Arne Babenhauserheide arnebab@identi.ca

time is a good proxy for space
-- Andy Wingo

But don't consider those words of wisdom, at Andy's request!

<wingo> who is going to be the first one to write a bot that uses the sandbox
        module to evaluate user code
<wingo> an irc bot
<wingo> like racket's bot
<paroneayea> wingo: wowee
<paroneayea> wingo: well
<paroneayea> wingo: I have another use
<paroneayea> wingo: user-scriptable MUD content
<wingo> yass
<paroneayea> I feel like I should still run that in a VM or container until
             the sandbox code gets more testing ;)
<wingo> yes i feel the same way :)
<paroneayea> wingo: I haven't looked in detail; does the sandbox code restrict
             in space or time?
<paroneayea> space seems like the harder one
<wingo> both, but time is a good proxy for space
<wingo> yeah the space restrictions are less precise
<paroneayea> wingo: mind if I quote you out of context on "time is a good
             proxy for space"? ;)
* paroneayea is amused by the quote
<wingo> lol sure as long as it doesn't impute wisdom of any kind :)

Mandatory #contextpatrol

Another bit, revolving how to handle extensibility and standards:

One issue that came up early on is worth mentioning, because it is at the heart of one of the major attacks on Common Lisp, which was mounted during the ISO work on Lisp (see section 2.12). This is the issue of modularization, which had two aspects: (1) whether Common Lisp should be divided into a core language plus modules and (2) whether there should be a division into the so-called white, yellow, and red pages. These topics appear to have been blended in the discussion.

"White pages" refers to the manual proper, and anything that is in the white pages must be implemented somehow by a Lisp whose developers claim it is a Common Lisp. "Yellow pages" refers to implementation-independent packages that can be loaded in, for example, TRACE and scientific subroutine packages. The "red pages" were intended to describe implementation-dependent routines, such as device drivers.

Nevertheless, the first question is brought up by a direct reading of the issue: Division of Common Lisp into a core plus modules.

If this were taken to mean a proposal that would have partitioned the language into layers with a central layer and outer layers that depend on the inner ones, then Common Lisp could have been more easily subsetted, which would have led to obvious implementations on smaller machines. This would have satisfied the need to cheap, prolific implementations. This would also have made providing educational versions of the language more readily available. It also would have prevented the strong attack during the ISO meetings by Europe and by, to a lesser degree, Japan.

The response from influential members is revealing: "This seems weird. Motivate it. Maybe these modules are optional at the implementation's choice?" "Keeping things modular is a good goal, but don't expect to succeed completely." "The division only makes a little sense." [?; ?] The group focussed too much on the funny white-yellow-red distinction and not on the corelanguage/extended-language distinction. Had this gone differently, so would have the future of Common Lisp.

Note, this sounds not too unlike the decision to break r7rs into r7rs-small and r7rs-large, for anyone who knows/cares about that in Scheme-land...

Just submitted the rest of MediaGoblin's dependencies to the Guix mailing list. Well, the Python ones. (Let's not talk about the Javascript ones...)

             SECURITY THROUGH DENIAL

     /\_/\          '-___-'          /\_/\
    / -.- \         / 0.0 \         / 0.0 \
   == _|_ == _     == _|_ == _     == _X_ == _
    /     \ / \     /     \ / \     /     \ / \
   | || || | /\|   | || || | /\|   | || || | /\|
  |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|

   SEE NO CVE      HEAR NO CVE    SPEAK NO CVE

(permalink)

I have enough ascii art now that I made printing random ascii art to the "phosphor" screensaver my default screensaver.

I can't believe it's been about 4.5 years of MediaGoblin... really??

But we're finally almost at 1.0!

So I mentioned that I've been hacking on 8sync, an asynchronous programming library for Guile. Of course, it's not a good networking-related library unless it has an IRC demo. So it comes with all the tools to build an irc bot, including one you can launch in demos/ircbot.scm

I've got a little IRC bot that I'm testing out in #8sync and #guile on irc.freenode.net. Mostly, it just says dumb things:

<paroneayea> syncbot: hello!
<syncbot> Oh hi paroneayea!
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> Horray! A delicious banana!
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> Horray! A delicious tapioca pudding!
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> YESSSSSS *nom nom nom nom nom*
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> :D :D :D
<paroneayea> syncbot: help
<syncbot> I can't help you... I can't even help myself!
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> oh boy! oh girl! oh arbitrary-gender-exclamation!
<paroneayea> syncbot: botsnack
<syncbot> *catches botsnack in midair*

Though you could also use it to run a Fate game:

<paroneayea> syncbot: roll-fate
<syncbot> paroneayea: Rolling at 0: [-] [-] [_] [-] -> -3!  (it's... really
          not good...)
<paroneayea> syncbot: roll-fate
<syncbot> paroneayea: Rolling at 0: [_] [_] [-] [_] -> -1!  (poor)
<paroneayea> syncbot: roll-fate
<syncbot> paroneayea: Rolling at 0: [+] [+] [-] [+] -> 2!  (fair)
<paroneayea> syncbot: roll-fate 3
<syncbot> paroneayea: Rolling at 3: [-] [-] [_] [-] -> 0!  (mediocre)

What's also nice is that it's totally live-hackable. You can connect to a running process live in emacs using the "M-x connect-to-guile" geiser feature and add features on the fly. All the extensions I wrote to the syncbot code were done while the thing was running. It's an incredible way to develop.

(What's next? Maybe a MUD?)