In 1997, on his retirement from Bell Labs, Doug McIlroy gave a fascinating talk about the “History of Computing at Bell Labs.”
Here is one man’s transcription of that talk.
I only skimmed over it (at the moment I’m not interested in what was); but nonetheless it does look like a great talk with a lot of fun and interesting bits in there.
Ben posted some examples of how to use the PLT match.ss library here.
Mosh Scheme is
A Fast R6RS Scheme interpreter.
I saw Mosh referenced on the SRFI-98 email discussion archive.
There already a wiki written using Mosh.
Addendum 7/18/8:
Mosh has been updated to version 0.0.5.
This announces the availability for discussion of
Scheme Request for Implementation 98
“An interface to access environment variables.”
by Taro Minowa(Higepon).
Its draft and an archive of the ongoing discussion is available at
(via Usenet)
The OLPC News Forum is the place to go for XO discussion.
Here is the page on the OLPC website that documents secure digital cards on the XO.
The XO supports SDHC (high capacity). I use a 16GB AData card on my XO without problem.
Here is a little reminder: when you insert the SD card into the XO, do so with the screen, and the shiny part of the card, both facing you.
BTW: I use a “Sandisk MicroMate for SDHC” USB adapter to work with the card under Windows XP, it cost 8USD from an Amazon affiliate.
The OLPC Wiki is the place to go to get information about XO.
Eric Sessoms announced his Erlang-Scheme interoperability library recently on the PLT discussion list.
What it is: Basically, it’s a port of Distel from emacs lisp over to
scheme. It talks to erlang using its own protocol and impersonates an
erlang node on the network. It aims to provide an abstraction such
that erlang processes look like scheme threads, and vice-versa.
Communication from scheme to erlang is done with (a wrapper around)
thread-send. Messages from erlang to scheme get routed to thread
mailboxes so that they can be picked up with thread-receive.
Emacs Commands Work in OS X.
Guess it is time to buy a Mac ;).
A silent revolution has changed the way computer science is understood and taught. The modern curriculum no longer focuses on the constructs of a language and the state changes in the machine. Instead, programming is taught as a problem-solving process that starts from a thorough understanding of classes of data and objects. The TeachScheme! Project has been at the vanguard of this revolution; the new series is its natural extension to cover a seamless transition to object-oriented design using Java.
Teaching is hard, and getting people to change how they teach is even harder. TeachScheme! (read Teach Scheme, NOT!)
wants to turn Computing and Programming into an indispensable part of the liberal arts curriculum.
There are truly world class folks involved in this effort whom I trust. Though I do not yet understand the depth of this project, I find it fascinating, and inspiring.
