Can anyone help me out with this?  Or know somebody else who can?

So I wanna learn Lisp.  But I see there is Lisp, then there is CLOS (or Common Lisp something something) but there is also Scheme (which may also be CLOS).

Confused yet?  Cos I am.

What I'd like is someone Lisp savvy to let me in on the secret of which is the Lisp to learn these days.  And, if possible, recommend a good Windows based environment for using it.

Addendum: I've come across a list of Common Lisp implementations.  So that's a pool to look at but I'd still be very happy to hear recommendations.

Friday: "Psychological Destruction". Dear Iraqi People, The Peace-loving and Freedom-loving people of the United States of America hereby introduce you to George Bush's ... [istori/log]

Lest we forget .... This is what this means.... [The Obvious?]

I've written a couple of times about BreakReminder a very simple $9 piece of software which, day-on-day, is making my life better.

I have RSI which varies in pain from none-at-all to I-can't-bear-to-touch-the-keyboard.  Thanks to BreakReminder these days I am, more often, closer to the former than the latter.

It is with sadness that I learned today that the author, Tom Hingston, has died recently.

Tom's software will live on and I shall always be grateful for the positive effect BreakReminder, and hence Tom, has had on my life.

This item on hit-and-run weblogging coupled with this other item on discerning weblog usage gave me an idea:

Is there a way, in Radio, to specify which posts are forwarded to your aggregator feed? Often I do a quick post (some smug webloggers might call these hit-and-run posts) for my own reference. Other posts have an audience in mind. I'd like to post both to my weblog, while forwarding only the latter to the aggregator feed. Has this been done?

[Blogfish]

For this kind of stuff I use a trick I picked up from Spike Hall.  I have a category Seeds which represents those things.  Any post I don't want to appear goes into Seeds and not the Home Page.

Then I copied the #upstream.xml file from /www/system into /www/categories/seeds/ to prevent anything getting upstreamed to the cloud.

Project Management's first P (there are eight): Purpose.

C and C forwarded this is nice piece on Project Management, structured into eight 'P's: Purpose, Promise, Process, People, Planning, Practice, Performance, and Place. Eight 'p's are a little daunting so I might jot two or three onto an index card for my cubicle.

Purpose is a good one to review on a weekly basis (for me at least, as I can wander into tangentia). Why are we doing the project? It would be interesting to track the answer from week to week. As the author says, "Purpose changes or evolves through time. We learn, conditions change, clients' views change."

This is something I hadn't considered before: expect the first P (Purpose) to change with time. Allow it to change. If purpose remains constant, fine. If not, at least you won't be blindsided. Expecting purpose to change also motivates you to consistently revisit the first p. Revisiting p1 naturally reinforces p5: planning, but that's topic for another time.

[Blogfish]

Alison picks up on the 8P's and makes a good interwingly point.

Purpose is the key aspect of any project.  Without a clearly defined purpose what's the point?

"Hey you guys! We delivered it in time and under budget!"

"Great. Now what the hell is it and why would I want one?"

Most worthwhile projects (and nearly all worthless ones) take quite a while to deliver, during which time change happens.  Goals become outdated, or just plain wrong.  You have to keep raising the periscope and checking that the vision is still on target.

This is quite a discipline.  Once people get up a head of steam, they don't want to have to make anything other than minor course corrections.

It's one of the reasons why I like the doctrine of eXtreme Programming so much.  That huge multi-year project gets turned into hundreds of smaller projects.  This creates natural breaks where people can come up for air and check back with the customer that they are still doing something good.

eXtreme Knowledge Management should be like this too.  Driven by the principle that people ask questions (and not just at the beginning):

• "Is this still valuable knowledge?"
• "How does it all fit together?"
• "When will I use it?"
• "How will I find it?"
• "Are there new pieces to the puzzle?"

For KM though there is something else, since,  KM is not an end, but a means to an end.

The purposes of a KM project, and this is perhaps a cause of the failure of some KM projects, should be closely aligned with the purposes of the organisation at large.

This means that people serving on KM projects really need to be keeping their radar at maximum and checking that the goals of the project still align with, and support, the goals of the organisation.

MetaBlogging and Human Moderation.

