Well that was fast and easy. Configuring now.

Sunday morning. Today is one of our Christmases, the first of I think three we’ll have with family this year, and the biggest. Per tradition we made our Bacon Cheddar soup, this year an experimental tripling of the recipe (appears to have come out fine). I am currently, though in the field, logged into my home computer and installing Citadel/UX to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The semester being finished, I finally upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, and for the fun and experience of it switched to KDE, which I so far am enjoying, especially Konqueror. Small adjustments, etc. I do most of my stuff on the command line anyway. Also using the break to do two things iKve never done before: set up a home mail server (which, if it works satisfactorally, I will switch to from my several-years-old gmail accout - not crazy about Google anymore) (I’m trying a ‘turnkey’ open source groupware suite called Citadel, which has its roots in BBS software), and readin Anna Karenina, which I’m only some 120 pgs into but am enjoying, though I only have real affection for one of the characters, Levin, whom Tolstoy evidently modelled very closely on himself. The book makes me crave champagne, because all the characters drink it all the time.

….hard to ignore the feeling of satisfaction.

…is in. Finished it last night. It was for the crash-course class I took over two weeks in the Fine High Summer. Stumbling slick and top-heavy into the sodden murk of December, I have less enthusiasm for the work. Final #2 due Monday and #3 due Thursday.

Got a Hunchentoot server running and working properly in my Lisp
–Dumbass hint for anyone else who tries to do this: run your emacs as a superuser when you install everything.

So, for my 452 final, as previously mentioned, I’m working up some Lisp. One of the obstacles to doing so is, how ought I to turn it in?

1. Save a log of my programs in action on my own machine, annotate it, turn it in as a text file?

2. Export my entire Lisp runtime as an executable (probably some 25 megs), and post it for download?

3. Attempt to embed my work into a Lisp web server hosted in a vm on my own box?

–I’ve been leaning toward (3), but putting together a working web server using Hunchentoot on SBCL in Linux is turning out to be a challenge. I enjoy the embarrassing dearth of low-level info the internet yields on the subject (especially published since 2007), as it makes me feel like it might afford me opportunity for (some kind of) publication; but at present I’m experiencing it mainly as a vexing obstacle.

–And on the subject of publication: though I’m finding a certain amount of arrogant-sounding opining on the subject on a few specific (long defunct) wikis, I’m finding virtually nothing in ‘the literature’ on the use of s-expressions as markup (or, speaking a little more broadly, the relative merits of s-expressions and Lisp in information organization). It seems to me such a conscpicuous lack that it causes me to doubt my own information-seeking skills; but if I’m not mistaken, there may be room for research here.

Sunday night. I’m working on a case study of the USA PATRIOT Act, due as a final exam on some 12/03. PDF’s, bibliographies, citation trails, emacs (always emacs). Zotero is a citation manager plugin for Firefox that I use; it previously obstructed my use of my library’s proxied access to journal databases but now doesn’t, and has become my best friend. Much recommended.

The idea is to not have a bunch of work to do over Thanksgiving, which A and I are spanning in Dallas with my matriline. I’m satisfied with my progress on my Lisp final; the case study snuck up on me. My other final is not something I’m worried about.

…Is the language I’m teaching myself, finding it, as I do, much easier to understand than the Python and (god forbid) Java I’ve seen (which isn’t much), though I do dig it much when knowledgeable old friend JM tells me that my parens and lambdas smack of socialism. The ultra-simple syntax of it though makes me always know where I am and what I’m looking at, which is helpful. Doing this for LIS452: Foundations of Information Processing in LIS. The class is doing Python. I’m running with it.

After fiddling around for literally months I have learned that emacs comes as a standard part of OS X - you just have to run it from the terminal.

*n.b. I am not a mac owner. I just have to use one at work.