Ken Dyck

Last summer, I had the idea to create a website that tracked gas prices, relying on volunteers to report prices. It looks like I wasn’t the only one.

The Programmers’ Stone has been around since 1997, but I only heard about it today. I can’t decide if I love it or hate it, but I spent the afternoon mesmorized by it.

Roedy Green has written a humourous guide on how to write unmaintainable code.

I already knew about ECL, but I only discovered chicken today, when I started investigating SWIG as a way to generate interfaces to C code from a Common Lisp. Neat stuff.

An excellent collection of online computer science articles and texts.

University of Southern California researchers are working on a system that will switch a customer from the automated telephone system to a human operator if he seems angry. Why would anybody think this a good idea? Who wants to live in a world where irrate obnoxious jerks get preferred treatment at the expense of those with enough self-control and civility to wait their turn without complaining?

Today, I am going to start using Emacs.

For the past five years, or so, I have been a Vim guy. Vim is a great text editor. I love the user interface. It is the most esoteric piece of software I have ever used, but once I climbed the learning curve, I could edit text more effectively than I had ever done before.

Over the past year couple years, I developed an interest in the Lisp programming language. I was aware that Emacs was a programmable editor and that its programming language was a Lisp. This seemed like an ideal opportunity. I could extend my editor in a language that I really enjoyed programing.

So last summer I decided to give Emacs a try. It was difficult getting started. The learning curve, like Vi, is pretty steep. Furthermore, all the Ctrl-Alt chording was physically painful. I managed to find and use the vip package (a Vi emulator for emacs), which eased some of the pain, but I found I still had to do way too much chording to be comfortable with Emacs. I gave up and went back to Vim.

Now the lure of a Lisp interpreter in my text editor has tempted again. So much so, that I am going to give Emacs another shot. If I can’t get Emacs to do what I want, I guess I will just have to write my own editor, but for now I am going see if I can make Emacs work for me.

The Itchy Robot has a beautiful gallery of found type (not that I claim any expertise in typography).

I have been reading Tanenbaum’s Modern Operating Systems, lately. On design issues in distributed operating systems, he writes,

Probably the single most important issue is how to achieve the single system image. In other words, how do the system designers fool everyone into thinking that the collection of machines is simply an old-fashioned single processor timesharing system? A system that realizes this goal is often said to be transparent.

A system that deliberately misleads its users about what it is doing, eh? I think the term he’s actually looking for is opacity.

Like Tom Shoop, I’m having some trouble understanding all the excitement about the idea of a manned mission to Mars. It is not so much that I have doubts in the abilities of NASA or the American government to make it happen, it is just that I don’t see how the benefits could possibly outweigh the risks.

If we send people to Mars, there is a very real possibility that they would never return. As Andy Rooney mentioned a couple weeks ago, “Scientists have said that it would probably be a one-way trip for whoever made it, because gravity on Mars is so strong that it would be impossible to bring along enough fuel for them to take off and return to Earth.”

On the other hand, mechanical probes like Spirit and Opportunity offer nearly all the benefits of space exploration with very low risk. They are able to explore and discover with absolutely no risk to human life.

I just don’t understand it. Risking the lives of people when there is a way to achieve the same results without risk just seems careless and stupid to me.