497686156189724993758756525399616019155487351045354729920444619442123787213803893991126769353775124417090005956563018545473316412289883581293782691217408,0000
   2: 131071  6160     0     0 34634     1     0     0       69 141822136    42824 21427888 18640  0,0000
   3: 87088  6169     0     0 19167     1     0     0       23 78496608    15520 2000000 19144  0,0000
   4: 83996  6219     0     0 30404   915   124   109      106 128215256  1021736 2000000 30427 -0,0000
   5:     0     0     0     0  4267  3287  1461   552      283 38188928   997504 40188928 5250  0,0000
   6:     0     0     0     0  6127     0     0     0        0 25096192        0 2000000 5774  0,0000
   Total bytes allocated=534775160
fatal error encountered in SBCL pid 23015(tid 3076041632):

No, this sbcl session was not started before the big bang :-).

Airport Passenger Screening

Another stunning article from Schneier: Airport Passenger Screening. It seems that the success-rate for smuggling things through airport security is 70% for knives and an incredible 100% for bomb-parts.
To print out when flying to Oaxtepec :-).

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.