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September 09, 2004
Implementation Language Selected: Lisp
Today I decided to use LISP as the implemenation language for Project SOULTRAIN. I discovered that there was a PostgreSQL package for CMU Common LISP, and that partly directed the selection.
Frankly, I'm tired of using programming languages that are intentionally under-powered. Nobody has made anything as strong as LISP since. It gets right to the point and is more powerful and flexible than anything else. Granted, I can do many similar things in other languages, but I haven't done them in LISP yet, and I bet after I learn how to do it, I'll be amazed at how powerful it is yet again. I'm ready for a mind-expanding experience, and neither Ruby nor Io nor Python are going to give me one (though I love them all).
Part of this was prompted by Alex pointing out that I hold LISP in higher regard than any other programming language. Well, fuck it—I'm ready to take the plunge.
The Spider
At work, a huge (1-2" in diameter) spider wandered in. It looks like it's in the recluse family, but it's not a brown recluse. I held him for questioning for about four hours, and then when Michael made it in, he took the spider out to the field.
My Favorite Design Pattern
For a long time now, I've said that Visitor is my favorite design pattern. And it probably is, overall, the most cool, though I hope not to have to use it again for some time. At work today, I got to enact the adapter pattern, and it was really quite fun. We have a shitty credit card authentication system from Go E-Merchant.com that works in a rather perverse way. You create a form and submit it via POST to their CGI, along with a redirection URL. They get your data and fire a Location-style header redirection off to your URL, with the results encoded in the URL as GET parameters. Not very wrappable, in point of fact, rather nasty.
We are going to be upgrading from this butt-nasty system to a proper system with a poor name called Advanced Integration Method or AIM. This system is more sane: you pass them your info via a POST and they give you back comma-separated values with every piece of information you could dream of (the old method only gave you whether it worked or not, and what the message was if it didn't).
The adapter came into play because we need to drop something into the old purchase page that's going to work with the new system. Hence, adapter: it looks like the old butt-nasty, but it works using the new magic. Plus, it affirms that library driving the new system works. All this makes me quite happy.
Lllama's Heat
During the past 6 days, Lllama went into and came out of heat. We need to get her to the vet.
Tomorrow
Apparently, tomorrow is the day of Zozobra, or “let's get drunk and set shit on fire” day. I will not be participating. Alex, Hillary, and Krishna probably will, though, at least in the fire. I think it's a waste of time, but more power to 'em; I can just skulk around here or program or something. Hopefully, Faust will come up and hang out with me and I'll initiate him into the dark theories of flow-oriented programming. Not sure if I can remember it well enough now, but if anyone is around who can help me get worked up and offended about the state of computer science these days, it's him. Maybe I'll even get to show him BeOS.
I spent a good chunk of time this past week looking back on BeOS and what I had hoped would come of it. Major mailed me a link to a store selling BeOS for $22.50 and I think I'm going to have to sink a little money into it one last time. The UI is starting to look a bit dated, but I miss everything being so fast, and the promise. I recall the semester I spent with an OpenBSD gateway and a BeOS-based computer; I think it was named Euryalus back then. Let's see if I can recall all the stupid names I've given my computer: Euryalus, Monolith, Murdock, Evolution. And the laptop is iDan. And the folk's computer is Polaris, and Nathan's computer is Godzilla or Parker. I still believe in the power of a pretentious name. I think I'm going to name the RAID server of Project SOULTRAIN Heorot, after the legendary hall of Beowulf. I need something pretentious that implies bigness, but isn't common enough to have been used by a bunch of teeny bitches. I liked Evolution a lot. It was short for Evolution is Inevitable or Obvious or something else, just to offend the creationists. It seems clear to me that God is clever enough to invent evolution, and kick back and let it do the work. I guess that's one reason why I'm interested in LISP so much, I expect it will provide the same kind of laziness to an ordinary human like me.
Bah
Posted by FusionGyro at September 9, 2004 05:00 AM
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