grant

OLPC XO: The Programmer's Ebook Reader

The OLPC XO has turned out to be a perfect ebook reader for me for the following reasons:

5 hour battery life in black&white mode with xpdf and mzscheme or Firefox and SBCL open
While reading, try out code in Common Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Ruby, Perl…
Take notes while reading
Beautiful screen
Light weight, tiny size
Low cost and durable

A presentation about Fluxus

Dave posted his slides from a recent Fluxus presentation here.

C and a desert island

If you were trapped on a desert island, clearly you would choose C as your only programming language!

About PLT Scheme v4.0

Have a look at Matthew Flatt’s thoughts about the pending release of PLT Scheme 4.0. He sets a definitive (if not authoritative) tone for what PLT Scheme v4.0 will, and will not, be.

A Guided Tour of Emacs

[Trey] recently came across the GNU page: A guided tour of Emacs. It is a gem of an introduction to Emacs. Unlike the help distributed with Emacs (tutorial, FAQ, *info* pages), this tour does a good job illustrating the wide variety of Emacs capabilities

A video tour of PLT Scheme 4.0

Via the PLT Scheme blog, there is a video tour of DrScheme now available here with a higher resolution video available here.

In this comp.lang.lisp post Ron Garret explains how he found and is in the process of exploring a copy of P-Lisp (PLisp) for the Apple IIe.
Addendum 06/24/08:
Ron explains how he created and released a disk image here.

Using PLT Scheme for Game Development

This presentation at the Vancouver Lisp Users Group sounds like a lot of fun.

Choosing a font in Emacs on Windows

The truth is that I haven’t read the Emacs documentation yet. I will read it, it is on the list. Until then, I’ve relied on other kinds folks to provide answers for my questions. Tommy was kind enough to provide an answer for this one.

Evaluate the following in the scratch buffer:

(insert (w32-select-font))

For more information on Fonts in Emacs on Windows, go here.

(via Tommy)

PLT Scheme 3.99 (revision 10030) for the OLPC XO

DrScheme is very, very close to its 4.0 release. I wanted to try out the newest bits on my OLPC XO using one of the nightly builds, but ran into the same problem as I did last time:
/home/olpc/apps/plt-3.99.0.25/bin/mred: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Some folks have resolved this dependency using Mesa for OpenGL emulation, but I found it easier to prepare a build that doesn’t depend OpenGL.
Here is the tarball and the md5sum for a trunk build that I made at revision 10030.
Here is how I did the build:
./configure --prefix=$WORKDIR/$DESTDIR --disable-gl --disable-shared --enable-origtree make make install

Author: grant