Topics on my particular interests.
I love computer hardware. Especially the pace of improvement in it. I’m referring specifically to notebook hard drives. About a year ago, when I bought this laptop, the most capacious internal notebook hard drive available was a 120GB 5400RPM drive. I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB 7200RPM model. But last night, I was …
In my previous post, I discussed a very minor thing that I thought should be simple to do with a Lisp macro, but that I’d been working on for the better part of a week without success. As I’ve said before, once I run into a problem, I can’t leave it alone — I pound …
From everything I’ve read, Lisp’s macros are most useful for abstracting commonly-used patterns. Well, I quickly noticed a pattern that seemed ripe for abstraction, but after trying to do so for the better part of a week, I haven’t met with any notable success.
I tried. I really did. I gave it more than a week, but at the risk of turning Geek Drivel into the latest battleground in the editor holy wars, I found that I just can’t stand the venerable and much-venerated editor known as emacs. I’m sure that emacs aficionados will say that a week simply …
After spending a week and a half studying both the PDF version of Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp and my copy of Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp (comparison coming soon), I coded up some algorithms for the next Project X prototype in the language yesterday.
Oh, lovely. Microsoft falsely accuses twelve thousand people of piracy over the weekend, and considers it nothing but a “glitch.” If my company had a “glitch” like that, we’d likely be out of business come Monday. I hadn’t noticed the problem here, but that may have something to do with the fact that only two …
Continue reading ‘“Windows Genuine Advantage cries wolf (again)”’ »
Teenagers apparently think that e-mail is only for us old fogies.
I’ve been using C and C++ for over twenty years now, and I’m very fluent in both of them. C++ has been my preferred language for pretty much any programming task for most of that time, and I haven’t seen any point to learning other programming languages because some of them are at best equivalent …
Continue reading ‘I surrender — Lisp really is better than C++’ »
JoelOnSoftware (an ex-Microsoft employee) posted an absolutely scathing commentary on Vista and Office 2007’s packaging yesterday, along with a devastating comment on Vista itself: I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply …
“Firefox can block ads, so we’re blocking anyone using Firefox from seeing our pages at all.” Priceless. Nevermind the fact that the User Agent Switcher extension means that Firefox can appear to be any other browser, easily bypassing this kind of block. I can understand why people would want to do this, but they’ll need …