Nights

I now have on average 3.5 nights per week of free time, where I can't go out since the sun's down (years in San Diego have persuaded me that the sun is the critical deciding factor for outdoor activity, years in Chicago have terrified me of the night), and have time to spend doing something meaningful. By meaningful, I intend not involving alcohol or /b/.

So, what have I been up to? I installed antiweb at beta-reduction, my vps at work. This was a simple case of (1) finding a CL implementation which works on CentOS with a nazi kernel eager to kill off any memory hogs -- in this case Clozure works marvels, SBCL fails to build for me, and building even CLisp proved troublesome, segfaulting the moment quicklisp was loaded; it's possible ecl is viable here, (2) install anti-web, (3) create /var/aw, (4) add a few dummy workers, in this case beta-reduction.com and iota.beta-reduction.com. What I'd love to do is investigate dynamic page generation, particularly using UCW. How workers handle cgi marshalling is yet beyond me, my light goals may be to implement simple pages in guile or ccl, with antiweb acting as a dispatcher.  Everything I learned at work about what a LAMP site does is completely overthrown by this setup, since for one hub and two workers each at 512GB Virtual memory, thus I have over 1.5TB of VM allocations, which aren't triggering OOM conditions. In contast, it seems most programs assume they can and will use the memory they allocate, and controlling mysql and php allocations for customers is maybe 1/8 of my job.

 I've started working again on 99 lisp problems, which keeps me busy this week. I'm surprised to look at previous times I started this and where I stopped.  I must be getting more proficient, to have made it several problems further. The best part is solving an intermediate problem in one or two lines using the last result. I never understood mapcan until I needed it. I think there's an internal timer in me, if a problem takes more than one hour to solve, I tend to move on. This time I made it to problem twenty-seven : given a list of items acting as a set, generate all possible sets of disjoint subsets of a specified size, as

(defun group (set sizes)
 ; something interesting here)

Also, this is the first week of classes at Roosevelt, so I think I will not be there for this fall semester. I may contact Dr's Pivarski and Urbina to see if this Spring makes more sense. It hurts to be 3 courses from a MS, but I can't afford more time to a degree without an exit plan. I also can't spend 36-48 hours per week at work and then take 1-2 nights from my free time to go to school without making Beth sad panda. I guess college might not have been my thing. (It really was, but what can you do?)

Still plowing through French and English readings. Just finished 'The Spectator Bird' and 'Bug-Jargal', moving into 'Dernier jour d'un condamné'. Before that was 'La Philosphie dans le Budoir' and a collection of poetry from 'Le Chat Noir', which was interesting, though I wish it had had more Allais. I read Villette, which I think is perhaps at least as good as Jane Eyre.

My Next Week, and my summer so far

Summer is winding down. In May, I started at WiredTree, with the expectation that after a few months I would be moving to night work. I just had the meeting with my manager, and Monday the 12th of August will be my last Nine to Five day in the office. I will begin my late work at 8PM on Wednesday the 14th. So my schedule will look something like Wednesday night to Friday night every week with Saturday nights also every other week. If it works out, I may not need to move my ballet tickets too much. If not, there's some flexibility in time off that I can take advantage of.

Training has been an interesting experience. I'm using linux in ways I never had, and dealing with much different aspects of the system. I'm seeing PHP up close, a language I never needed. I'm dealing with ill defined plugins to solve strangely ambitious problems, (I just want the page to load fast). I see the slime that inhabit the internet, smut peddlers, spammers, scammers, and people hawking little plastic pieces up close. I'm beginning to sympathise with them and understand their motivations. I may, gasp, end up revisiting Perl. Since I had always previously treated computers as really fast adding machines, the whole internet thing seems to have past me by without changing my habits too much. That's why my twitter account is quiet, my Facebook was deleted years ago, this blog gets a post when I feel like it. But I seem to pull the current emacs and sbcl branches at least once a week.