I’m really blown away by how nice a bit-o-work git is. What Eric von Hippel taught me works both ways. Real innovation requires close contact between a interesting problem and talent. When you encounter innovation it signals an interesting problem and engaged talent. Ignore the story told. Look for that problem and why the talent [...]
If this doesn’t work out blame him, but I’ve moved the blog out of my basement. It’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
I’m struck by how visceral my reaction to this is: For my part, I don’t see any reason why the Lisp community should constrain itself to having exactly one defsystem facility. It misses the heart of the problem so completely that it unintentionally makes it worse.
CL-PPCRE is a Lisp clone of the perl regular expression subsystem (i gather it’s even faster). I love it because lots of things I used to do in Perl or AWK I now do in Lisp. Each language has it’s coding tricks and there are lot for Perl’s regular expressions. The Perl regex manpage is [...]
I believe it was Ray Kurzweil, circa 1989, who advised encouraging a private jargon inside your new company. I remember because that was just about the time I was starting to think open would totally trump closed in our industry. The advise seemed to my ears a bit old fashion. But at the same time [...]
Here’s an amusing business tactic: lock out the customers. You know the drill. You visit the website, log-in, and the vendor inserts an extra page forcing you to provide your missing zip code, or what ever. “Our data quality is more important than your time.” So this company, a health club, locked their patrons out [...]
Dan Weinreb wrote a long blog post recently outlining what Common Lisp’s “Conditions (exceptions) are really about.” He argues, and I won’t disagree, that they provide a clean, even elegant, way to handle all the long tail of situations that arise when your trying to be fastidious about the contract for your functions. One of [...]
Finally Google is revealing some of the means they will provide to allow third parties to run code closer to their assets. Last week was good for Python! Since, we learned that Google’s leading language for developers will be Python. While they assert that the platform is language neutral it certainly looks like only Google [...]
Wrote small Common Lisp library for accessing the echonest music analysis API. All the other APIs are jealous. Writing this was fun because I got to use Relax NG for the first time in actual code. By inspecting the XML that comes back from echonest I guessed at what the schema was and wrote it [...]
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