Eric at LispCast wrote an article about why PHP is so ridiculously dominant as a web language, when arguably more powerful languages like Common Lisp linger in obscurity.
I think the answer is pretty easy. In real life, practicality usually trumps everything else. Most programmers aren’t paid to revolutionize the world of computer science. […]

Ten days ago I complained that there were no good Lisp equivalents of ruby-forum or perlmonks. It looks like someone went and made one. What good timing.
I hope it’s a success, and I hope it stays newb-friendly. The amount of fake watch and shoe spam on comp.lang.lisp has reached critical mass.
Speaking of […]

There’s an article on Slashdot about a US Senate hearing on laptop seizures at border crossings. This affects me, because I travel to Canada a lot and plan to move there within a year or so.
It’s a problem because my job requires me to handle what amount to people’s medical records as data files […]

What’s the Common Lisp version of Perlmonks or Ruby-forum? I have yet to find it.
comp.lang.lisp is largely crap. 50% of the traffic on that list is spam about shoes and fake watches. The other half is equally split between:

People debating tiny, silly semantic points of the Common Lisp Hyperspec.
People stuck in the […]

Friday a guy on the phone said he’d call me back Monday or Tuesday to give me an update on when / whether they’re ever going to send me my monitor. Monday came and went with no call. Not really surprising.
I filed a complaint with the BBB today. We’ll see […]

People are stupid. We’re blinded by our own prejudices and biases and preconceptions. It’s kind of understandable because no one has enough time to really collect enough information to have an informed opinion about everything. So we end up extrapolating or relying on expert opinion or turning to our gut feeling. […]

When I was in college, one of the guys in one of my classes was an older fellow who’d been working in the Real World for a while, and he asked me one day what kind of job I wanted after I graduated. I remember saying “I have no idea. Pretty much anything. […]

In Linux when I use SSH I usually pass the host and port and username on the command line and then type the password when prompted. (In those rare cases I don’t use certificates to log in without a password.) In Windows, PuTTY makes you pick a host and port and then prompts […]

My ninth call to Westinghouse today, about my Westinghouse L2410NM 24″ LCD monitor which I RMA’ed back in March, revealed that they did in fact shipmy monitor, supposedly to my house, on April 4th or so. A UPS tracking number confirms it. There are are a few things wrong with this.

In spite of […]

I’m up to eight phone calls to Westinghouse now (about my RMA). (Previous Westinghouse enjoyment can be read here.) It’s been almost a month, and no one seems to know where my monitor is, other than reassuring me that “they received it”. I don’t think I should be kept waiting in the […]