31 May 2005

Almost beaten to the punch!

The shark-profile package has only been out for a few days, and I've been scooped! I'm glad that someone with more stamina and skill than I have has fixed the interrupt/floating-point interaction for SBCL on OS X. I've been using SB-SPROF a bit tonight, and it seems to be stable now. In consolation, I suppose there may still be people who wish to use shark instead of SB-SPROF, and I got several good weeks use out of SHARK-PROFILE, so all is not lost :).

27 May 2005

Profiling lisp with SBCL and Mac OS X

I just posted some code for profiling with shark (part of the CHUD toolkit on Mac OS X) and SBCL. I've been writing some fancy n-body integrators using common lisp for a research project, and wanted to profile the code. SBCL comes with a profiler (sb-sprof), but it doesn't work well---at all---on Mac OS X (see the reply to this message of mine for a description of the problem). So, I cooked up this code (with some help from Juho Snellman) which lets me use shark for profiling. It's quite a hack, but it does the job.

22 May 2005

Go New York Times!

Check this out:
While the proposal to close the case was ultimately rejected by senior officials, documents show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when an article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003, reported that at least one of the prisoner's deaths had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the military's earlier assertions that both had died of natural causes. Activity in the case quickly resumed.
I'm getting tired of our side being the bad guy so often. Why is the army not more thorough about disciplining those responsible for this kind of crap? At best, I would say it's apathy, or a desire to protect your own---however flawed they may be---and at worst, I would say it's because those in charge actually think this sort of thing is OK. Either way, it's not making me very happy. This also shows the media at its best---the army wasn't doing anything, and the NY Times got them moving. Let's hear it for the fourth estate!

21 May 2005

First Post

I've finally broken down and started a blog. Typically for me, it came impulsively as I was searching for information on the best way to rip books on tape (CD) in iTunes, and stumbled on http://aldoblog.com/blog/471. Since we're flying to California, Oregon and then the Netherlands this summer, we've got some 30 hours of time on planes, and thought we'd get some books on tape for Rachel's iPod. The above link gives the details, but the short version:
  • Set the import file format to AAC, 64kbit Stereo Rate, Mono Sampling
  • Use the Advanced menu option to consolidate the tracks into one (so you don't have 50-60 tracks for one book on the iPod).
  • Once the file is ripped, change its type from m4a to m4b so that iPod will automatically maintain your listening position rather than resetting to the beginning of each track. You can use the MakeBookmarkable script, or (I think) just change the extension of the imported file to m4b.
I intend to record such tibits here in the future so that they're easy to find.