Artful Code

I have been using Blackberry OS 6 on my Bold 9650 (pre-installed) for a few weeks. I love some of the new functionality, especially search and the new context menus. Search works very similarly to Spotlight on OSX. The new context menus do a good job of splitting common contextual options out of the BB menu. I also like the quicker boot time.

After silently drooling over the usefulness of my wife’s iPad for the last few months, I finally gave in to temptation and decided to get a tablet. Of course, being a Blackberry man, I was ecstatic about the release of the Playbook. The Playbook OS is QNX, and ultra fast, light-weight, real time unix that I have been a fan of since college. I always felt that it would have been a wonderful system for Apple to have built OSX on, but it seems that Blackberry at least gets to beat Apple to the punch on something, anyway.

TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an auspicious time to try out another editor.

Pike 7.8 did not compile out of the box on my Mac, so I figured I would write up what it took to get it working.

Profiling is one of the most important steps in writing software. Once a package is written, profiling greatly helps to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies by showing how an application spends its time. How to profile a lisp application is a common question among those new to lisp. Luckily, profiling lisp is simple with emacs and [...]