Ted Walther's Private Diary

Report from Debconf, Day Three

Laundry day. New roommate Thaddeus Black is really on the ball; today is the first laundry day we've had at the conference, and he was prepared for it, and reminded the rest of us when we woke up. I think I'll wait until the Thursday laundry day. To get your laundry done here, you put it in a plastic bag, and mark it somehow. Then the bags go into a pile, and some company hired by the hotel comes and washes them, and returns the bags of clean clothes to you the same or next day. You can even choose between regular drying and sun drying the clothes.

Debian. Yesterday someone filed a bug against my expect package; today Alec Berryman sent in a patch that fixed it. Thank you Alec! The fixed package is now uploaded and should be available to everyone tomorrow.

Food. Ville Vuorela brought a big bag of candies from Finland for Simon Richter, who shared them with the table here in the hack lab. They were salty and sweet, with mild licorice flavor. They were quite good. My friend Jesus Monroy, a food columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a few comments on my food adventures yesterday, which I will quote here:

Pancita is Spanish for stomach. Most likely you had a type of menudo, or soup dish. This is a very common and popular dish. Usually used for hangovers.

Check the chicken vendor's spices when you can. With some hope he did not use MSG. MSG, as you may know, can be toxic in large amounts. It's not unheard of in Mexico, but they don't know that MSG can be toxic. My mother has refused to eat at some friends houses because they use so much the chicken tastes extremely over-salted.

MSG toxic effects are lathargy, nausea, headaches, all the way to death (very extreme). Then again too much salt, or just water, can be toxic.

As for the church, they have not changed much in 500+ years in Mexico. Most likely what you saw was what was built.

Ted Walther with Peter van Eynde

Conference. Today I attended the one presentation that motivated me to attend Debconf; Peter van Eyndes Common Lisp presentation. Common Lisp, of course, is the best programming language ever, in terms of developer time. Haskell is similar, but is designed more for machines to run fast, than for developers to develop fast. The LISP community has almost universally switched to using darcs for their revision control system, which is not only the easiest to use I have ever found, but is also written in Haskell. Nine people attended Peters presentation. He showed us how to drive the Lisp compiler from inside emacs using slime, with its advanced auto-completion features. He demonstrated the common lisp controller which has advanced dramatically in the past five years. It is now simple and intuitive to load libraries into your Lisp program. He showed us how to package lisp libraries using asdf, which has long been an opaque mystery to me. Luca Capello fom Switzerland, the maintainer of the stumpwm window manager was present, and he promised to demonstrate stumpwm later tonight. stumpwm is not yet as advanced as ratpoison, but it could become far more advanced and whiz-bang than ratpoison could ever be. It has potential. I also met Erick Lopez of Mexico, who wants to package cl-wiki, but is looking for a sponsor. As a Lisp developer, he will be an asset to Debian. After the presentation Peter opened the floor, and every question I'd had about Lisp for the past few years was answered very satisfactorily. At the end, Peter showed us a book called Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel, which he praised highly for those who want to use Lisp for "real" things. Such as a streaming MP3 server. I'm sold! But if you are poor (povre), you can read it for free at Gigamonkeys.