clc v6 and debconf6

I released common-lisp-controller 6 which has one major change: if you now compile a lisp file not under clc (or slime) control then the resulting fasl file will end up in /var/cache/common-lisp/<uid>/<implementation>/local/<full path of the source file> so that on upgrade of the implementation all cached fasl files will be removed. To give an example compiling /home/luser/cl-world-control/mind-beam.lisp will result (on sbcl) in /var/cache/common-lisp/1001/sbcl/home/luser/cl-world-control/mind-beam.fasl

The only problem with this is that is you remove the source-tree the cached fasl files will not get removed, but I guess people do upgrades with regularity (for sbcl every month or so) and sysadmins know that anything in /var/cache may be nuked at any moment.

For debconf6 I'm blogging about it on my non-debian and lisp blog (so that my non-debian friends read it) and uploading pictures to a special debconf6 flickr set.

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.