Welcome

In Kernighan's book UNIX: a history and a memoir, he mentions the editor sam, which seems to have been in use by many well known members of the IT scene. So, when reading that book, I got curious and did a few experiments with this editor.

Trying to understand the separate namespaces for functions and values in Lisp₂, I was diving into that a little bit, taking some notes and preparing a set of macros. Providing local namespaces for the development of further macros, they can help to prevent unwanted free name capture.

A topic of long and outstanding troubles for me has been the automatic selection of the other window in emacs. I tried to solve the question on how to change this behaviour (at least for me).

Some years ago, I was trying to wrap my head around how to transform recursions into iterative loops. The way to go would be transforming typical recursions (e.g. derived from mathematical definitions) into tail call recursions, which can then easily be expressed as loops.

About cross-compiling binaries for time capsule devices. Used here to enable easy access to backups when restoring from an unmodified NetBSD installation medium.

Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing my old Mac Mini's OS by NetBSD, I tried to implement an automated backup, allowing me to handle it similarly to the time machine backups I've been using before.

Over the easter days I was planning to resurrect my trusty ppc based Mac Mini and to replace the old OSX 10.4 with a newer, but still BSD-based operating system. Unfortunately, as it seems, there are a few obstacles to overcome when trying to install NetBSD/macppc on a Mac Mini. So I thought I'd write a little bit about my experiences in case someone else (probably me) ever tries to install this combination again.

Programming Lisp can be very recreational. And one of the best places to do that these days is in Emacs. So here is my literate emacs init, consisting of all kinds of collected lisp functions. Some of them probably should be put into proper packages instead…