spazzatura

I updated the Lisp-Debian blog again.
Last weekend was rather pleasant. First Matteo went for the first time to the Ikea play area while we went shopping. On sunday I went swimming and then cycling to the local park, while zoutke did all the hard work cleaning and preparing a rather nice lunch. All in all very nice.

sync ; sync ; sync

I managed to get a picture of me in the blogger.com profile, so if you want to scare small children you know where to look :-).

I should decide to what conference I try to go this summer. There is debconf 5 in Helsinki (note the title "See you in hel") which is July 10 to 17. Or I could go to LSM 2005 which is in Dijon (much closer) and from July 5 to 9 and is in general a hotbed of Common Lisp activity. I'll wait a little more until the programms pan out, but after the Danish disaster of last year I doubt I can convice my wife to go to Helsinki. She wants Calabria :-).

I made almost no progress with the lazy memory allocation in sbcl. I think I know where the problem is, but I don't have enough time to check it out :-(. Also I wonder why nobody seems to care about this problem. What do you do on a 64 bit machine, do you start by allocating 2**41 bytes? Does the OS permit this? What does root think of this? Or do you want to have to select at startup how large your image might become? If not, you need lazy allocation.

spazzatura part II

I completely forgot to say the spazzatura bit.
While I was bringing Matteo to school he saw a street-cleaner and said (in dutch) "Kijk de mensen van de spazzatura" (Look the people of the garbage) but the garbage was in Italian, so I said "Correct spazzatura, but in dutch it is vuilnis (garbage), so vuilnisman (garbageman = street-cleaner)". A bit later we see a bagger and I ask him "Who does that thing remind you of?" to which he replies "Scoop" and then after a pause "and in Italian: Scoop!".
I almost fell down laughing :-).