Recently you may have noticed a certain amout of blog.love of Paul Graham . What can I say, I really liked his book Hackers and Painters. He talks somewhat extensively about the programming language LISP. To this end I have taken up the challenge and am now working through his instructional book ANSI Common Lisp. Here is how I managed to get an emacs-based IDE running Common Lisp. You need this web page for background: [ LINK ]. Download fink if you don’t have it. This is a handy tool for grabbing new command-line-ish tools Make sure you can get clisp: “sudo fink list clisp” - something should come back with the word clisp in it.

I loooovvvve Tiger. Yay Tiger! All the press is pretty much the same, i must say that I love Spotlight the most though. Spotlight indexes every file on your system. I kid you not. Say you remember that you received mail from rsteans and had a file with his name on it. Invoke spotlight, type those letters and …. seconds later there’s a list of all the email with rsteans as a sender, recipient, his address book entry, everything. It makes browisng your file hierarchy a snap! The second great feature Spotlight has is that you can launch applications with it.

For all of you thinking about taking a loot at Lisp, the guys over at Gigamonkeys have build a pretty handy tool for getting started with at quickness. Download and check it out (OS X and Linux. Windows, as ever, lags).

During the Ice Storm week I learned the basics of LaTeX. LaTeX is a document preparation system. By writing a type of markup you can pass it through the LaTeX formatting engine, which, in turn, utilizes Knuth’s TeX language, and it will format it and you can output it to a variety of formats, like PDF. Update: I’ve created a LaTeX reference page. Check it out: \title{A LaTeX Demonstration} \begin{document} \maketitle When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I’m not just a fanboy because my most excellent friend P-dizzle earns his daily bread on the hills of Page Mill Road, but because the virtualization software totally mega absolutely freaking rocks. I bought their latest product, Fusion, yesterday. It’s the virtual machine platform for new Intel Macs. So on this one can run a virtual machine of Windows, and I’m currently typing this in a virtual machine of Ubuntu Linux “Feisty Fawn”. Real reason is that I needed to figure out some magic associated with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy. For VMWare this is a snap. I created an ubuntu image, installed the necessary apache components and am now figuring out the magic.

Must display unicode properly Must let me use command ( AKA the apple key ) as META on the command line ( i.e. meta+b goes back one word ) Option is not an acceptable substitute for META ( lookin’ at you, iTerm )

I’ve been away a while because I’ve been working very hard on migrating my legacy application. After hours and hours of punching a way in Vim, Perl, M4(!), and making screencasts the last thing I wanted to do was come home and type some more. The interesting thing is that some of the work that I have done is able to be discussed in a public forum, so I’ll actually be able to show not just tell. In all this typing of late, I’ve been using the vim editor for many, many hours. Given that the MacBook Pro seems to be the de rigeur tool for the modern hacker, has anyone come up with a solution on how to avoid this problem:

I recently got a new computer and decided to set up Mutt locally on it. Here’s how to get to reading mail with Mutt in a way that supports HTML and multi-byte character sets. This is not a perfect HOWTO (especially in the mutt ./configure section), but should get you most of the way there. Use Darwin Ports sudo port install rxvt-unicode sudo port install tokyocabinet (if you’re going to talk to an IMAP host and want to cache the data, you need a db to cache into) sudo port install w3m (for displaying HTML mail) Set up your shell to help mutt with multibyte export LC_CTYPE="en_US.

I recently got a Cisco Flip camera. It’s awesome, but OSX has a major problem that it launches iPhoto (in addition to the Flip software) when I plug in the device to the USB port. This means that two applications are busily indexing the contents of a USB device every time I want to use it. To inhibit: