Another Word for Nerd

Cyrus Harmon finally has SBCL working under OS X on an Intel-based Mac. I can get back in the swing of things now. Thanks, Cyrus!

Built SBCL 0.9.10 this morning on the SPARC (E420R, quad 450MHZ CPUs, 4M L2 cache each, 4G RAM) and the x86 system (Dell SC420, Celeron 2.53Ghz, 1G RAM).

First, the Sun box (Solaris 9):

//build started:  Mon Feb 27 09:30:23 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Feb 27 10:58:32 CST 2006
real    88m9.016s
user    81m11.700s
sys     6m24.700s

Then, the Intel (Linux, FC4) system:

//build started:  Mon Feb 27 10:48:04 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Feb 27 11:04:15 CST 2006
real    16m11.196s
user    15m7.233
ssys     0m17.781s

No, not that del.icio.us, I’m talking about Delicious Library from Delicious Monster.

Using the built-in iSight camera on my new Mac, I’ve started cataloging all of the books I own - and boy, do I own a lot.

I’m about half done, and here’s the library so far.

I just built Steel Bank Common Lisp version 0.9.9 using a pre-existing 0.9.8 install on two of my systems.

Dell SC420
1G RAM, 160G SATA disk, Celeron 2.53Ghz CPU, Fedora Core 4
~15 minutes.

Sun Enterprise 420R
4G RAM, dual 18G SCSI disks, quad US-II 450Mhz CPUs (2M L2 each), Solaris 9
~2.5 hours.

Joel Spolsky has written one of the best articles I’ve ever read, about the dumbing-down of Computer Science educations. Some schools have replaced languages like Scheme and ML with Java, and are now trying to make Java even *simpler* to learn.

So far, so good. Yesterday I finally stopped trying to use vi navigation keys by default.

The only problem I’ve found so far - I can’t get either Aquamacs or Carbon Emacs to remember my window-size settings! I have to resize the window every time I launch the program.

I finally got Brad Parker’s MIT CADR emulator up and running. Here are some screenshots.

This weekend I’ll try to port the code to OS X (with X11). There’s some OS X-specific stuff commented out in the provided Makefile, but I still haven’t gotten a clean compile yet.

If the predicted new Mac mini with Intel CPU comes out in January, I’ll be replacing this iMac G5 (17″, 1.8Ghz) with one and a Dell 2005FPW widescreen LCD. Will make a nice small silent workstation.

Despite what AppleMatters and Ars Technica tell you, it is possible to completely dissasemble the Apple Mighty Mouse without breaking the retaining ring.

All I had to do was slip a razor blade between it and the body of the mouse to cut the glue. I was then able to pop the top of the mouse off the hinges on the bottom, unscrew the “scroll ball” assembly, pop off its top cover, and clean the rollers. I’ll have to glue the retaining ring back on with a couple dots of superglue, but the mouse works fine without it right now.

Update: Four drops of superglue, and everything’s back together and working perfectly. I’ve also crossposted this over at MacHELP.

Note: I took my Mighty Mouse apart after all the other cleaning methods had failed. I tried all kinds of cleaners, scrubbing the ball, etc, and it had gotten to the point to where taking it apart to clean the ball rollers was the only option.

Got a Linksys NSLU2 in today, so I overclocked it, installed OpenSlug, upgraded that to OpenDebianSlug, and now have a nifty tiny ARMlinux system with a 200G hard drive. I’ll be using it as a NAS and possibly move my rsnapshot-based backups to it as well.

runt:/# uname -a
Linux runt 2.6.12.2 #1 Tue Sep 27 20:21:18 CDT 2005 armv5teb GNU/Linux
runt:/# cat /proc/cpuinfo | head -3
Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5b)
BogoMIPS : 263.78
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp