Curious About Everything
Probably it’s no surprise why Google is where it is today, if you actually listen to one of it’s creators. That’s a very long video, but trust me, it’s a highly inspiring talk. He’s does a very good job of enumerating all the cool problems that are begging to be solved, and and how few people are actually working on stuff that would change the world. Awesome.
Hi all, after a rather long pause, I basically upgraded the entire vps that runs viamentis.com, right from the kernel up. The Bytemark folks are incredibly helpful as usual, and if you need some hands-on Linux hosting, they’re the guys to go to.
As a result, the site feels considerably faster, and am pleased that it went without a hitch, unlike my previous upgrade attempts (which is why I was putting it off for a while, as I didn’t have the time to spend on it). Finally, I had to install SBCL for staging the Lisp webapp that I am working on, so I had to basically upgrade the whole shebang. Am I glad I did 
Yes, expect some action in the future, as I will be staging the Alpha release on this machine and will be asking some of you to take a look at the app. This is still a few weeks away, and it’s a very basic app, but I think it does the job, and I will finally be able to see how good Lisp is for webapps, for myself. Stay tuned!
John W. Backus, inventor of the Fortran language, dies. He is party responsible for the Backus-Naur Form, or what we normally call BNF. He also pushed the state of the art in functional programming, which I partly work on these days. Thanks Mr. Backus, we owe you.
I am writing some tests retro-actively for a project that I am working on. Trust me, it’s no fun. I kept postponing writing them as I thought “I’m just prototyping this, it’s too early to write tests”. Trust me, that’s a mistake. Even if you’re noodling around with some code for a future project, start writing tests. It will take a lot of motivation to do it later.