• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they'll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • ...actually, I'm also taking spanish!
• "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I'm really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I'll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I'll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux's Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he's blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I'm following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn't be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven't mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It's fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast's I've ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I'm stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I'm actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

The digression onto cl-pack was a wonderful little trip. I learned a bit more about Lisp and lots more about packaging software for Common Lisp. It was a good little project to cut my teeth on and hopefully better prepare me to see this through.

So wish me luck, I'll probably need it for this larger undertaking. Approach #1 is reading the Ruby code and then writing similar CLOS Lisp code. It seems like a decent approach off the top of my head.

clc-register-user-package to the rescue! Create ~/.clc/source and put your ASDF package there, then simply run

$ clc-register-user-package ~/.clc/source/package/package.asd

and volia, you can (require :package) from any of your Lisp systems there after.

It's pretty awesome. :)

cl-pack covers most of Perl's pack's features ignoring as far as I'm concerned only weird esoteric stuff. Granted thats up to interpretation but I am very happy with what cl-pack supports and so I am pushing out 0.2 and calling it "feature complete" unless I hear from anyone soon needing anything or with bugs. If not I'll rerelease it in a bit as 1.0. It's a pretty solid piece of work IMHO.

He'd suggested some more radical changes too, the biggest being to turn the two pack/unpack case statements into macro-foo so that I could just go

 
(define-directive #\i ...)
 

all on its own. I gave it a good try and pretty much got it working, but it unfortunately spits out about 125 style warnings, increased the code by about 100 lines or ~ 20% and I'm not sure in the end if it really was any clearer, so I scrapped that for now and am just releasing the basic easy changes and moving onto a few more features.

The planned release will be hopefully something like a few more features for 0.2.0 and then if nothing explodes, release it as 1.0 and cl-pack should be done-ish.

cl-pack is a Common Lisp library supplying perl/php/ruby compatible pack() and unpack() functions so that Lisp can easily communicate with those languages via binary protocols or files. pack() and unpack() take Lisp data and pack them into binary strings that can be stored or exchanged safely with other programs. The (un)pack functions are handy utilities that most other common languages support and now so does Lisp.

Cavets: This is the first release, therefor full coverage of all pack() syntax isn't yet available. Most data type (all common ones) are supported, as are repeaters in the form of numbers and '*'. Grouping with brackets and other extended syntax is not yet supported, but should be forthcoming in the next release. Documentation is in cl-pack.lisp and if you want to see what it can do, also look at tests.lisp. cl-pack is ASDF compatible so it should integrate with your system well. It relies on ieee-floats but ships with a copy should your system be lacking one.

You can get it at ftp.mindstab.net/cl-pack

So yeah, this is what I've been working on for the past month or so. Glad to get it out. I plan to throw up some small web page for it in a few days and then start working on the remaining syntax support.

Edit: I set up a page for cl-pack at CLiki http://www.cliki.net/cl-pack

I'm playing with a new RPC framework that doesn't have Lisp support but I'm looking to see if I could add it, and I've noticed that because it mainly uses a 'binary protocol' that Lisp doesn't necessarily support binary data types like float much. Or at all. And interestingly (at least to me) Lisp doesn't seem to have a Perl compatible (and PHP, Ruby, and Python) pack() and unpack() function, which, looking at the code of the implementation of this RPC frame work in all the other languages, is what they use to encode the data.

So I've stepped back from that for a moment and am playing around with writing pack() and unpack() functions in Lisp. Through this little side project I'm finally learning a lot more about Lisp packages and ASDF, so it's been fun so far. Integer support was dead easy to write, but I was dreading groking the ieee float specification enough to try implementing it, but thankfully someone already did and I can make use of the Lisp package ieee-floats for that, so Yay and thanks! And so hopefully soon I'll have a perl compatible pack() and unpack() set of functions for Lisp.

As a side note, even though it can be frustrating, I really do enjoy hacking away in Lisp, for some reason I just find it fun.

So far the only entered contenders are myself with "fink" and Rob with "RGB". He took an early lead for a while and was working towards beating our house bot, "Amigo" (found on the net, an old Go bot from the early 90s, was originally an Amiga gobot that was someone's PhD dissertation. It isn't super good, but it is fast), and making progress on that. I finally got some free time and have been working a ton in the last week and on friday got my bot up to a point where it could beat his, and thus took the lead. Now with some actual competition the two of use are both hacking away at a good pace and he's retaken the lead for now but neither of use can quite best Amigo yet.

I'm also pretty happy with myself as my entry is coded entirely in Lisp, and this is my first actual Lisp project. So things are sailing smoothly enough, and I'm also learning tons about Lisp. Also, I'm crediting the high level power of Lisp with letting me do more interesting things easily, which I'm going to attribute to the fact that my bot runs at usually 1/3 to 1/2 the time Rob's does, even when beating it, and his is written in C. So when it comes to thinking about optimizing, it seems algorithms are a lot more important than the speed of the language implementing it, and a language that lets you more easily use more complex algorithms is possibly better. We'll see though once everything is all said and done .

We're hoping a few of the other people who have expressed interest will soon get enough code together to join the competition, and we're always looking for more interested people. The more the merrier!