The JavaBlogs site is one that aggregates different blogs on Java into one convenient holding place.  And now Kasia is finding that the JavaBlogs site just isn't working for her:

I really like the concept behind JavaBlogs... and for a while it really worked well for me. I've read many excellent entries on Java I may have (actually very likely would have) missed otherwise. Unfortunately, as is true with any growing website, the signal to noise ratio is becoming worse and worse.. and not in a good way.

When I first discovered JavaBlogs I read nearly every entry posted and most were great.. agreed with some, disagreed with others.. typical blog-reading experience. These days I find myself skipping more and more entries.. why? They're not about Java.. and many of the ones that are simply reiterate or link to previously posted entries. [_Go_]

I see her point.  Take a look at what I just posted in my PHPblog (the entry below on Bunnies).  Yes it was php related but the relationship was tangential at best.  It is almost like we need a "Related But Not Very" type of categorization.  Or a scalable value.  Of course the problem is that if it is human done we'll all just configure it wrong.  Perhaps we need "Latent Semantic Indexing" (this is a really excellent paper if you care about low level search engine issues).  [_Go_]

I think what needs to ultimately happen is that our aggregators need to get smarter in the background i.e. they still gather everything but show us things that we are more "likely" to be interested in.  They'll have to do this via some kind of background analysis (probably) of links followed out of the aggregator.  And then some kind of periodic training.  And this is a) difficult and b) far, far from perfect.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

I could see this problem raising it's head back when JavaBlogs first took wing.   People don't stay on-topic.  For example, this week I have posted far more about politics, government surveillance, crime and terrorism than about KM, topic mapping, organisational development, etc...

It's quite likely that usual readers of what I'm saying have gotten fed up with yet another preachy diatribe ;-)

Of course if their news aggregator was smart enough to pick up the topics in my posts (I appreciate they aren't actually in here at the moment, I'm re-working some of the code, they'll be back soon though) they could filter out all the posts I mark with topics like:

law, politics, privacy, terrorism

and so forth.

It'll happen.

RDF primer released. On January 23, a working draft was released for a RDF Primer. (RDF standing for "Resource Description Framework".) To quote: This Primer is designed to provide the reader with the basic knowledge required to effectively use RDF. It introduces the... [Column Two]

Got to get to grips with RDF one of these days.

Language of the year.

The Pragmatic Programmer suggests learning a new programming language (at least) once per year. Specifically, you should learn a language that changes the way you think about things - learning C# if you know Java doesn't count.[Joe's Jelly]

I've been debating this myself. My problem is that I try to learn about three languages a year, hence, 6 years after I first started learning Python, I haven't done anything useful with it. And that's part of learning a language; it doesn't do you any good to just read the book, you've got to do something with it. So I'm conciously trying to limit myself this year. I've already decided that my new book buying this year is done: I've got The Python Cookbook, ANSI Common Lisp, and How To Design Programs. That I'm limiting myself to those 3 probably explains my problem. However, given the list, it's likely that the language of the year will be Python, Scheme, or Lisp. Python is probably the most practical, and I already have a passing familiarity. I started learning some Scheme last year so I've got a bit of a head start there. But I read the first 2 chapters of ANSI Common Lisp on Paul Graham's website, and half the 3rd chapter as previewed on Amazon, and I have to say that Paul got me excited about learning a new language for the first time in a long time. [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog]

I too have been on the brink of adopting Python.  I've crossed it's path a few times and been intrigued.  I wish Radio used Python instead of Usertalk, you'd think that with an Outliner as the built-in programming editor Radio would be an ideal home for Python scripting.  It'll never happen though.

So Python was looking good.  Then I made the mistake of reading Chap 1 of "ANSI Common Lisp" and I have to say I'm hooked.  Guess I'll be looking for a good Windows based LISP implementation.  Any recommendations?

Brobeck's bubble burst.

Brobeck Dissolving

Brenda Sandburg
The Recorder
01-30-2003
 
Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison -- just two years ago the most profitable firm in the Bay Area -- is dissolving following the collapse of merger negotiations with Philadelphia-based Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. [more...]

...

Morgan Lewis & Bockius made the right call. While Morgan Lewis needs a strong west coast presence, their culture is 180 degrees from Brobeck's ax-at-the-door culture. It would have been a match made in hell - and I'll be willing to wager that a number of the more progressive lawyers from Brobeck will end up at Morgan Lewis anyway once the dust settles.

...

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

I read all of the article ( "ax-at-the-door culture" above ) and although it was long it was fantastic.  It's just like LA law!

Thanks Rick :)