RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay by Federico Biancuzzi -- Though some in the open source world claim that the GPL is now unnecessary, RMS and the Free Software Foundation are still working night and day to promote the idea of software freedom. Part of that is a revision to the popular GNU General Public License. Federico Biancuzzi recently chatted with Richard Stallman about the goals and plans and successes of the GPL.
As every now and then, someone asked in c.l.l what's so great about Lisp. An, as always, among the don't feed the troll reactions, there have been some educated answers trying to enlighten the poor guy. But one of the answers, entitled What's so great about Jazz? is so great that Bill Clementson is reporting the whole story in his blog. The unparalleled Louis Armstrong summed it up in a few words:
"Man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know"
'Nuf said.
In 1987, Eugene Garfield published an article in Essays Of An Information Scientist (Vol. 10, 1987) that listed the most frequently cited works in the Arts & Humanities Index between 1976-1983. The top ten are:
If you're curious, here's the complete list. (Source: Boing Boing).
A darwinport of MDK is now available. Thanks to my good friend Aleix, who created it yesterday. The port seems to run fine for the command line utilities, while the GTK+ GUI (available as a variant) has some instabilities. It has not (yet) entered the 'official' distribution, but you can get it here in the meantime. Those are friends!
I just released MDK 1.2.1. GNU MIX Development Kit was my first (and most important so far (which, admittedly, is a shame)) contribution to the FS world. It served me extremely well to learn a lot about writing and maintaining free software. Nowadays, MDK is more than five years old, but i try to keep it current with at least one release per year. It still has an audience (as one would expect from a program useful to readers of TAOCP), and i keep receiving patches and bug reports. Often, they're accompanied by kudos and kind comments. Those alone make the effort worth it, not to mention the fun of late nite hacking. Pity i don't have so much time for hacking as i used to.
Java and C# programmers often talk about their favourite's language reflection capabilities. As is often the case, these languages just scratch the surface. Actually, what Java &c. provide is just a form of introspection, i.e., the ability to find out information about elements of your program. Proper reflection should also include intercession, which is a way to modify the characteristics of elements of your program. Java and friends are not even close. Unsurprisingly, Lisp offers full reflection via its MetaObject Protocol (or MOP) defined some twenty years ago (parenthetically, the MOP also enables a form of the new aspect oriented programming vogue, as aspectl demonstrates). Bill Clementson provides a thorough review of these issues in a post, CL's vs Java's Reflection, where he summarises a recent thread on comp.lang.lisp, featuring Pascal Costanza, aspecl's author.
We often think of the 'email problem' on the receiver end. But, half of the time, we are on the other side. That is, we are writing email. While guides for fighting the email overload abound (see, e.g., this excellent one, this Writing sensible email messages post at 43folders is the first i've seen that focuses on what to do to avoid becoming the problem. Recommended.
Not everyone is willing to stand RIAA-based abuses. This Boing Boing post points to a P2PNet history showing how the music industry's indiscriminate legal attacks against music fans are so sloppy that they often catch people who've never heard of file-sharing, P2P or MP3s. This wonderful piece profiles several people who stood up to the music industry and refused to pay out to their protection racket when accused of file-sharing. Don't miss the FAQ about file- sharing and the music industry at the end of the piece.
By popular (as in the two of you reading this blog) demand,
emacs-wiki-journal now supports RSS feeds, or so i hope. I've spent a
couple hours providing basic support, and this feed is the result. The
code is available here.
I keep turning back to ion3 once and again, so i guess it's safe to
say that, by now, it's become my almost default window manager.
Specially since i discovered detach.lua (available in ion3's
scripts collection page or in the ion3-scripts debian package), which
improves transient window management by putting them in a superposed
floating workspace (thus avoiding, for instance, popup windows
maximisation).
Definitely, ion maximises productivity at the very affordable expense of eye candy. But you don't need to take my word for it: Wouter, a debian maintainer, has recently switched to ion3, and is reporting his experiencies in his blog.