Info-mcl reborn

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.

Hacking DARPA

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.

No Boom

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.

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

Bunk and McNulty investigate a crime scene:

53 words total

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:

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

UAV Population Explosion

“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].

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

LOLPG

By Christophe.

Another Good Word

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...”