I had to undelete someone’s files from a FAT partition today. My first thought was to use good ol’ Windows to do so, given that Windows is the unholy ground which spawned FAT to begin with. I remember there used to be an UNDELETE command of some sort in some old version of […]

The SBCL download page shows version 1.0.14 released today, and it’s already in Portage (masked). The gentoo-lisp list says we got a new Lisp project lead recently. Looks like there’s plenty of Lisp going on in the Gentoo world. Personally I am very pleased with the state of Lisp in Gentoo.
Sometimes I […]

In my oh-so-neverending quest to learn Lisp and make a webpage using it, today I actually bothered trying to install SBCL on my server, which is a VPS running Debian.
Failure. I got errors like this:
mmap: Cannot allocate memory
ensure_space: failed to validate 536870912 bytes at 0×09000000
(hint: Try “ulimit -a”; maybe you should increase memory limits.)
This […]

Six developers (or people pretending to be developers) responded to my survey.
Now, given a random online poll that I might stumble upon, I estimate a 3% chance that I would ever bother to respond to it. Extrapolating from this the fact that only 3% of the devs reading Planet Larry responded to […]

I was wondering today how many Gentoo devs actually read Planet Larry.
If you’re a Gentoo dev, and you feel so inclined, could you leave me a short comment? Just say “hi”. In this way, I shall count you.
I’ll at least get a lower bound answer this way. Unless no one […]

Via this page I learned of the existence of apachebench, which was installed on my system already (probably along with Apache2) as /usr/sbin/ab. This tool lets you hammer a server and see how it handles concurrent requests etc. Long before I read this diatribe I knew that I didn’t know crap about statistics […]

Gentoo is a good platform for playing with Lisp. Given it’s the only platform I’ve used for playing with Lisp other than Windows, and I doubt anything could be as bad as Windows. But Gentoo works fine.
Here are some other links that I’ll probably find useful in a few months even […]

For a long time in Gentoo, if I had the “Use my KDE style in GTK applications” option selected in KDE, certain themes would cause all GTK apps to fail to even start. Only certain QT themes did it though. Domino for example, which happens to be my favorite QT app.
I also had […]

Imagine if you will, a field of daisies. In the background, some sappy music. Perhaps Chariots of Fire? At one end of the field, running in slow motion, arms spread wide, is a pasty white, lanky, bespectacled geek. At the other end, a nondiscript black box. What is this box? […]

I had to buy a mouse for my laptop, and this Microsoft mouse is what I got. Microsoft does actually seem to make decent mouses. It’s a nice little mouse, takes one AA batter that supposedly lasts 6 months, has a little USB antenna that snaps into the base of the mouse for […]