If your soulmate is married to somebody else, and you miss the opportunity to send her or him Valentine gifts today, consider self-marriage. Seriously.
Water is a Human Right
All Citizens of the EU,
the EU Commission is planning to privatize the water supply infrastructure, a move that will not only significantly raise the costs of water, but also turn water into a scarce commercial commodity.
Please support the petition against this short-sighted policy.
Thank you.
Stupid German Money for Europe
Hollywood Studios coined the phrase “Stupid German Money” for the 80% or so of German taxpayers’ subsidies to the movie industry that went right into Hollywood’s pockets instead of going to local independent film studios that were the intended recipients. Even though they’ve finally closed this loophole a couple of years ago, Stupid German Money remains the best example of German politicians’ incompetence in financial matters.
Now history is about to repeat itself on a much, MUCH larger scale by Stupid German Money soon to be spent en masse on the ESM to automatically bail out French, Spanish, and Italian banks… on a regular basis, without any way for Germans to have a say in the matter whatsoever.
Waldo Canyon Fire hits Colorado Springs
This year’s Waldo Canyon Fire has hit the beautiful city of Colorado Springs with devastating violence. It was the worst fire for a long time, and it is not over yet.
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Censorship in German Weekly DIE ZEIT
When we talk about censorship, we usually imagine old fashioned book burning ceremonies, or journals with parts forcibly blacked out or blanked out by the authorities.
Yet this isn’t the worst kind of censorship, because at least, that was highly visible. Less visible and not government-mandated, yet maybe worse in scope and quality, is censorship-based bias in moderating dissenting readers’ comments in commercial newspapers. One particular, if not really all that important, illustration is the obnoxious behavior of the moderators and journalists from the German weekly DIE ZEIT.
More ANSI Common Lisp Introspection
In the previous episode, we’ve obtained a list of all symbols with the function OBLIST, and looked at their internal slots with SYMBOL->CELLS. While this was useful to examine a single package like, say, COMMON-LISP-USER, it didn’t tell us what other packages were available.
In this post, we’ll revisit OBLIST, rewriting it with the somewhat unlispy LOOP facility. Then we’ll see how to get a list of all packages, and how to obtain a package description where available.
ANSI Common Lisp Introspection
Here is a couple of hopefully portable ANSI Common Lisp functions that will help you explore available objects (symbols). In this post you’ll find:
OBLIST, a function that returns a list of all objects??,?f,?v,?t, and?s, functions that will fetch the whole description or documentation strings of a symbolSYMBOL->CELLS, a function that returns the cells of a symbol (name, value, function, plist, package, docstrings) as an alistOBLIST-WITH-CELLS, likeOBLIST, but returns a list of cells for each symbol- introspection.lisp, the source file with all those functions.
VGWort’s Shady Business Model?
Unless you’re an author in Germany, you may never have heard of the ominous VGWort royalties collection agency. And unless you had to interact with them, you may not be aware of their shady, or at least highly questionable, business model. As a published author, I’ve had a pretty bad experience with VGWort lately, since they flatly refused to include my Python Book (Das Python Praxisbuch) in the list of books that are entitled to some royalties.
Bye, bye, GUUG
This is my last year as a member in the German Unix User Group (GUUG e.V.). I’m definitely leaving GUUG December 31st. 2012, and I don’t think that I’ll be back in the foreseeable future. I’m somewhat saddened by this move, but I see no alternatives for now.
John McCarthy, Dennis M. Ritchie, and Steve Jobs passed away
Three giants of the computer world have passed away in 2011: Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple Inc.), Dennis M. Ritchie (inventor of C) and John McCarthy (inventor of LISP, Artificial Intelligence, and time sharing).
Even though all three of them equally revolutionized the IT world, only Steve Jobs’ death drew the attention of the “genteel beast,” a.k.a. the mainstream media, while Dennis M. Ritchie (also known by his handle “dmr” to us old farts) and John McCarthy passed away in silence, unsung and unpraised. This is a crying injustice, IMHO, because without dmr’s C, there would be no Unix, Linux, no Mac OS X, no Windows… and no iWhatever gadgets today; and without McCarthy’s LISP, the second oldest high level programming language (after FORTRAN) still in active use today, the whole field of Artificial Intelligence wouldn’t have evolved the way it did, and most modern programming languages wouldn’t have adopted some of LISP’s best features.
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