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.