June 29, 2007

Info-mcl reborn

who are these masked kids?

Info-mcl, the mailing list for Digitool's commercial Lisp MCL, is now being hosted by Clozure, which is the sort of spin-off company that is responsible for OpenMCL. It's a small thing, but its gotten the MCL fans a little excited:

From: Peter Paine
Subject: Re: info-mcl update
Date: 2007-06-29 07:15:33 GMT

At 1:58 PM -0400 6/28/07, Alice Hartley wrote:
>The info-mcl mailing list is now being hosted by Clozure.

Hurrah! The info-mcl list actually seems to be working again - after 
all those dysfunctional years.

It will be interesting to see who remains a MCL user, what with the 
list being mangled for so long, the brick wall of Intel compatibility 
(i.e. MCL is unusable on any current Apple product), Digitool last 
showing signs of life via it's site in May 2005, and now the 
unilateralist Apple raising it's axe over Carbon's neck.

Of course the big question is how Clozure is talking to Digitool (and 
vici versa).

OpenMCL seems to have it all, Cocoa, 64bits, Open, ... but it doesn't 
have what MCL has had - a development environment in which a lisp 
engineer can work to develop an application.  Starting with Fred, 
graphics, ...

Here's hoping that Lisp on the Mac platform can come back from the 
dead.  After all the work put into Lisp over the years, my hope is 
that we are about to see a renaissance.  But as I'm primarily a GUI 
developer, I live perhaps in a world of self delusion - I call 
optimism.

Without communication there was no chance of community, without 
community MCL's future was dire.  I think just mention of MCL/Clozure 
is a good omen.
Posted by jjwiseman at 11:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hacking DARPA

it is now officially freakout time
At 9:33 AM, Feb 20 1971, instead of broadcasting the usual weekly test signal for the Emergency Broadcast System, W. S. Eberhardt at the National Emergency Warning Center in Cheyenne Mountain accidentally broadcast the tape of a real alert. “I can't imagine how the hell I did it.” It took 45 minutes and several tries before they finally broadcast a cancellation containing the correct codeword. More EBS codewords. [via mefi.]

DARPA never answers my email.

Since I haven't heard back about my request to add an RSS feed to their Grand Challenge discussion forum, I rewrote my bulletin board scraper from a couple years ago to handle the new format and am now publishing a feed that gets updated every half hour.

Posted by jjwiseman at 09:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 26, 2007

No Boom

from biophysics of the bird flightby karl herzog

On Friday I went outside at about the right time for the double sonic booms of the Space Shutle landing at Edwards Air Force Base, but I wasn't able to hear anything over the traffic on Sunset Blvd. Militant Angeleno was more successful, and even has a recording.

Posted by jjwiseman at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 19, 2007

RID Analysis of a Classic Dialogue Between Bunk and McNulty From Season 1 of The Wire

i love all these characters

Bunk and McNulty investigate a crime scene:

▾ PRIMARY:NEED:SEX
fuck31 fucker2 fuckety1 fuckin1 fucking1
PRIMARY:100.000000 %
EMOTIONS:0.000000 %
SECONDARY:0.000000 %

53 words total

Posted by jjwiseman at 02:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 16, 2007

Stupors

This is what happens when I turn my back for just a minute if there's an open container of catnip within Mr. Shrimp's reach:

mr shrimp overindulges in catnip and finds himself in a stupor

Rachel's reinterpretation of the feline stupor in human terms:

rachel's diabetic coma

Posted by jjwiseman at 03:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 15, 2007

UAV Population Explosion

a big vintage buick trying to make it up to the earth
“One of about 50 big 50s cars tied into a riverbank in Central California for erosion control.” From Lost America.

In the past four years the U.S. Military's UAV inventory has increased by almost 15x, from about 200 vehicles to about 3200 [via DIY Drones].

DOD UAV flight hours graph

I think this is the first public photo of the first UAV designed from the ground up for combat:

Boeing X45-C UAV

Posted by jjwiseman at 04:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 12, 2007

LOLPG

LOLPG: invisible arc

By Christophe.

Posted by jjwiseman at 12:43 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 04, 2007

Another Good Word

if being the creature from the black lagoon is wrong, i don't want to be right
Fashion photo, 1947. From shorpy.

Homoiconicity, “a property of some programming languages, in which the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself...”

Posted by jjwiseman at 12:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack