04 Jan 2016, 19:03

Deptyr, or how I learned to love UNIX domain sockets
Let’s say you have a program that needs to do I/O on a terminal (it draws really nice ascii graphics!), but it usually runs unsupervised. If the program crashes, you want a think like s6 or systemd to restart that program. The problem here is the terminal I/O: Since most process supervision tools usually redirect standard I/O to a log file, the wonderful terminal graphics just end up being non-ascii chunder that confuses you if you try to tail the log file.

02 Jan 2016, 20:24

Hosting my blog on Google App Engine with Letsencrypt

Editing my last post in Octopress was such a pain that I decided to switch the blog over to Hugo. While doing that, I decided that the yak stack wasn’t deep enough and that I should be moving my blog to https in the process. Here is my story (and links to automation shell scripts!)

31 Dec 2015, 17:33

2015 in books

OK OK, time to join in the book review fun.

19 Jan 2013, 00:00

Elixir: First Impressions
For the longest time now, I’ve admired Erlang from afar. It always seemed to be a bit daunting to take on. For one, there was the slightly weird and inconsistent Prolog-inspired syntax (I was always scratching my head over why this place needs a period and that place doesn’t), and then there was just plain weird stuff like one-based indexes. While you don’t end up needing indexes very often, a nice syntax on top of Erlang is something I always kind of wanted, but nothing really could deliver.

26 Dec 2012, 00:00

Write gmail filters in a nice Ruby DSL: gmail-britta
I’ve just finished (mostly) documenting and writing tests for my latest little library, gmail-britta, so thought I should release it to the world as a sort of holiday gift. Gmail-britta is a library that lets you write Gmail filters (hah, Britta, get it?) in a way that doesn’t drive you insane - you write them as a ruby program, run that program, and out comes XML that you can import into Gmail’s filter settings.

09 Sep 2012, 00:00

Some more updates
So I’ve been moving stuff off my 6 year old server to a machine hosted in Germany lately. I hope to bring back Boinkmarks on it some day soon. (Not in the way I brought back the git repos, though - no outsourcing for benchmarks!) (-: There are a couple state changes in my projects that would not warrant a blog post on their own, but I think as a whole are still something to write home about:

09 Sep 2012, 00:00

Git lives again - somewhere else
I’ve revived the git repos affected by this outage the cvs->git conversion is now alive again, and the repos there are now kept on github.com. Turns out there are only two more CVS repos left that I was converting to git: McCLIM and SLIME. So, they’re online again, and I hope you still find them useful. If you are missing any repos that I forgot to move, please send me a note.

24 Aug 2012, 00:00

git.boinkor.net outage
I’m currently moving some of boinkor.net’s services off the creaky old machine that used to host it, over to another machine. This affects git.boinkor.net - it’s not going to be available for the next 2 days. (With a bit of luck, it may be back up a little sooner, though.) This probably affects you if you follow the slime and mcclim git repos hosted there. This was caused by a case of really bad planning on my part.

30 Dec 2011, 00:00

Converting the Mustache Test Suite to CL
Matthew Snyder has a great introductory post on his blog where he converts the Mustache spec into a runnable fiveam test suite. Very cool stuff - I hope he posts more (-:

21 Dec 2011, 00:00

IDNA Now Supports Punycode Decoding

My IDNA library now supports decoding IDNA strings via the to-unicode function: