How you know when a book predates widespread internet availablilty 2008 May 3 20:57
Posted by diamond in : Random , add a commentWhen the book suggests using GNU Emacs1 and the footnote says:
1Available from Free Software Foundation, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Retro.
The book in question is COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach, published in 1992. I’ve tried learning lisp before, but the book i tried went about it all wrong, for me at least. Too much of the code snippets was in the to-be-explained-in-much-later-chapters category, which grates after a while. The above book, though old, is spot on in it’s approach. The first (short) chapter is dedicated to how to start the lisp interpreter, how to deal with errors, and how to exit it. The dealing with errors in particular was something that had never been explained in the previous book (Practical Common Lisp), and given that clisp will drop you straight into a debugger when you make a typo, this is highly relevant to those new to lisp like myself.
Lisp truly is an elegant language (and not just because xkcd says so). Once you get past how weird the syntax looks compares to most modern languages, it really starts to grow on you.
Extreme 2007 October 19 15:38
Posted by diamond in : Random , 1 comment so farToday i:
- climbed out a window
- at the top of one of the highest buildings in the country
- to pry a dead fox with a plank of wood
- so that we could open a door
My day was awesome. Thanks noirin -)
Not quite what was intended 2007 April 30 22:45
Posted by diamond in : Random , 2 commentsThis post was meant to be made on the basis of some notes that i was keeping on one of my palm treos. Unfortunately, i mis-read a dialog box while syncing it to the pc, and had it’s data overwritten by the backup from the other treo. Oh well ,-)
Instead, this post is composed from a couple of things i’ve been meaning to put up here for ELONGTIME.
Firstly, the checkers book. It’s real name is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”, which is a bit of a mouthful if you’re going to refer to it in speech. It’s an excellent book, it’s considered to be the definitive textbook on the title subject, and rightly so. It’s just the name that irks. So, taking inspiration from one of the quotes[1] on the official website, i’ve taken to calling it ‘the checkers book’. This here is my bid to try and spread that a bit -)
The second thing is anonymous samba share browsing for windows clients (it seems like i’m not so good at naming things either). For years it’s been niggling at me that i have been unable to figure out how to get a samba share that windows would be able to browse anonymously. I finally figured it out last summer, and have been meaning to document it ever since. Here’s how it goes.
[global]
...
security = user
map to guest = bad user
...
[sharename]
...
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
...
So, when a windows user tries to access the share, so long as their windows username is not the same as an account on the samba server, their user will silently be mapped to the guest user by the samba server. Without this, windows will throw up a dialog requesting username/password to access the server, and will never try connecting to the share as guest, meaning you can’t see the share without authentication. The bit i had been missing for years was map to guest = bad user.
And that’s all (s)he wrote.
[1] “Despite sporting a title that sounds about as interesting as The Longest Checkers Games I Ever Saw, Thomas Limoncelli and Christine Hogan’s The Practice of System and Network Administration is an exceptionally valuable book.” The original review that it is from is here.
It’s been a while 2007 February 21 23:27
Posted by diamond in : Random , 11 commentsSo, since the last post. I’ve decided to try and list some of the things that have happened since:
- Moved into the new apartment with niall
- Spent most of the christmas holidays doing IT support at home
- Went to zurich for a week on buisness. Motorised beds, that’s all i’m saying.
- Went on the company ski trip to italy
- Went snowboarding for the first time. In jeans. Didn’t die
- Planned and booked my second snowboarding adventure
- Stepped down from the Vice Presidency of skynet
- Had ~E1.6k taken from my credit card in fraudulent transactions
- Went to the opera for the second time. To see what i thought i had seen the first time
- I was wrong
- Went to SkyCon. Enjoyed
- Entered my first programming competition, set and judged by Alan Cox
- Won. Cheekily.
- Jumpstarted more cars than i cared for
- Watched Aladdin. Admitted it wasn’t awful
- Started playing Guitar Hero
- Bought a new desktop (aisling)
- Upgraded fluff (my server) at last
- Have only been back in balbriggan once
- Tried to donate blood, got rejected
- Got a performance review which noted that ‘Becoming known for truly terrible puns is no bad thing.’
- Reduced my medication back to 50mg, which is where it was 1.5 years ago
- Went to the dentist for the first time in 10 years. Apparently i’ve gotten away with it by having ‘very good oral hygiene’
- Read all of the Sandman comicbook series
- Oh, and got engaged tonight. Yes, to noirin
Joyous joy 2006 December 14 16:53
Posted by diamond in : Random , 4 commentsJust signed the lease and received the keys for this place. After 2 months 3 weeks of being homeless, it’s a most wonderful relief to finally have a place to live, and a nice place in a kickass location at that. Oh, and the lease we signed set the rate to €100 below the asking price, which was a nice surprise -)
