briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: SBCL)

Money solves everything?

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:16:01 -0800

After saying I didn't want to throw money at this problem, I threw money at it. I checked out some other VPS hosts and none of them offered anything substantially different than my host, at least not at the price I'm paying. So I paid to double the RAM for my server on my current host, then fired up my origami site again last night and it hasn't given me problems yet. Perhaps 368MB was just not enough to run SBCL and Apache and a bunch of Mongrel servers all together. Intuitively I would've though it'd be enough, but such is life.

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed, usually it took a day or two for SBCL to start gasping for life so there's still time for all my problems to return. I hope this works out, because I really liked writing my site in Common Lisp. Thanks to all who posted their own brief success stories and suggestions, telling me I was wrong to give up on SBCL.

I'm not a great programmer, that much I recognize and admit freely. If anything, I'm an enthusiastic programmer. I enjoy doing it, I enjoy my little successes, I enjoy learning from my frequent failures. I'm grateful for anything that helps me figure out what the heck I'm doing. Failing is a good way to learn.

SBCLish host wanted

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:44:08 -0800

After sleeping on it, I think I'm going to switch hosts and try to keep going with SBCL and Hunchentoot.

If you're reading this and you know of a VPS unmanaged web host that's known to work well with SBCL, could you please comment and let me know what host you use, and what plan at that host, if it offers more than one plan, and what OS you prefer? So far I've heard Slicehost and OCS Solutions suggested. (Slicehost offers Gentoo. Do I dare?)

Note to all, my current host for my SBCL-driven site is FutureHosting. I'd advise people to avoid them if you plan to run SBCL. Their support and service is usually pretty good as long as you don't push it too far, but their servers are pretty wonky at times and after the comments from my last post, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of my problems were due to some kind of VPS misconfiguration. Their support staff told me nothing more than "pay for more RAM" when I informed them of the problems I was having.

Lisp?

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:31:29 -0700

I decided to start learning Lisp, after hearing good things about it from a bunch of people. So far, I can recognize a lot of Ruby elements that must have been ganked from Lisp. My prediction is that Ruby will end up being mostly a superset of Lisp except for a few areas Lisp is specifically targetted at. But we'll see.

I'm learning right now via the book Practical Common Lisp. The whole thing is free online, which is clearly awesome. I may buy it just so I can read it when I'm away from my computer.

As the book says, finding a Lisp interpreter isn't straightforward, because there are a lot of them. I settled on SBCL, for the simple reason that it's the only one that would compile properly. If you use Gentoo and want SBCL, be sure to get the unstable version. The stable version wouldn't even compile for me.

I'm resisting the push to use emacs instead of vim. I'll stop using vim when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.